Prejudice, hubris, crisis management

A book of thumbnail biographies of Indian prime ministers delves into the motivations behind their history-altering decisions, revealing a narrative that centres around survival

How Prime Ministers Decide

Author: Neerja Chowdhury

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 578

Price: Rs 999

The book gives us thumbnail biographies of six of India’s prime ministers, describing their motivations for making crucial, history-altering decisions. But it is equally an exploration of how, over the past 50 years, benign Hinduism lost out to its angrier version.

Did the process begin with Jayaprakash Narayan giving legitimacy to the Sangh Parivar in his bid to unseat Indira Gandhi?  “If the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] is fascist, so am I,” JP famously said in 1974. Or did the worm turn with Indira Gandhi’s gradual Hinduisation, propping up Sikh fundamentalists and then using a sledgehammer to crush them?

The author writes that Indira Gandhi frequented temples, paid obeisance to sadhus and became increasingly superstitious during her years in the political wilderness between 1977 and 1980. In 1982, she had her son, Rajiv Gandhi, meet Murlidhar “Bhaurao” Deoras, an influential pracharak and the younger brother of RSS chief Madhukar Dattatraya “Balasaheb” Deoras, but with the advice that he should not discuss his parleys at the dining table in his wife’s presence. Two years later, on April 7-8, 1984, the Vishva Hindu Parishad  (VHP) held its Dharma Sansad in New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan, which was only possible with the government’s acquiescence. The VHP demanded handing over three temples to Hindus — Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura.

Rajiv Gandhi kept in touch with Bhaurao Deoras after taking over as prime minister. On Bhaurao’s prodding, ignoring the advice of senior Congress leaders, he ensured the telecast of the Ramayana serial on Doordarshan. Rajiv’s political naivete awakened the sleeping giant when his government overturned the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano verdict, which, the author writes, Sonia Gandhi opposed. In a balancing act, Rajiv Gandhi had the Uttar Pradesh government ask a district court to allow the opening of the Babri Masjid gates. The author notes how Rajiv’s 1984 Lok Sabha election campaign, fought against the backdrop of the assassination of his mother by her Sikh bodyguards, and crafted by Rediffusion, “depicted Sikhs as the enemy”. In September 1990, as the leader of the Opposition, Rajiv spoke for over two hours against caste-based reservations. That Sonia Gandhi installed Manmohan Singh as the prime minister 20 years later was probably catharsis, while Rahul Gandhi has been demanding a caste census and is seen as a leader uncompromising towards the RSS.

Two other prime ministers tried stalling the Hindutva juggernaut. Vishwanath Pratap Singh implemented the Mandal Commission report that fractured Hindu consolidation, temporarily halting its march. Mandal, the author states, was the reaction to the BJP’s temple politics and not vice versa. Rajiv Gandhi pulled the rug from under Chandra Shekhar’s feet when he was close to resolving the Ram Janmabhoomi issue, and even helped L K Advani’s Rath Yatra succeed, H R Bhardwaj told the author. Chandra Shekhar’s successor, P V Narasimha Rao, the author writes, allowed kar sevaks to raze the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. In an episode that veteran journalist Ram Bahadur Rai relayed to the author, Rao told Nikhil Chakravartty,  “I allowed it to happen because I wanted the BJP’s temple politics to finish forever”.

Neither Singh nor Rao succeeded. The BJP formed a 13-day government in 1996 and coalition governments from 1998 to 2004. It also discovered Other Backward Classes (OBC) leaders in its midst to wed its kamandal  politics with Mandal. The pinnacle of this effort was Narendra Modi, a Hindu hridaya samrat and OBC, an offspring of the temple and social justice politics becoming the prime minister of a majority BJP government in 2014. However, Mr  Modi, on the cusp of a third successive term, is one prime minister the author has not scrutinised but was keen to put “under the microscope” at least one decision of his, either demonetisation or dismantling Article 370.

The book is a trove of delightful, rigorously referenced anecdotes and weaves a narrative from India’s recent past that will make the present coherent to many. For example, the secrecy Indira Gandhi exercised on July 19, 1969, when she nationalised 14 private banks, could rival the November 8, 2016, announcement. On July 22, 1975, almost a month after she imposed the Emergency, Indira Gandhi said in Parliament, “You have been calling me a dictator when I was not. Now, yes, I am”. The censors killed the PTI take a few minutes later.

The author has attempted to answer some of the “what ifs”. Why did Indira Gandhi lift the Emergency? Or why was Jagajivan Ram the best prime minister India never had? Did Rao spread the canard about Pranab Mukherjee’s prime ministerial ambitions, which had Rajiv exile him? Would the trajectory of the OBC assertion be any different if Rajiv Gandhi’s attempted truce with VP Singh had succeeded in 1987? Who should get the credit for the Pokhran nuclear test —Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the prime minister who green-signalled it, or Rao, who prepared the ground?

In the ultimate analysis, the author seems to conclude, prime ministers make decisions based on prejudice, hubris and to survive an imminent crisis rather than with an eye on a long-term grand design.