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Journalism of Courage
Indira Gandhi was refreshingly frank with her son Sanjay when he questioned her in a letter about the Congress’s radical proposals for bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses, back in 1967. Sanjay, a dyed- in-the-wool capitalist who had dreams of setting up a small car factory, was deeply suspicious of his mother’s left-leaning advisers such as Romesh Thapar and P.N. Haksar. In a letter to Sanjay, then working in England as an apprentice in the Rolls Royce factory, Mrs Gandhi confessed candidly, “The problem is not one of right or left-indeed it never has beenbut a struggle for power.
Mrs Gandhi, with no-nonsense pragmatism far removed from her father Pandit Nehru’s at times woolly-headed idealism, explained to Sanjay that the key issue was not “garibi hatao” that she sought to address through bank nationalisation, her leftist posturing was really aimed at getting out of her way old fogies like Morarji Desai, S.K. Patil, S. Nijalingappa et al who were hurdles to her assuming complete control of the Congress party.
Equally candid and rather more public is the BJP’s star orator Sushma Swaraj’s startling confession in Bhopal last month that the movement to construct temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya was purely political in nature and had noting to do with religion.
When L.K. Advani launched his Toyota Ram Rath yatra one got a very different impression. Advani’s theme then was that building a Ram temple at the site of the Babri Masjid was “a matter of faith”, and not politics.
Saffron-clad sadhus stood besides Advani on the dais when he spoke, cassettes of bhajans and religious songs blared as the rath criss-crossed the country, cheered on by women chanting the name of Lord Ram.
Of a piece is Sonia Gandhi’s current hysteria over saving the Constitution from the so-called assault by the Vajpayee government. The bonafides of the Congress party and the Gandhi family in particular in this matter are rather suspect. It was Indira Gandhi who after all stood the constitution on its head with an emergency rule for over two years under which a citizen’s fundamental rights were suspended. Her legal experts scornfully dismissed the argument that there was a basic structure of the constitution, which was inviolable. As the BJP points out, of the 79 times the Constitution was amended in the last 50 years, 69 amendments were made during the Congress rule, as many as 58 under the Nehru Gandhi family dispensation.
Similarly the econo-mic policies of the two major parties underscore the same opportunistic streak. The BJP, like the Jana Sangh before it, began with espousing a ri-ghtwing economic ideology, mainly as a counter to the Congress’s socialism. But when Narasimha Rao ushered in the process of economic liberalisation with the dismantling of the licence quota raj, the BJP lurched away from a free market economy, warning instead of the perils of globalisation. The new mantra was sw-adeshi economics.
In 1989, the party ca-lled for a ceiling on foreign borrowings and cautioned against a policy that invested more in colour televisions than handlooms. As late as 1998 the BJP spoke of a calibrated globalisation and gi-ving Indian industry seven to 10 years br-eathing space to come up to the level of global competition. Clearly the mandarins in the Finance Ministry are not listening even though the BJP is in power.
The Congress, meanwhile, which changed the direction of its economic thinking at the 1992 Tirupati AICC session where it endorsed the Narasimha Rao government’s policy of economic liberalisation, now wants to backtrack. And in what looks like a familiar replay, Arjun Singh, Jitendra Prasad and Rajesh Pilot among others bemoan“the anti-poor” policies of the party and call for a change.
High-minded sentime-nts usually emerge when there is a major power struggle within the party or without. The Third Fr-ont, for instance, gets pa-ranoid about the dangers of communalism whenever it is in opposition to the BJP. When it is allied with the BJP, the threat from communalism mysteriously recedes.
It is hardly coincidental that V.P. Singh went full steam ahead with his social justice platform and insisted on the immediate implementation of the Mandal report, only once he realised that thanks to in-fighting in the Janata Dal his government was in imminent danger of collapse. Advani similarly launched his rath yatra to deflect attention from the Mandal issue. Though the BJP wanted to withdraw support from the V.P. Singh government it could not afford to openly oppose it over OBC reservations since its manifesto actually supported the implementation of the Mandal report.
Arjun Singh’s obsession with the Jain Commission was not to ensure justice was done to Rajiv Gandhi’s killers but to hit out at his rivals in the party, by picking on an issue on which Sonia was bound to react.
The BJP has progressively smartened up its ideological jargon with catchy phr-ases like Gandhian socialism, integral humanism, counter to pseudo-secularism and Hindutva. The terminology and content of the party’s manifestoes is left largely to a new breed of professional spin masters. The old RSS-Jana Sangh brains trust, whose ideas were dismissed as belonging to the stone age by the uppity newcomers, have been discretely discarded.
The old timers, who grew with the Sa-ngh Parivar, now feel as if there is no place for them in a party which increasingly resembles the B team of the Congress. If M.L. Khurana’s short lived mini rebellion against the government’s econo-mic policies ended in a whimper, it was not because the majority of the party MPs did not agree with the points raised in his letter broadside, it was simply that they did not want to burn their boats with the powers that be in the BJP as Khurana had foolishly done.
The new lot who form the party’s brains trust are in it not out of deep conviction but largely for power and pelfwhether parliamentary seats, government jobs or chairmanships of boards and institutions. Ironically some of the BJP’s present spin doctors started life at the other end of the ideological spectrum espousing Trotskyite dogma.
Typifying such freelance professionals is Mohan Guruswamy, a Harvard-trained economist who started out by writing the party literature for the Janata Dal and speeches for some of the leaders. He then shifted to the BJP and was equally adept in drafting manifestoes and the economic agenda. Guruswamy, who departed from the BJP with some acrimony, was recently inducted to draft the common manifesto for the four elderly former prime ministers in search of relevance. Guruswamy makes clear he is merely rendering professional services. As he put it,“If Sitaram Yechuri asked me to draft the CPI(M) manifesto, I would oblige.”
