NEW DELHI: India’s ruling Congress (I) party which is not tired of projecting the country as the largest democracy in the world has held fictitious elections for party posts and the Indian media is full of these reports.
The following report is by Prabhu Chawla, editor of Indian Express, India’s largest selling newspaper, which speaks for itself:
The organizational elections of the Congress Party, being held after gap of 20 years are turning Out to be both comic and bizarre. The Prime Minister, P.V Narasimha Rao, might have opted for the cumbersome process of elections with the twin objectives of restoring democracy in the ruling party and throwing up legitimate leadership from the grassroots level. However, laudable his intentions, he is in for disappointment If there pons from the States are to be believed, the Congress leadership, instead of going through genuine elections, has invented a new collusion course which ensure that the organizational authority remains With the ruling clique both at the state as well as the control level. Elections of a dozen Pradesh Congress Committees (PCs) on Consensus basis are nothing but a new style of guided democracy by which those who could have won on the basis of their strength and. popular support have been denied their legitimate share in the new power structure,
Barring Kerala, nowhere else has the party gone through the genuine process of elections. On the contrary, it was a cabal of former and presents chief ministers, PCC office bearers and the Union and State ministers who took upon themselves the task of imposing the consensus candidates on the party. Consensus, in fact, was turned into license to accommodate and retain those who otherwise would have not made it to dead to either the PCC or the AICC office.
For example a journalist turned politician who had lost the Lok Sabha election in Madhya Pradesh was berthed in Uttar Pradesh an AICC member. Another representative of an industrial house who was denied a Lok Sabha ticket was elected as a PCC delegate in Madhya Pradesh. R.K .Dhawan, once the most dreaded and powerful aide of the Gandhi family Could get himself elected as an AICC member from Uttar Pradesh although he is a Rajya Sabha member from Andhra Pradesh, In Madhya Pradesh of the 590odd PCC members, over a hundred have never been active in district or state politics.
According to report searching the AICC office, even drivers, cooks, gardeners, personal staff members and relations of Union ministers from the states have been elected as delegates. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, over 30% of the 2,500 PCC delegates have never participated in any Congress activity directly. They were declared elected by the AICC observers because there was no contest in most of the places. The list containing these names, along with their nomination forms, were forwarded to the returning officers in the form of a consensus list by the leaders of various factions in the state or the district. There is not a single stat in the country where persons enjoying the support of the ruling clique were not accommodated in the name of consensus.
Since the elections would have disturbed the power equations in States and at the center, even the central leadership became a willing collaborator in the blatant manipulation of democracy. Union ministers who were made observers ensured that the hold of the existing ruling elite in the party was not disturbed. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, there was serious threat to Brahmin domination from the backward Harijans Muslims combine, Half a dozen central observers met almost all the PCC delegates. But when they found that consensus was not forthcoming they forced all the contestants for the PCC leadership to withdraw and leave it to the Prime Minister to decide the final name, In Bihar too, there was a for challenge to the existing leadership from backward and Muslim leadership, but the upper caste leadership swept to under the mat.
With ordinary workers keeping aloof from the elections, the regional satraps organized angry demonstrations in various state capitals to demonstrate their muscle power. In Delhi, H.K.L. Bhagat, former Union minister and currently AICC general secretary, joined hands with his van athema, Jagdish Tytler, in scuttling genuine elections to the PCC. Since neither of them wanted the PCC to slip out of his control, Bhagat even agreed to climb down from his high political pedestal to take over the local leadership which he had left a decade ago. As part of a well calculated move to keep the organization under the thumb of a chosen few, all of the factional leaders of West Bengal ganged up and were trying to have the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, Pranab Kumar Mukherjee: as the WPCC chief. This is despite the fact that the former Union Minister had never been able to win even a panchayat election in his State.
In Maharashtra too, the Defence Minister, Sharad Pawar, went out of his way to find a place for deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, Dr Najma Heptullah in the PCC, after she had been defeated at the block level. Both the AICC office and the Prime Minister’s office have been flooded with serious complaints about the Kithandkin politics going on at the state level.
But what has reduced the entire election to a mockery is the attempt to revive the sycophantic culture and personality cult in the Congress. From 1969 t0 1991, the Congress Party got used to singing pecans to the ruling Gandhi family. And, acting from behind the mask f this vain popularity, the Gandhi family would ensure that party men passed overall decision making power, including the selection of chief ministers and PCC office bearers, to the Prime Minister, or what was pompously called the high command.
The party is going through the same ritual again, And the one for this personality cult and sycophancy was set by none other than HLK.L Bhagat who has a proven record in this art ~ when he proposed that Narasimha Rao should be asked to retain the AICC president ship. Once the signal went out, the other PCCs also fell in line.
According to party insiders, as soon as the election process began at the block level, the entrenched leadership realized that it might be upstaged by a new breed of Congressmen who could not surface earlier due to imposition from above. The bosses thus decided to bury their differences. Consensus became the new buzzword. “The new and aspiring leadership was kept at bay. Since the old guard controlled the various party for a, they even refused to divulge the details of the party membership. Meanwhile bogus recruit ment went on in full swing. Knowledgeable AICC sources say that over two crores primary members were registered during this frenetic membership drive. In fact the figure is fudged. It was due to this abject wicker that Congressmen were able to get Priyanaka Gandhi elected a though she could claim to be a DCC member only after enrolling 25 ordinary members.
The fiasco over Privankas election symbolized the extent to which sycophancy could survive in the Congress Party. It could have been dismissed as plain toadyism had it not let to similar clarification elsewhere. As the last date for completing AICC elections draws closer, the Prime Minister, who set the ball rolling himself, can hope only for a Pyritic victory.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 28, 1992
