GREATNESS BE HANGED - How did the great leaders of the past fail to build a great nation? | |
| Ashok Mitra | |
There is no point in joining issues with value systems; if army rule is somebody's preferred cup of tea, he/she should have the latitude to openly air that opinion in an open society. That does not however imply accepting as valid the simplistic view of contemporary Indian history as presented by the academic luminary. The great men-small men dichotomy can hardly tell the story of how this country has, at this moment, arrived where it has. Were the great men of the earlier generations indeed so great, why did they, the cheeky ones may ask, fail to build a great nation and initiate a process which ensured their succession by men of equally great stature? In other words, these great men of yore were perhaps not men of particularly great vision or particularly great competence. That aside, India's judiciary too has had its ups and downs and is not as lily white as the respected scholar assumes. The Supreme Court, for instance, did not exactly cover itself with glory during Indira Gandhi's Emergency. The callousness with which it dealt with the legal issues arising out of the Bhopal gas tragedy matched the cynicism displayed at the time by ruling politicians. Questions have now and then arisen concerning the integrity of individual judges. A retired Chief Justice of India is currently under the scanner of the CBI; the chief justice of a high court, facing grave charges of corruption, has just resigned to avoid impeachment by Parliament. It is just happenstance that the nation's highest judiciary is currently asserting a rare quality of forthrightness which has drawn public acclaim. But this season could be ephemeral. Judges come from the same social background as politicians and civil servants: if society gets degraded, all its institutions are bound to degenerate more or less to the same extent. Come to think of it, does not the evolution of one very special institution more or less encapsulate the narrative of the rake's progress — if that is what it is — this country has registered over the decades? That institution is the Indian National Congress. Apart from at most half a dozen years, it has been at the helm of the country's Central administration. It has had an extraordinary influence on the shaping of the polity. One can actually be even more specific. The Congress, almost without interruption, has been in the grip of a particular family, the Nehru-Gandhis, over this entire period. An alternative experiment with the so-called Syndicate flickered for a while in the 1960s. It did not last. Descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru have ruled the Congress and therefore the government in New Delhi. A democratic system featured by a republican Constitution has spawned a feudal overlordship. It is an extraordinary phenomenon and cannot but be subject to occasional strains of contradiction. Compromises are necessary in such situations. For certain other developments have cast their shadow. While the Congress has metamorphosed into a feudal edifice, it has nonetheless to face competition across the nation. It can no longer rule on its own as in the past. The party has to share power; and we have arrived at the point we have arrived. A prime minister is nominally in situ, but he is not much more than a marionette. He has to honour the code of the feudal order within the party and conduct himself according to the wishes and directives of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Moreover, he lacks control over ministries that are the preserve of coalition partners. Academia may grieve that we no longer have a great man as prime minister. The situation leaves little scope for display of great heroics by one occupying that position; he has to be Mary's little lamb, or he will not be there. Consider a related matter. Jawaharlal Nehru was a towering prime minister and had an overwhelming influence within the party, but he had to show deference to Vallabhbhai Patel; besides, the Congress had such powerful leaders dispersed over the states as Govind Ballabh Pant, B.C. Roy, C. Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad or, a bit later, Kamaraj Nadar, Atulya Ghosh and Sanjeeva Reddy. As the party has gradually slunk into the feudal mode, it has become increasingly Centralized, the role of state leaders is trivialized. Party personnel at different levels, each cut down to size, have to look up all the time to the ruling family for decisions on both big and small matters; they have to be, invariably, at its beck and call. Dynastic succession does not, however, guarantee the continuity of greatness. An era of genius, somebody once remarked, is followed by an age of perseverance. Notwithstanding the lack of great leaders, the Congress party — and the nation it has been habituated to keep in thraldom — could have still managed to proceed towards the direction of a placid equilibrium. It did not happen that way. Jawaharlal Nehru, the towering Congress prime minister of the country, was the bête noire of John Foster Dulles and forged the grand Non-Aligned Movement that gave the United States of America sleepless nights. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister who dared the US President, Richard Nixon, to prevent her from assisting the Bangladeshis in their war of liberation, was again the supreme head of the Congress party. The present prime minister, so obsessively anxious to make India the most trusted junior lackey of the US, also represents the ethos of the Congress party. If you want to call it transition from greatness to teeny-weeny living, that is your prerogative. But the basic factor behind this awesome change is the shifting mindset of the family whose pocket borough the Indian National Congress is. It is possible to go over some more of the not-so-ancient history. Nehru, bubbling over with enthusiasm, gave the go ahead to P.C. Mahalanobis to have an integrated plan frame focusing on the goal of economic self-reliance linked to a rapidly enlarging heavy industry base. He nationalized the Imperial Bank of India, the country's largest, and the insurance business. It was at his urging that Keshav Dev Malviya laid the foundation of an indigenous petro-chemical industry. The public sector, Nehru had not a shred of doubt, must be in command of the economy. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, who made herself the be-all and end-all of the party, nationalized 14 other banks and a large segment of the mining sector. Whether out of conviction or for reasons of strategy, she ordered the setting up of the monopolies commission as well as of the Food Corporation of India and the State Trading Corporation of India. Her son, who assumed office as prime minister following her assassination and was reckoned as saviour and custodian of the Congress, decided on a U-turn. He had no excess baggage such as memories of the freedom movement and its pledges. He was reared in the incubator of a public school ambience and had his own notions of how to eradicate poverty while simultaneously transforming India, overnight, into a version of the US. The Congress party went along with his fantasies. July 1991 is not the determining date which marked a sea change in the nature and content of India's economic growth. It is November 1984, when Nehru's grandson took over. His decision to liberalize imports led to the balance of payments crisis and subsequent surrender to the Bretton Woods institutions. The epoch of nation-building through creating assets in the public sector ended, and the era of disinvestment and sale of public assets commenced, all under the auspices of the Congress. Nehru forced his finance minister to quit office because the Life Insurance Corporation of India, by then an annex of the ministry of finance, had committed an act of minor indiscretion by favouring a Calcutta stockbroker. His granddaughter-in-law is now the party empress and evidently endorses the view of the incumbent prime minister that his cabinet colleagues may be crooks but nothing can be done about it, given the dharma of a coalition regime. Those who shape the destiny of the Congress party these days have exercised their choice. They think it has yielded lovely economic dividends to the nation's top decile whose concerns are now the central concerns of the party. A new philosophy is king: greatness be hanged, we will not worry about not being great as long as we are rich, we will bicker among ourselves over the sharing of the spoils, and in the process, convert Parliament into a pig's den. |
Palash Biswas
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