India After Independence: 1947-2000 (33 page)

Certainly, their differences and disputes were real, as also significant, but they have been exaggerated to the extent of falsifying history.

Patel and Nehru had temperamental as well as ideological differences. After 1947, policy differences on several questions cropped up between them. The two differed on the role and authority of the prime minister, the manner in which the riots of 1947 were to be handled and the relations with Pakistan. The election of Purshottamdas Tandon as Congress president in 1950 created a wide breach between them. Nehru opposed, though unsuccessfully, Patel’s view that the right to property should be included among the fundamental rights of the Constitution. Several times their differences on questions of policy led to near breaches and offers of resignation from the government by one or the other. A certain tension was always present between the two.

Yet, the two continued to stick and pull together and there was no final parting of the ways. This was because what united them was more significant and of abiding value than what divided them. Also they complemented each other in many ways: one was a great organizer and able administrator, the other commanded immense mass support and had a wide social and developmental perspective. If anything, Patel buttressed Nehru’s role even while challenging it in some respects. Besides, there was considerable mutual affection and respect for each other and each recognized the indispensability of the other. Gandhiji’s death also made a difference; the two realized that it had made their cooperation all the more necessary. Both arrived at an agreement through the process of frank discussion on almost every major government policy decision. Patel would argue his case, sometimes strongly, would win it sometimes, but when he could not, he would invariably yield to Nehru. Throughout Patel remained Nehru’s loyal colleague, assuring him of complete support for his policies. After Gandhiji’s death, he repeatedly described Nehru as his ‘leader’. On 14 November 1948—Nehru’s birthday—he was to say: ‘Mahatma Gandhiji named Pandit Nehru as his heir and successor. Since Gandhiji’s death we have realized that our leader’s judgement was correct.’
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And Nehru reciprocated: ‘The Sardar has been a tower of strength; but for his affection and advice I would not have been able to run the State.’
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The struggle between the right wing of the party and Nehru came to a head in August 1950 over the question of the election of the party president and lasted for over one year. The struggle involved questions of policy and ideology; but it was also important because the new office-bearers would play a decisive role in the nomination of the party candidates in the coming general elections.

The three candidates who contested the election for the party presidentship were Purshottamdas Tandon, supported by Patel, J.B. Kripalani, supported by Nehru, and Shankarrao Deo. Nehru was opposed to Tandon because of his overall conservative social, economic and
political outlook. He made it clear that he would find it difficult to continue as a member of the Congress Working Committee or even of the government if Tandon were elected. Supporters of Tandon, on the other hand, hoped for his election ‘to curb’ Nehru, to change his foreign, economic and social policies, especially his policies towards Pakistan and the Hindu Code Bill.

In a closely fought election on 29 August 1950, Tandon won with 1306 votes, with Kripalani getting 1092 and Deo 202 votes. Subsequently, Tandon packed the Working Committee and the Central Election Committee with his men. After a great deal of internal debate and tussle, a large number of Congressmen, led by Kripalani, resigned from the party in June 1951 and formed the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party, even though Nehru and Azad advised against the step.

Nehru now decided to give battle. Regarding the Congress as indispensable (Patel having died on 15 December 1950), he decided to intervene directly in party affairs. While keen to preserve party unity, he was not willing to let the right wing dominate the party or the coming election process. With great skill and determination and bringing into play his considerable political talents, he got the AICC to pass resolutions fully endorsing his social, economic and foreign policies. Then, on 6 August 1951, he resigned from the Working Committee and the Central Election Committee asking Congressmen to choose ‘which viewpoint and outlook are to prevail in the Congress—Tandon’s or mine’.
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There was no doubt as to what the Congressmen’s choice would be, especially in view of the coming elections which could not be won without Nehru’s leadership and campaigning. Instead of accepting Nehru’s resignation, Tandon, fully realizing that Nehru’s political position was stronger than his own or his friends’, decided to himself resign. The AICC accepted Tandon’s resignation on 8 September and elected Nehru to the Congress presidency. Nehru accepted the AICC decision, even though he was in principle opposed to the prime minister being the party president. But then he had already said earlier that ‘necessity might compel’ him to do so ‘in special circumstances.
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The entire episode led to little bitterness as Tandon resigned ‘with grace and little recrimination’ and Nehru graciously asked Tandon to join his Working Committee. The offer was immediately accepted by Tandon. Nehru also asked the dissidents to rejoin the party, and several of them, including Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, did so.

Nehru now emerged as the unchallenged leader of the party—the leader who had the final word in the party as also the government and he enjoyed this position till his death in 1964. Though he failed to bring Kripalani and many other rebels back to the party, he succeeded in maintaining the pluralist, consensual as also the left-of-the-centre character of the Congress.

Another aspect of the conflict between Nehru and Tandon was connected to the relationship between the party organization and the parliamentary party and the government, which had cropped up earlier during Kripalani’s presidency. After his election as Congress president, Tandon had again raised the issue of the party control over the government
and he and his supporters had declared that the prime minister and his Cabinet must carry out the mandate given by the party and be responsible to it for the carrying out of policies. However, Tandon’s resignation and Nehru’s presidency confirmed the prominent role of the prime minister and the Cabinet in the formulation and carrying out of the government policies; the party president and the Working Committee were to concentrate on the organizational aspects of the party. Though Nehru never again became the president of the party after 1953, there was no conflict between the party and the government in his lifetime. After Nehru too, it has been widely accepted that in a parliamentary democracy where the executive is directly or indirectly elected by the people, there cannot be two centres of power and the real state power has inevitably to reside in the parliamentary wing.

But the situation in India in this respect is not like that in Britain or the US, where the party leadership plays a subsidiary role. In Congress the party president matters much more. The party plays an important role in formulating policies and in selecting the candidates for the state and parliamentary elections. Also, in a vast country like India with a largely illiterate population, the ruling party and its political workers are needed to act as links between the government and the people, to convey popular grievances to the government leaders and to explain the government policies to the people. The party alone can guarantee the proper implementation of government policies and provide a check on the bureaucracy. For example, a proper implementation of land reforms could have been achieved through an active and alive party.

Unfortunately, even while realizing the importance of the party, Nehru and his colleagues neglected the organization and failed to assign its cadre proper tasks, as also to give them their due honour and importance. Instead, there was a certain devaluing and atrophying of the party and party work. Everybody who mattered in the party wanted to be in the parliament or state legislatures and then occupy ministerial chairs. Ministers and legislators took up party work only when pushed out from ministerial and legislative positions, and they often did that too so that they could manoeuvre themselves back into parliamentary positions. N. Sanjiva Reddy, who left the chief ministership of Andhra to become the president of the party, was to publicly remark that ‘a junior ministership in a state government offered greater satisfaction than presidency of the Congress party.’
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At the same time, that the party still mattered is confirmed by the fact that almost every prime minister after Nehru either tried to have a henchman or a sycophant as the party president or herself/himself assumed the party presidency.

Even in the early years there were signs that Congress was gradually beginning to lose touch with the people and its standards beginning to
decline. A certain tendency towards deterioration is perhaps inevitable in a ruling party but the deterioration and decline should remain within reasonable bounds. This was certainly the case with the Congress in the early years after independence; but the erosion of the party values and standards was still worrisome. There were certain tendencies in the party which were fraught with danger.

There was, as a political scientist said, ‘increasing corruption, disillusionment, and loss of
elan
in the Congress Party,’
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or, as Nehru bemoaned as early as 1948, ‘the progressive collapse of the morale and idealistic structure that we had built up.’
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A patronage system was initiated especially in the rural areas leading to the emergence of political brokers and middlemen and vote-banks. Factions, factionalism and factional intrigues arid disputes, often based on personal and group interests, though sometimes involving ideological and policy differences, emerged, leading even to non-democratic functioning at the lower levels of the organization and tarnishing the image of the party. Intense rivalry and conflict between the organization men and ministerialists in the states led to intra-party conflicts, with the former often behaving as an opposition party, their major political objective being to dethrone the ministerialists and to occupy their seats. This tended to create among the people the image of the Congress as a party of office-seekers.

Above all, there was the increasing loss of idealism and neglect of ideology, especially as concerns social welfare and social transformation. The net result was that the Congress increasingly lost touch with the people and it no longer appealed to the intelligentsia and the younger people and was therefore unable to recruit the best of them into the party. Most of the idealist youth preferred to join the opposition parties. The Congress was thereby failing to train a new generation of leaders to replace those thrown up by the national movement. The deterioration was beginning to affect all political parties but it affected the Congress to a much greater extent, it being the ruling party.

Nehru was, of course, aware of this state of affairs in the country and in the Congress. In a mood of disillusionment, despair and despondency, he wrote in 1948: ‘It is terrible to think that we may be losing all our values and sinking into the sordidness of opportunist politics.’ In 1949: ‘Our standards have fallen greatly. Indeed, we have hardly any standards left except not be be found out.’ And then, again in 1950: ‘We have lost something, the spirit that moves and unless we recapture that spirit, all our labour will yield little profit.’
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In 1957 he told the Congress MPs: ‘The Congress Party is weak and getting weaker . . . Our strong point is the past. Unless we get out of our present rut, the Congress Party is doomed.’
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Unfortunately, Nehru was no party organizer or reformer nor did he and other tall leaders working in the government have time to devote to party organization. The important work of building the party and toning it up were neglected during the years of Nehru’s total dominance of the party and the government. In fact, Nehru was compelled to rely on the
state party ‘bosses’ for running the party machine. Nevertheless, being very much an ideologue, he made several major attempts to keep the party anchored ideologically and politically to its socialist and idealist moorings.

The departure of the Socialists had weakened the radical forces in Congress and the space vacated by them was being increasingly filled by vested interests—landlords, rich peasants, and even princes. Nehru realized that Congress had been weakened ideologically by the absence of the Socialists and that he was being gradually getting hemmed in by conservative modes of thinking. At the same time he also felt that the Congress was indispensable and that it would be wrong and counter-productive to either divide or leave it. The answer, therefore, was to reform and improve a united Congress despite its many weaknesses.

Nehru, therefore, tried several times to bring the Socialists back into the Congress or to at least get their co-opertation in the implementation of a developmental and egalitarian agenda. He did not simultaneously woo the Communists for, as we shall see in the next chapter, they were organizationally, politically and ideologically on a completely different track from that of the Congress. But he did try, with some success, to bring the Communists into the mainstream of parliamentary politics. The Socialists on the other hand, Nehru felt, had the same principles and objectives as he had. Moreover, he had a great personal regard and affection for several Socialist leaders, especially Jayaprakash Narayan, who for years was close enough to him for years to address him as ‘Bhai’ (brother).

His first attempt to bring the Socialists back into the Congress was in 1948 itself when he expressed his distress at the growing distance from them, which, he said, was ‘not good either for us (the Congress) or the Socialist Party, and certainly not good either for the country.’
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But the Socialists were still quite angry with and critical of Nehru. Jayaprakash, for example, wrote to Nehru in December 1948: ‘You want to go towards socialism, but you want the capitalists to help in that.’
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He also told