Ram Guha has an uncanny knack for learning the wrong lesson from history. In February 1955, Congress at Avadi decided to embrace Socialism. Later that year, Nehru visited the Soviet Union and Kruschev and Bulganin visited India in August.
Previously, Congress was a big tent with different economic interests having a voice in decision making. It was believed that parliamentary democracy was the best way that different vested interest groups could strike mutually advantageous bargains.
After Avadi, it became clear that Congress would be a centralized organization with Delhi relying on foreign funding and f.d.i to dole out largesse to the States. Power would be concentrated in the PMO and the Planning Commission. Indigenous economic interests would be ignored. Rajaji's response was to set up the Swatantra Party in 1959. It proved utterly useless.
Guha writes-
Back in 1957, when the Congress Party was as hegemonic in Indian politics as the Bharatiya Janata Party is today,
This is nonsense. Congress had monopolized the Hindu vote since 1937. Kerala had got a Communist govt. in 1957. Otherwise Congress dominance was near complete. But Nehru had taken it to the Left. Communists don't believe in Democracy.
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari wrote a remarkable essay on the dangers of excessive dominance by one party to democracy.
He only did this after his Party lurched to the Left. This legitimized the Communist ideology. People would prefer the genuine article to Nehru's incompetent and half hearted version. India would have handed itself over to the Kremlin. White men in a far away City would once again be making all the important decisions for the poverty stricken masses of India.
A veteran of the freedom struggle, once a close associate of Gandhi and Nehru, the holder of high political office at both Centre and state, “Rajaji” was increasingly disenchanted with the direction the country was taking under the government led by his erstwhile comrades.
Which direction was it, Guha? The answer is- to the Left. Had Congress moved to the Right- e.g. if it had scrapped the license permit Raj- the old man would have been happy.
He expressed this disenchantment in a magazine essay published in August 1957 to coincide with Independence Day.
The Communists had come to power in Kerala that April. This had concentrated minds. As a Southerner, Rajaji was aware that Catholics and Muslims had voted against the Communists. It was the Hindu vote in the countryside which had enabled Namboodripad to form a Ministry. Congress, as Gandhi had said in 1939, was a high Caste Hindu party. It was because Panditji had a soft spot- in his head- for that evil ideology that India might end up relinquishing its hard-won Independence from Westminster and voluntarily accepting servitude to the Kremlin.
Rajaji’s article began: “The successful working of parliamentary democracy depends on two factors;
The man was a fool. The successful working of any system of government depends on only one thing- not doing stupid shit.
first on a broad measure of agreement among all classes of citizens about the objectives of government;
In which case India should not be a parliamentary democracy. It was clear that Muslims wanted the Government to kill kaffirs and to destroy their idols. Hindus wanted their own religion to be dominant. They refused to grant reserved seats to Muslims. They got rid of Urdu and made Hindi in Devanagari the National language. Communists wanted to nationalize everything including agricultural land. Princes wanted their privy purses and Zamindars wanted to hang on to their inherited land and wealth.
In the UK, the Labor Party was committed to the public ownership of the means of production. The Tories favored private enterprise. This did not cause any difficulty for the working of parliamentary democracy. By contrast, the situation in France was chaotic. The Fourth Republic would collapse in 1958.
secondly, on the existence of a two-party system, in which each of the big political groups possesses effective and continuous leadership and is strong enough to take over the responsibilities of government when the majority of the country’s voters wish it.”
This was not the case in the UK during the interwar years. The Tories could govern on their own. Labor could not without Liberal support.
For if “one party remains always in power,” wrote Rajaji, “and dissent is dissipated among unorganised individuals and relatively insignificant groups which do not and cannot coalesce, government will inevitably become totalitarian”.
This is nonsense. Provided a party has internal democracy and rejects totalitarianism no such outcome is likely. The fact is, some monarchs deliberately diluted their own powers and introduced representative institutions and fostered the creation of the party system. On the other hand, it is true that Rajaji was as stupid as shit. He published a pamphlet stating that it was the religious duty of Hindus to go and die fighting in the cause of Khilafat! Even Gandhi was less crazy.
At this stage, the Congress had been in power at the Centre for a decade and had been continuously in office in almost all the states too.
Is the BJP in power in 'almost all the states'? No. Thus Guha's analogy fails.
Observing the complacency and arrogance with which the Congress conducted itself, Rajaji wrote: “A single-party democracy soon loses its sense of proportion. It sees, but cannot place things in perspective or apprehend all sides of a question. This is the position in India today.”
Thus Rajaji had been wrong to support his 'sambandhi' Gandhi who demanded that the Brits should hand over power, including command of the Army, to the INC immediately and without any consultation of other parties. This was despite the fact that Gandhi himself stated, in a newspaper article published in 1939, that Congress was a high-caste Hindu affair. He went on to explain that Hindus were shit at fighting and so, if the Brits left without handing over the Army to Congress, then the Muslims and the Punjabis would rule the country.
With one party so dominant, continued Rajaji, “it is inevitable that the party should become more important than Parliament... The leader will take decisions in accordance with majority opinion in the party. This may be deemed to be a partial alleviation of totalitarianism, but even this may not happen if the leader be an overwhelming force by himself, in which case the party may not be able to divide itself even within closed doors. The mechanics of unadulterated dictatorship would then operate unhindered.”
If Rajaji was right then the Indian Constitution should have been amended such that parties which remained in power for a stipulated period must be broken up in the same way that monopolies, in America, had to be broken up under Anti-Trust laws.
Rajaji’s remarks, aimed at the Congress-ruled India of the past, are strikingly relevant to the BJP-ruled India of the present.
No. They are relevant to Congress- a dynastic party which is the prisoner of whatever ideology the current incumbent might hold.
To be sure, while in absolute control at the Centre, the BJP is not in power in several important states, which may act as a partial check on its totalitarian ambitions. However, at the national level, the Opposition is weak and fragmented.
It is crap.
And even more than Jawaharlal Nehru, Narendra Modi seeks to be “an overwhelming force by himself”, his desire to build a personality cult around himself aided by the sort of propaganda machine not remotely conceivable in the 1950s.
This is foolish. The propaganda machinery of the 1950s was much more effective than anything which now obtains because the channels of mass communication were firmly in the hands of the Government.
With the assistance of his home minister, Modi has also subverted and undermined democratic institutions far more systematically than Nehru ever did.
But it was Nehru who established a dynasty. The big difference between Nehru and Modi is that Nehru could bring Congress to heel by threatening to leave it. His daughter did in fact split the party. His grandson was unseated by rebellious Cabinet colleagues. However under Sonia, they dynastic principle has been firmly established. Nobody is even talking of splitting Congress no matter how steeply and rapidly it declines.
It should be remembered that Congress was never democratic. Nehru's Home Minister was Govind Vallabh Pant. In 1938 he said 'Italy has its Il Duce, Germany has its Fuhrer. India has Mahatma Gandhi'. Gandhi anointed Nehru as his successor. When he died elections were still 18 months away. Shastri died after a year in office. Congress needed Indira as 'vote catcher'. Initially hesitant, she came to see that the Party needed her even more than it had needed her father. This was because Indians had come to loathe the Gandhi cap. Only those who hadn't taken office- nutters like JP- were respected.
Rajaji lived long enough to see that 'totalitarianism' is only possible in a democracy if there is potential Dictator who can get out the vote regardless of party symbol.
Several months later, Rajaji published a second article on the state of Indian democracy, which he titled: “Wanted: Independent Thinking”. He argued here that “no ’ism will work satisfactorily unless the citizens in the democracy are willing to undertake the responsibility of thinking and judging for themselves.”
Very true. No country can have a successful Space program or successful Nuclear program unless all the citizens have a PhD level knowledge of Physics.
However, as things stood, “instead of independent thinking and free judgment, the manners of parrots have been growing among men... They repeat the words uttered by the established guardians without paying thought to the meaning and the implications.”
Rajaji wasn't a parrot. He was a donkey. Guha, on the other hand is repeating Rajaji's words because he is incapable of making an argument on his own. He wants to say nasty things about Modi and thus drags in Rajaji. But Rajaji wasn't saying nasty things about Nehru. Why? He respected Nehru as a 'vote catcher'. In a democracy, guys who can't get elected need to understand that they lack some quality which people who do get elected have.
These strictures apply to a fair degree to India today, made worse, again, by the availability of means of communication and indoctrination unavailable to Nehru and the Congress in the 1950s.
New mass media have undermined the old methods of brain washing. China can spend billions on controlling the internet. But China can also kill and 're-educate' hundreds of thousands.
Consider the sycophantic praise of the prime minister by his ministers and MPs offered daily in the op-ed pages of once reputable newspapers published in Delhi.
It sends a signal that the party and Cabinet are united and cohesive. This affects Expectations which in turn affects Outcomes.
Consider the English and, especially, Hindi television channels, whose slavish parroting of the government line, and whose whole-hearted participation in building Modi’s personality cult, cheapen and degrade Indian democracy.
Guha has been cheapened and degraded by ghost of Rajaji who is constantly pissing into his mouth and using his head as an anal dildo.
The fact is that it is profitable to support a popular politician. Guha finds it profitable to take an anti-BJP line. But this isn't losing the BJP any votes in Karnataka.
Consider also the regular barrage of carefully-choreographed videos showing the prime minister as a larger-than-life, almost god-like, figure, blessing athletes or inaugurating projects or playing with peacocks.
Consider the citation cartel in which a Guha will praise the work of a Kesavan and so forth. These are shitty historians but it is in their interest to pretend otherwise.
Consider, finally, the cut-paste tweets of the bhakt brigade, likewise part of the malign attempt by the state and the party machinery, to inhibit or discourage citizens from thinking and judging for themselves.
Guha is incapable of making a reasoned argument. Thus all he can do is spew out venom. But it is his own article which is 'cut-paste'. Obviously, he has some stupid shit about Rajaji on his computer and is recycling it because Scroll.in gets paid for publishing hysterical abuse directed at Modi.
In May 1958, Rajaji had warned: “If subservience and slavish adulation take the place of independent thinking and criticism is never resorted to but with fear and trepidation, the atmosphere quickly breeds the political diseases peculiar to democracy.”
Why was Rajaji so slavish and subservient to Mahatma Gandhi? How come he only turned against such adulation after his political career had blown up and he had been sidelined? To his credit, he set up his own party and tried to make a comeback. Guha, obviously, can't do any such thing. He is now the Huccha Venkat of Indian historiography.
Without “the free and critical atmosphere of a well-balanced democracy,” he wrote, India was witnessing “the growth of the weeds of careerism, intrigue and various types of degrees of dishonesty.”
Rajaji was a careerist sure enough. Then his career blew up and he railed bitterly against that salutary outcome.
Rajaji went on to argue that “an Opposition is the natural preventive for such poisonous weeds. An Opposition is therefore the urgent remedy indicated by the symptoms...”
A useful discovery to make if you have no alternative but to set up your own Opposition party because no other party wants you.
In this second article, Rajaji briefly spelt out the requirements of an Opposition that might help restore Indian democracy to an even keel. Thus, he wrote: “We need an Opposition that thinks differently and does not just want more of the same, a group of vigorously thinking citizens which aims at the general welfare, and not one that in order to get more votes from the so-called have-nots, offers more to them than the party in power has given, an Opposition that appeals to reason and acts on the firm faith that India can be governed well as a democratic Republic, and that the have-nots will not reject sound reason.”
This is the problem with Guha & Co. They offer no alternative to Modi but want credit for opposing him. Sadly, the literary equivalent of a fart does not represent 'vigorous thinking'.
The next year,
the year after
at the ripe old age of 80,
81
Rajaji put his precepts into practice by starting a new party called Swatantra whose charter was to free the economy from what its founder called the license-permit-quota raj, to protect individual freedoms, and to forge closer alliances with the democracies of the West.
So, there was some American money on the table. Rajaji also opposed India's nuclear program.
Notably, while opposed to the economic and foreign policies of the Congress government, Rajaji shared Nehru’s commitment to inter-faith harmony and the rights of minorities.
He was the first Hindu leader to endorse Partition. Oddly, South Indian Hindus weren't really utterly callous to the fate of Sindhi and Punjabi and Bangla Hindus.
Swatantra mounted a vigorous intellectual and ideological challenge to the Congress.
Guha can't mount any type of intellectual challenge to anything.
However, neither it nor other Opposition parties were able to make much of a dent in the political supremacy of the Congress.
Because Nehru was popular. Rajaji was seen by his own people as a senile, casteist, cretin. By contrast, Kamraj emerged as the 'king maker' in Delhi.
For, as, Rajaji ruefully remarked: “It is the expensiveness of the election campaigns and the monopoly of funds that it commands that chiefly contribute to the Congress Party’s success.”
The money had to go to the party with the viable PM candidate. That's how money works. If there is no return on investment, money evaporates.
This, again, resonates with the present, when the BJP’s control of the State machinery and the opacity of the electoral bonds scheme (which the Supreme Court has surprisingly not struck down)
Surprising? The stay petition was presented by Prashant Bhushan! It was obvious nonsense. Companies making donations had to mention them in their Accounts. Bhushan's contention that they might be traded for cash was equally foolish. Nobody pays 'white' to get 'black'. The RBI hadn't objected to the scheme. It had approved it and made further recommendations. Bhushan is to Law what Guha was to Historiography.
give the ruling party considerable advantages over its opponents, particularly at the time of general elections.
Unless their opponents have a better PM candidate.
Some works of scholarship endure and are worth reading decades after they were published.
Guha's works were never worth reading.
But this is virtually never the case with newspaper or magazine articles, which are usually forgotten very soon after they are published. Rajaji’s essays of 1957 and 1958 are a remarkable exception. For the dangers to Indian democracy, and to India itself, posed by the dominance of a single party are even greater now than they were six decades ago.
Indian Democracy was endangered by dynasticism. Political parties were factionalist. The BJP is more cohesive because the RSS isn't really political. It entered politics in self-defense but its own ethos would be damaged if it becomes just a spring-board into politics. To some extent that did happen previously- people like Vaghela took their RSS honed skills to Congress- but seems to have declined under Modi.
While recognising their flaws and insecurities, Rajaji could yet acknowledge that Nehru and his colleagues were “good men”, which is not the sort of description one would use for the men in power today.
especially if you are being paid to shit on them.
The BJP of Modi and Shah is ruthless, amoral, and, above all, majoritarian.
Though it was under Nehru that Muslims were massacred and chased out of the country.
It is far more hostile to democratic values and democratic practices than the Congress of the Nehru years ever was.
Congress dismissed the Communist government in Kerala. Nehru kept his pal Abdullah under arrest for a decade. Had Nehru not been more popular than his party he might, as he himself had hinted in an article he wrote under the pen-name 'Chanakya', have tried to make himself a dictator of a Single Party State.
The arrogance of the ruling party and the obsession with building a personality cult around the prime minister are important reasons why, despite two successive majorities, the record of the BJP in office is so dismal on all fronts, leading to a decline in the economy, stresses on the social fabric, and our precipitous fall in the eyes of the neighbourhood and the world.
The BJP will dump Modi the way they dumped Advani if he is perceived to be unpopular. The BJPs record in office is better than Manmohan's after the latter was defeated by the 'activists' and Social Justice warriors in his party in 2011-12. India has risen in the eyes of the neighborhood and the world under Modi. Not engaging with Imran turned out to be a smart move. The guy is meshugganah. Afghanistan and Pakistan are clashing along their border.
Two terms of BJP (mis)rule at the Centre have cost the country and its citizens dearly.
Karnataka's voters think differently. The BJP has 25 of the State's 28 Lok Sabha seats.
A third term for the BJP might be catastrophic for India.
It will be a catastrophe for Guha. A historian who doesn't understand what is happening in the present is likely to be really shitty at interpreting the past.
Our country needed a vital, vigorous Opposition in the late 1950s;
No. India needed sensible and competent people who would grow the economy and increase the offensive and defensive power of the armed forces. Instead it got a bunch of cretins who babbled nonsense incessantly.
and it needs such an Opposition far more in the early 2020s.
No. It needs sensible economic and defense policies. What it doesn't need is yet more Farmer's agitations and anti-CAA protests. Even Congress has understood this.
This, to invoke Rajaji one last time, must be “an Opposition that thinks differently and does not just want more of the same”,
No. The Opposition should be saying 'we can do the stuff you like better than the current bunch of senile tossers.' Kejriwal understands this. He is saying I will deliver more while pursuing a Nationalist agenda. Chanting Hanuman Chalisa will help me do so.'
an Opposition “that appeals to reason and acts on the firm faith that India can be governed well as a democratic Republic, and that the have-nots will not reject sound reason”.
Rajaji thought the 'lower castes' wanted 'lower caste' education for their kids. Quite naturally they kicked him out and turned on people of his caste. Everybody wants their son or daughter to become a Doctor. Nobody wants them to study History.
Why do cunts like Guha and P.B Mehta never produce any 'sound reason' for their anti-BJP diatribes? Surely, it would be easy enough to come up with substantive criticisms and suggestions as to how things could have been done better? The answer, I'm afraid, is that Guha, Mehta etc, are lazy and stupid. Scroll and Wire and Caravan and so forth are subsidized to publish anti-Indian shite. The subsidy does not go up if what is written is of high quality. It doesn't go down if only shite is written. Thus, it is subsidization which has destroyed this shitty little cottage industry going.
Why is this the case? The answer is that nobody really wants to topple the BJP because the alternative would be bad for everybody. Still, there are Foundations and Oligarchs who have to spend a given sum of money in any given tax year. One may as well pay for gobshites to vent their spleen while pretending one is striking a blow for 'Democracy' or 'anti-Fascism' or some such shibboleth.
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