Tirupati AICC Session As A Guide, Congress Will Not
Hold Elections
Saeed Naqvi
Congress leaders
like Shashi Tharoor are suggesting an election of a new party President. They have
probably forgotten the Tirupati Congress session in April 1992 to elect a new Congress
Working Committee. This exercise in Democracy astonished arch Brahmin P.V.
Narasimha Rao because Arjun Singh, a Rajput, led the pack followed by
intermediate casts like Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot. The results were declared
null and void. Why this happened is explained at the end of this piece.
This being the
30th anniversary of one of Rajiv Gandhi gaffe’s, from which the
party could never really recover, I have hung the story on that peg.
Two retrogressive
steps taken by Rajiv Gandhi to please the “Mullah”, naturally alienated the liberals
on all sides. He reversed a Supreme Court verdict providing maintenance to an elderly
Muslim widow – Shah Bano. Later he banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
Then, to keep the
Hindu vote, he allowed the locks of the Ram Mandir to be opened.
The VHP was
spurred into action. The reversal of the Shah Bano verdict was a Godsend: “Muslim
appeasement” thundered Ashok Singhal of the VHP. Having upped the ante on this
count, the VHP was anxious on another: the Congress was beginning to poach on its
Ayodhya platform. This competition in Hindu radicalism defined much of the
subsequent politics.
In this
competition, the climax was reached in 1989 when, in preparation for elections,
Rajiv Gandhi announced in Ayodhya that, should he be elected, he would usher in
Ram Rajya, a sort of Hindu Shariah. This when the VHP was already embarked on
one of the great mass mobilization strategies. Bricks would be consecrated in
all the temples in the country, particularly in North India, and carried to
Ayodhya for the construction of the Ram Temple.
At this very
time, Rajiv Gandhi’s favoured Finance Minister, V.P. Singh added fuel to the
cauldron already bubbling over. He charged Rajiv Gandhi for large scale corruption
in the purchase of Bofors Field Guns. The charge was never proved but a harried
Rajiv plotted frenetically. While V.P. Singh was challenging his moral credentials,
the VHP made him look weak on the Ram Mandir. This challenge too Rajiv decided
to take up without sufficient clarity of direction.
The Allahabad High
Court had stayed the building of the temple on land disputed by the Muslims. By
a show of massive force the VHP threatened to lay the foundation stone of the
temple on land which was disputed and would therefore violate the Court’s
order. If the VHP carried out the threat successfully, it would be a huge slap
on the face of the administration. It would imply that the police and the
official machinery were more loyal to their faith than orders from their
superiors.
What then
should Rajiv do?
Join them, if
you can’t beat them. Help their shilanyas but only by resorting to subterfuge, unadulterated
deceit, which I saw with my own eyes, seated as I was next to the District
Magistrate of Faizabad, Ram Sharan Srivastava. The trick was this. To please
Ashok Singhal, “Shilanyas” would be allowed “discreetly” on the land which was
disputed. Once Singhal and his hundreds of “Ram Bhakts” had left, chanting
slogans, Srivastava would put out a press note saying that a token stone laying
ceremony had taken place on land which was “not disputed”.
No sooner was
the press note on the wires, than Singhal called his own very well attended
Press Conference. “We have performed Shilanyas on land which was in our original
plan for the Ram Temple.”
The story perpetuated
by the Gandhi-Nehru family loyalists has been that the Muslim vote walked out
from the Congress en masse because P.V. Narasimha slept while the Babari Masjid
was demolished on the fateful day, December 6, 1992. This is only partly true. The
real hemorrhage had begun earlier, soon after the Congress allowed the brick
laying ceremony to take place on land belonging to Muslims in violation of the
High Court order.
I remember, a
Congress stalwart of Faizabad, Nasir Hussain, weeping. “Rajiv has finished the
Congress in UP” he said. He was right. It was all so short sighted. After all,
it was not Congress policy to build the Ram Mandir. And yet the Congress had
begun to look a saffron party. Was this only a perception among Muslims?
P.V.
Narasimha, ofcourse, created conditions for Atal Behari Vajpayee to take over
as the BJP’s Prime Minister for a distinct set of reasons. These reasons were
embedded in the verdict of 1991 election which brought P.V. to power. Because elections
in the North, where the Congress had done badly were over when Rajiv Gandhi was
assassinated, the emotional factor which helped the Congress to scrape through
operated only in the south. In other words India’s first Prime Minister from
the South, was by a fluke of fortune kept buoyant by the southern contingent in
the Congress parliamentary party.
This meant
that his political security and longevity in power dictated that he should not
allow a powerful leader to emerge in the North. Narayan Datt Tiwari was
something of a has-been, but Arjun Singh could always mount a challenge. He had
to be outfoxed. There was another anti Arjun Singh factor operating in PV’s
deep core, aggravated by Chandraswami, the tantric constantly by his side. During
the 1991 elections, key Brahmins like N.D. Tiwari, Lokpati Tripathi, Rajendra
Kumari Bajpai, Jagannath Mishra, Jitendra Prasada, Bindeshwari Dubey, K.K. Tiwary,
Vasant Sathe, V.N. Gadgil, Gundu Rao, all lost. Brahmins outside the Congress, Ramakrishna
Hedge and Madhu Dandvate too. The abiding Brahmin in P.V. moved him to accommodate
Pranab Mukherjee, Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi, V.N. Gadgil, Naval Kishore Sharma,
Jitendra Prasada, and others in his office, the Rajya Sabha, as party General
Secretaries and official spokesmen. But Arjun Singh who had beaten everybody in
the popularity stakes in Tirupati, the “wily” Rajput, had to be kept at bay. The
Congress may therefore never hold elections just in case the party finds a
leader who has the potential to upstage the Gandhis.
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