1969 in retrospect

By Anil Nauriya THIS WINTER was the thirtieth since the 1969 split in the Congress. What does that split signify for the Congress tradition and for India today? In economic terms, the split was represented as one between the left and the right. The term right wing is misleading because the Congress(O) was not quite classifiable with the Swatantra Party or the Jana Sangh. This group had gone along with most policies jointly formulated in the Congress the policy on a socialistic pattern of society, on cooperatives, on the earlier rounds of land reforms and on the building up of a public sector. But it had doubts about further nationalisation of banks and other industries. This latter programme was favoured by a group of advisers that had come to be formed around Indira Gandhi, either because they genuinely believed in it or to pre- empt a challenge to her. With the Congress(I) having adopted the Manmohan-Chidambaram brand of liberalisation, a section of the erstwhile Swatantra Party princely constituency also having joined the party, and foreign banks having acquired a higher profile than the Indian ones which were nationalised in 1969, the economic aspects of the 1969 split now seem unreal. If K. Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, Nijalingappa, Sadiq Ali, Abid Ali and Asoka Mehta can all be lumped together as right-wingers, one may have to resort to three-dimensional geometry to depict the economic positions of the entire Indian political spectrum, including today's lineal descendants of Indira Gandhi's Congress faction. Of the Nehru era, it can still be said that the building up of the public sector was a pre-condition for India to hold its own even in the current liberalisation. But a similar statement cannot be made of the post-1969 economic programme except arguably in one respect. This was that a fresh round of land reform was carried out by the States at Indira Gandhi's behest in 1972. There is, however, nothing to indicate that those who she split away from in 1969 would have opposed this. In fact, the prime economic slogan of the 1969 split had been nationalisation of banking and insurance, not land reform. Moreover, despite the fact that the so-called right wing had been eliminated with the split, Indira Gandhi's faction was unable to implement a thoroughgoing land reform in a State like Bihar. This suggests that a discussion of the 1969 split in terms exclusively of right and left does not take one very far. One can see the split in terms of a generational change, though even here the lines are not clearly drawn. Most of Indira Gandhi's close associates were those who had come to political consciousness with the movements of the early Forties. Some of those who had come to the Congress in the movements of the early Twenties, which had placed special emphasis on India's composite nationhood, did remain with her but, with the exception of Uma Shanker Dikshit, were not amongst her closest advisers. It is of course possible to think of some from the group of the 1920s who still remained with her party as, for example, Giani Gurmukh Singh Musafir, Ajit Prasad Jain, Kamlapati Tripathi, and Indulal Yagnik. Many others simply faded away. Examining the split in terms of what the Congress lost and what it gained makes it somewhat easier to place one's finger on what happened. Clearly, a group intellectually-

oriented towards the CPI came to be formed around Indira Gandhi and gained ascendancy within the party at least until the takeover of the wholesale trade in grain in the early Seventies. It was the failure of the grain trade takeover that was to somewhat discredit this group. And it was devoid of real talent after the death of Mohan Kumaramangalam in an air crash in 1973. Among the bureaucrats, this group was presided over by P. N. Haksar. The group's sincerity was not matched with much experience of working with large and disparate parties. It was not careful about inner party democracy or the forms of Cabinet Government. Reports circulated about Ministers required to wait in the ante-chambers of bureaucrats in the Prime Minister's Secretariat. The same bureaucrats were to lament the death of democracy when they were targeted after retirement during the Emergency. What did the Congress lose by the 1969 split? On the surface, very little. Indira Gandhi and her garibi hatao platform swept to power with a massive two-thirds majority in the 1971 general elections. The group around her was on top of the world. The atmosphere was heady. It fell victim to a common intellectual fallacy - that ideas alone, without constructive back-up action on the ground, can move the world. It had contempt for the plodding Congressmen of the old type. In a pithy speech at the Bombay session of the Congress in 1934, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had emphasised the connection between the constructive programme of the Congress and its political work. Referring to his tour of Bengal, he said the people were willing to listen to the Congress in those subdivisions where its constructive programme, in this case the charkha, had reached. It had generated some income and people could get at least a meal a day. In other subdivisions, where the constructive programme had not reached, people were ``scared to talk to us or to come near us''. After Independence, the Congress withdrew from direct involvement in constructive work. But till 1969 the constructive workers of the Congress tradition provided a back-up for the Indian National Congress. In 1969 that link snapped. With two major Congress factions locked in political conflict it would not, in ordinary circumstances, have been an easy decision for constructive workers to prefer the one over the other. Secondly, the newly- ascendant groups around Indira Gandhi had no real understanding of what the constructive programme was and what it had meant to the Congress. They did not attach much importance to it. It is only in the later, much later, writings and speeches of men like Haksar that one can discern the realisation of the inter- dependence of what Gandhi and what Nehru had stood for. Even here there is hardly any realisation about the critical importance of constructive work. The dominant tendency in the group around Indira Gandhi was to posit, along the lines of Anglo-centric writers, a sharp Gandhi-Nehru divide. And, sure enough, before long Indira Gandhi's party and the Gandhian constructive work agencies were in fact locked in conflict. Both sides forgot the common interest they shared. Indira Gandhi was charged with being a Hitler or a Mussolini while the Gandhian agencies were charged with being in the pay of the CIA. One aspect of the JP movement (1974-75) focussing on corruption and lack of public accountability and of the Emergency (1975-77) was precisely this conflict. At least the Gandhians, with their stoicism, should have appreciated that they shared a common interest in transformation of society even with the newly-ascendant groups in the

Congress(I) of the early Seventies. This was true even if these groups did not fully appreciate that fact and even if their sectarian ways left something to be desired. There were enough persons with stature among the old guard who could have reined in the newly-rising coteries within the Congress(I) without in the first instance resorting to a politics of confrontation. From that confrontation, led by JP himself, only the RSS benefited. Both the factions of the Congress and also the CPI tradition suffered. The consequences of the 1969 split have, however, been so traumatic for the country that the groups involved must at least ensure that they do not repeat their sectarian mistakes. The constructive work agencies of the Congress tradition still constitute a vast network in the country. In the past these agencies have proved to be somewhat gullible. JP himself thought in the mid-Seventies that the RSS had changed. They will be making a grievous mistake if they allow themselves to be lulled into complacency by the placatory noises that the RSS now makes towards the memory of Gandhi. The RSS does so only for two reasons. First, its earlier strategy, till the early Seventies, of directly attacking Gandhi did not click. Secondly, the RSS knows that if there is any network of constructive work agencies which can stand up to it, it is the Gandhian network. In this respect, India is far better placed than Germany was in the Thirties. But the Gandhian agencies must wake up before they are fully infiltrated. [The Hindu, 17 March 2000]