NEW DELHI: When Rajiv Gandhi went to the President on the cool, clear morning to resign as Prime Minister of India, he was in almost every sense a man alone. The defeat of the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru was Nehru a personal defeat. Indians find many ways to explain how Mr. Gandhi came to lose the largest parliamentary majority in Indian history, but there is almost no debate about why he failed. The job grew too big for him, and he was never about to assemble a credible team to carry out his promises to shake up Indian society and rid its body politic of corrupt and discredited bosses.
For many Indians, Rajiv Gandhi was also never quite one of them. Educated in part abroad and married to an Italian born woman, he surrounded himself with cosmopolitan technocrats, public relations advisers and friends who boasted about having no regional Indian roots. With personal computers and swimming pools, they lived in a style that Indian newspapers ridicule as “phoren.”
In a country where a sense of place is powerful, there was no Indian village that Mr. Gandhi could call home.
“An Alien” Vision“
His vision of society was an extremely alien model,” said Rajni Kothari, a social scientist and critic of the thari, a social scientist and critic of the Prime Minister. “It was not politically thought through. I used to say that if, when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, we had asked the United Nations to send a body to run India, it wouldn’t have been very different from Rajiv Gandhi’s government. It has no roots in this society.”
“In the India of Rajiv Gandhi there were many good people,” said Ashish Nandy of Delhi’s Center for the Study of Developing Societies. “But Rajiv Gandhi chose people wrongly. His advisers were glib, yuppie, whisky guys. He could have used his friends, but not for making fundamental political decisions,”
There is remarkably little sympathy for Mr. Gandhi in defeat. Although he kept his parliamentary seat in voting on Nov. 22, that small victory was dishonored by the violence and vote rigging, some of it by policemen, in his own district of Amethi. He will be under pressure from his own party to burnish his image and the party’s fortunes as leader of the op position, or end his political career
But the second eclipse of the Nehru dynasty in 12 years was caused by Mr. Gandhi’s short comings.
An Election Commission that Mr, Gandhi had tried to pack dallied a few days but ultimately ruled against him in Amethi, turning down Congress Party pleas not to order new voting where ballot boxes had been blatantly stuffed,
The commission was prodded by President Ramaswamy Ven kataraman, who also acted decisively in dissolving Parliament as soon as the pattern of voting was clear, possibly heading off a constitutional crisis. The dissolution ‘was sought by the Congress Party Cabinet, whose surviving leaders will now begin the task of rebuilding their organization and restoring its reputation as India’s preeminent political party.
Some Specific Grievances
Today, President Venkatara man, ignoring suggestions that he could ask the Congress Party to form another Government because it holds a plurality in Parliament, asked its rivals to form a Government instead.
The men and women who stood in line in dusty slum school courtyards or village halls to cast their votes had specific grievances the rising prices of sugar, cooking oil and other basic commodities and the dearth of jobs and land. They turned out of office a staggering array of local leaders and ministers in the Government who had not served them well. They proved in huge vote swings that all the money the Congress Party, or any well placed regional party, had at its disposal could not buy them.
They voted against corruption, not because of reports that high officials may have been the recipients of kickbacks from European armaments manufacturers, most notably Bofors of Sweden, but because the bofors gun caricatured on walls all over India had come to symbolize more and more audacious malfeasance closer to home.
Voters in many places said that it was now impossible to complete any transaction from getting a license or permit to applying for a subsidized loan without the payment of huge bribes. Publisher vices are riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Local policemen come around personally to shake down passport applicants who ne ed clearance to go abroad.
Promises From Gandhi
When Mr. Gandhi led the Congress party to a huge majority in December 1984 on a wave of sympathy after the assassination of his mother, he promised in a series of inspiring speeches to remove such burdens from society while modernizing India.
Economic liberalization followed, and foreign companies traditionally suspect began to get a cautious welcome. Local industries boomed, enlarging the consumer society.
In the administration of power and the choice of officials and advisers, Mr, Gandhi proved to be inconsistent, unpredictable and unwise, his critics say. At first, he dismissed many of his mother’s political managers who dispensed patronage and kept a huge national party in line. When his fortunes began to slide and problems mount over the last two years, he began to bring them back.
Gandhi shuffled his Cabinet frequently and dismissed ministers or other officials in fits of annoyance. Within the party, democratic procedures withered, according to for met colleagues.
“A big country like India cannot be run by reflex or by impose,” Arun Nehru, Mr. Gandhi’s cousin and former Minister for Internal Security in his Cabinet, said in an interview earlier this year, when Mr. Gandhi’s popularity had begun its final plunge.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 8, 1989
