Lest we forget

There’s much to rejoice, now that we have a stable government at Delhi. That the Congress was able not to give in when ally DMK tried to blackmail it is a good sign, and it’s an even better sign that prime minister Manmohan Singh was able to keep the avaricious T R Baalu out of his ministry. None of this would have been possible during the last term, when parliament was balanced so delicately that one miffed ally could have brought the government down in a jiffy.

We see wholesome praise being heaped on Manmohan Singh, who sailed through his first term as prime minister without a single blemish. The larger picture is that, for the first time in three decades, India is poised to take big, bold decisions. The economy is happy when it knows the government won’t drag its feet or go back on policy. If the stock market spiked the day after the election results, it is because of this confidence.

It may seem rude to spoil this mood of optimism, but we must remember some dark things about the Congress lest we allow them to ride roughshod over us, as they did during the Emergency. The rise of anti-Congress forces in the past three decades has sobered it down a bit, but that doesn’t mean it will turn saintly overnight.

Nehru, our first prime minister, set the agenda for the Congress. He loved Gandhi, but hated the religious overtones of his political actions. British-educated Nehru embraced the Western definition of secularism: it brought us acclaim from the world community and made us look nobler than Islam-obsessed Pakistan, but in later years, it also unwittingly made it easy for the BJP to sell its idea of Hindu nationalism.

Nehru rejected Gandhi’s village economics, and tried to graft the best of Russia and America in his five-year plans. We ended up with what came to be known as the licence raj, where the government had stifling control over all economic activity. Much of this changed with Rajiv Gandhi and later Narasimha Rao, both Congress prime ministers, but vestiges of Nehru’s confusion remain.

For all his democratic impulses, Nehru wasn’t opposed to dynasty. In school, we still study Nehru’s florid prose with great reverence, and don’t get even a glimpse of the incisive writing that Ambedkar and Lohia produced. That’s because we still believe in the glory of Nehru’s pronouncements. And who’d want to drag the dynasty down anyway?

Nehru left behind an ambitious daughter who was to lead Indian democracy into its darkest days. She used the police to torture her political rivals, and turned an already brutal police force into an unimaginably corrupt and partisan machine. Indira Gandhi encouraged sycophants who would say and do anything to please her. Her son Sanjay is remembered with dread to this day, and his son Varun Gandhi is the new terror on the block. Indira Gandhi gained strength from regional tyrants, one of whom turned against her and killed her.

The Congress continues to get into unprincipled alliances to this day, as we saw recently when Dharam Singh willingly accepted a scheming Deve Gowda’s hand in Karnataka. The Congress karma of cruelty and opportunism will return to haunt it, and we have to see if Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi can do anything to overcome it.

Dynasty has remained a big curse for the Congress. Throughout its history, criminals, contractors and feudal lords have gravitated to the party. They have managed to protect their interests, and also profited wildly, all by merely remaining loyal to the Nehru family.

So while we congratulate Manmohan Singh and the Congress on their victories, let us also remember to keep our eyes wide open.