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Journalism of Courage
ONCE it was the Congress, the behemoth that the Opposition struggled to get around, and finally found a way by bringing together disparate parties with common interest in fighting it.
Now, as the BJP juggernaut rolls on and on, there is a similar push back from the other side. One year to go for the next Lok Sabha elections, the Opposition is again trying a united front – though it is still no more than an amorphous entity, and remains short of a strong common agenda to build a narrative around.
A look at the past such experiments, which all had one thing in common – they were all short-lived, with the dominant party (earlier the Congress) returning right back on top:
Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, who had developed differences with the Congress high command led by Indira Gandhi in the years following Jawaharlal Nehru’s demise, gave a call for Sapta Kranti (Seven Revolutions): equality among men and women; equality against differences on the basis of the colour of one’s skin; equality against ritualistic caste system plus special opportunities for the backward; freedom from foreign slavery; freedom from disparities of private capital and economic inequality and increasing production by planning; freedom from unjust interference in private life and ensuring a democratic system; and struggle against weapons and for Satyagraha.
The disillusionment with the running of the Congress by Indira Gandhi, who went about sidelining her detractors, led many of them to come together as the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal, including those with Left and Socialist leanings, as well as leaders from the Right in the form of the Jan Sangh.
Between March and July 1967, the Congress was stunned by a series of defections even as a grouping called the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal captured power in many states, under different forms – Charan Singh in Uttar Pradesh, Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee in West Bengal, Mahamaya Prasad Sinha in Bihar, E M S Namboodiripad in Kerala, C N Annadurai in Madras, Rajendra Narayan Singh Deo in Orissa, Gurnam Singh in Punjab, Rao Birender Singh in Haryana, and later Govind Narain Singh in Madhya Pradesh.
In 1969, Indira Gandhi formed the Congress(R) after splitting the party and managing to wrest control of a big chunk of it. Leaders such as Morarji Desai and Chandra Bhanu Gupta, who had formed the Congress (O), gravitated towards the Janata Party. Apart from Congress(O) leaders, this grouping included the Bharatiya Lok Dal of Charan Singh, Jan Sangh, Socialist Party, and the Congress for Democracy of Jagjivan Ram, among others.
Already an anti-Congress mood had been created in the country by a campaign launched by socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan. If Lohia gave the call of Sapt Kranti, JP came up with the catchy slogan of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution). This translated into political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual, educational and spiritual “revolution”.
What gave momentum to Sampoorna Kranti was the support it whipped up among youth organisations in Bihar, even as a similar Navnirman Andolan on the other end in Gujarat coalesced with it. The growing anger against the Indira Gandhi government over rising prices, and questions over its legitimacy due to the court case against her election, finally whipped up into a Hindi heartland uproar that Indira could not ignore.
She plunged headlong into an ill-thought-of Emergency in 1975, cracked down on Opposition leaders and, amid rising unpopularity, tried to hold on to power by means of authoritarianism.
As unexpectedly as the Emergency was imposed though, the Indira government lifted it. And in the 1977 general elections, the Janata Party candidates – belonging to different groups but combined in the anger against the Indira government – swept to power. Incidentally, the CPI, which supported the Emergency, did not join the Janata Party. Its breakaway faction, the CPI(M), though made seat adjustments with the Janata Party.
The defeat of the Congress in 1977 was the most audacious turning of the tables in independent India’s history, felling the mighty party just six years after Prime Minister Indira had acquired the veneer of invincibility after winning the Bangladesh War.
But, the 1977 Janata Party melange could not live up to the moment it had created. Within three years, in which it went through two PMs in Morarji Desai and Charan Singh, and many jostling ambitions, the Janata Party government collapsed.
In the 1980 elections, the Congress returned to power under Indira, in what would be her last election.
The Jan Sangh, which was straining at the leash of the Janata Party over the question of dual party membership, parted ways. In 1980, the Jan Sangh re-emerged as the BJP.
Swept to power by the largest majority in India’s parliamentary history, in the wake of India Gandhi’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi’s honeymoon period started fraying mid-way through his term as PM. The Bofors scam came as a personal blow, led by his ambitious Defence Minister V P Singh, with the support of some of Rajiv’s closest comrades.
The “corruption” taint that Singh tapped into found an unlikely fellow traveller in the Hindutva campaign that the BJP had by then embarked upon. After Singh quit the Congress, he brought together the various Janata Party factions, such as the Lok Dal, and formed the Janata Dal.
In her book The Lonely Prophet V P Singh: A Political Biography, Seema Mustafa writes that while Singh was in the midst of his efforts to unite the Opposition against Congress, H K Bahuguna met him and asked what role he envisaged for his Jan Morcha. Singh replied that “Jan Morcha cement ka kaam karega. Just as cement is sandwiched between two bricks.” To this, Mustafa writes, Bahuguna replied, “Vishwanath, remember one thing: cement can join brick to brick but it cannot join brick to wood.” The implication was that there were some differences which could not be papered over.
The Janata Dal eventually united a disparate spectrum of powerful regional parties such as the TDP, the DMK and Asom Gana Parishad to form a National Front. In 1989, the National Front defeated the Congress to form the government, with outside support from the BJP and Left.
But even this coalition had too many contrasting interests to survive for long, with eventually the growing drumbeat of the BJP’s Ram Temple movement going too far out for the comfort of the Left and the Janata Dal’s many socialist elements. The arrest of L K Advani, while leading a Rath Yatra to Ayodhya, by the Lalu Prasad-led Janata Dal government in Bihar finally proved the breaking point and the National Front experiment collapsed.
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination ensured that the Congress emerged as the single largest party, with 232 seats, in the 1991 Lok Sabha polls and managed to form the government. But by the end of P V Narasimha’s eventful tenure, the party’s own internal differences were proving a big hurdle. Meanwhile, the BJP was on the ascendance after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992.
In 1996, the BJP won 161 seats to emerge as the single largest party and, with the support of the Shiv Sena (15), Shiromani Akali Dal (8), Samata Party (8) and Haryana Vikas Party (3), laid claim to power. The Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA government, however, could not survive a floor test and fell within 13 days.
It was replaced by a 13-party United Front government, which included parties like the Janata Dal, CPI, DMK, Tamil Maanila Congress, Samajwadi Party and All India Congress (T) among others, and was supported by the Congress from outside. H D Deve Gowda, a Karnataka veteran little known outside his state, was the surprise pick for PM as the consensus choice.
Within 11 months, then Congress president Sitaram Kesri decided to withdraw support. But then the party supported a new government of the United Front, with I K Gujral replacing Deve Gowda.
The irony was delicious. Once, for the ouster of the Congress from power, the Left and Right had joined hands. Now, to keep the “communal” BJP out of power, the Congress supported the third front.
However, again the internal contradictions and pulls and pressures were just too much, and the government fell in March 1998 after Gujral refused to drop DMK ministers from his government, on the demand of the Congress, after the Jain Commission questioned the DMK’s role in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.
The Congress withdrew support, and Gujral resigned.
The BJP went about getting more “acceptable” parties under its umbrella, and formed the NDA with long-time socialist leader George Fernandes as its convenor and with the “Agenda of Good Governance”. Fernandes and Nitish Kumar both were part of this as part of the Samata Party, which was their bid to break away from the Janata Dal and Lalu Prasad’s dominance.
The BJP kept aside its main agendas like Ayodhya temple, Article 370 and Common Civil Code, and many forces which were earlier part of the third front now joined the NDA. During 1988-99, its ally was Jayalalitha’s AIADMK; and in 1999-2004, they were the DMK and TDP, besides parties like the Samata Party of Bihar and Trinamool Congress of West Bengal.
The Congress’s bid to pose a challenge and propose an alternative government in 1999 were severely stymied due to the refusal of both Sharad Pawar of the NCP and the Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav to go with Sonia Gandhi.
There was a third front, a Lok Morcha, including Mulayam and the CPI(M)’s Harkishan Singh Surjeet. However, Mulayam parted ways with the Lok Morcha to vote for the NDA’s presidential candidate A P J Abdul Kalam in July 2002.
In an election that the BJP went into guns blazing with faith in “India Shining”, it suffered a setback when the NDA was just reduced to 181 seats. The Congress, which had so far frowned upon regional parties, saw a chance. Just after the Lok Sabha polls, it formed the UPA, including regional forces, apart from outside support from others. They agreed on a National Common Minimum Programme.
It was a successful experiment, headed by Manmohan Singh, with the UPA government managing to get even rival parties such as the SP and BSP to support it on issues. The Singh government continued for 10 years, famously surviving even a threat to its survival on the historic nuclear deal with the US, and initiated landmark reforms like RTI, MNREGS.
However, before 2014, it was struggling with allegations of corruption.
The era of these coalition governments finally ended in 2014 with the Narendra Modi-led BJP’s brute majority
