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.

Three swingers and a poll

Last week, as Karnataka’s big parties announced the names of their candidates for next month’s elections, ticket aspirants waited anxiously to see who had made it and who hadn’t.

And as you may already know, those whose names didn’t figure on those lists have started sulking and throwing tantrums. Simultaneously, criminals and policemen are donning khadi and getting into one or the other of the state's three major parties.

All of which is good entertainment, and of course the election season is always a good time for connoisseurs of drama. To add to the excitement, star campaigners are descending from all over India to do their bit for their parties.

Arun Jaitley of the BJP was in Bangalore last week. He made a suave presentation at the Taj West End to a gathering of journalists, who’d received invitations the previous day from velvet-voiced PR girls. (I was unlucky and got a call from a sober male voice).

I was among those who sat at the hotel’s opulent banquet hall and heard the BJP stalwart’s eloquent briefing. He had facts and figures ready, and reeled out numbers without as much as glancing at his notes, but what was most striking was that he spoke no ideology at all. No Hindutva, no talk about fighting corruption or Congress misrule. All he said was that Karnataka should vote for stability.

Jaitley delivered his speech like a CEO at a board meeting, such was the corporate polish of the event. But then, come to think of it, this season could well mark the advent of elections without any ideological fervour. Also, the three big players have slept with one another in the last five years, and cannot really take the pativrata tone without sounding foolish. So if you were the pragmatic type, you would say, “Ah, good, no bullshit!”

But consider the tragedy. The Karnataka assembly has 224 seats, and since the last elections did not deliver a decisive mandate, the Congress, the JD(S) and the BJP were forced to share power — and the spoils. As everyone knows, they got into opportunistic alliances, praising their partners when together, and abusing them when the good times ran out.

In 1977, after Indira Gandhi lifted the Emergency and announced elections, the rest of India sent non-Congress leaders to Delhi as MPs but Karnataka went against the tide. Again in 1978, the state voted a Congress government to power.

But the Congress joy ride jerked to an end. In 1983, Karnataka got its first non-Congress government when the Janata Party took over with Ramakrishna Hegde at the helm. The ideologies of Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia (and his Kannadiga ideologue Gopala Gowda), the CPM, and the RSS had come together to form an alliance to defeat a satiated and arrogant Congress. The Karnataka voter has thus always remained inscrutable, and unpredictable.

In 1984, after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, an emotional Karnataka sent 24 Congress MPs to Delhi out of 28. Hegde dissolved his government, owning moral responsibility for his party's poor performance, and called for elections right away. Voters stunned the nation by taking a U-turn and sending his Janata Party back to power at the Vidhana Soudha. In the process, the Karnataka electorate won for itself the reputation of being wise and discerning.

One of the heroes of that inspired anti-Congress movement was Deve Gowda, who you saw, these last four years, in the role of the shrewish wife in serial marriages with the Congress and the BJP. Yes, it has been a disgraceful fall, but he is again rubbing his hands in anticipating of a hung assembly, and looking forward to more fun and intrigue.

So friends, Kannadigas and countrymen, this is going to be a battle among three big parties, and it is a battle over the millions they can rake in from real estate and mining. Happy voting, and God save you!