3 defining political blunders

Indira Gandhi targeting the RSS during the Emergency, Rajiv deciding to give up the mandate in 1989, and Vajpayee and Advani advancing elections - these errors changed the course of India's politics

In his replies during the debate on the motion of thanks on the President’s address in both Houses of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took us back seven decades to count what he sees as the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s errors across our independent history.

This gives us the cue for another question: What is the biggest, the most consequential political blunder made by any party or leader in independent India? It is challenging to name just one, so we will list three. We are also confining our search to the past 50 years.

As we go along, I will also put them in my order of significance or consequentiality. We need to clarify, however, how we define such a blunder.

First, it has to be purely related to our politics. Any policy errors — economic, foreign, or social — are excluded.

Second, morality or propriety is no criterion for judging what was worse or the worst.

And third, a big qualification to be really bad and feature among the three, and then top this list, a blunder must have consequences that altered the course of politics for decades. The longer the impact is felt, the worse the error.

At this point, I shall name my choices for the three worst. I am only listing them chronologically yet:

* Indira Gandhi targeting the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) during the Emergency and jailing thousands of its workers, mostly anonymous people. This is distinct from the Jana Sangh leaders she jailed.

* Rajiv Gandhi deciding to sit out and not stake a claim to form a government despite winning 197 seats in the Lok Sabha in 1989. The mandate was against him, and he respected it, he said. Never mind his party was the largest by far.

* In 2004, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani advancing the general elections by nearly six months, buoyed by their sweep in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

The first question you are likely to ask me might be: Why aren’t you counting the imposition of the Emergency among the biggest political blunders? Why just the targeting and jailing of the RSS cadres? The answer is simple. Mrs Gandhi got away with the Emergency; her 1977 defeat was a mere rap on the knuckles. In under three years, she was back in power. If in the 46 years after the Emergency, her party was in power for 25 years, it can only mean that the people forgave her for it.

It was her somewhat targeting of the RSS that endured. First, it legitimised the RSS as a political force, elevating it to be her party’s main ideological adversary. Until then, her party’s strength was that it never needed to fight one ideology.

It was never the Congress ideology versus another. She brought this upon her party. Mass arrests of mostly unknown and relatively common folk of the RSS brought it wide respect and some awe. In the course of time, the Jana Sangh was reborn as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), emerging as the only ideological counter to the Congress as it weakened in the following decades. If she hadn’t targeted the RSS, Narendra Modi wouldn’t be sitting pretty with his second majority and looking at a third.

The 1989 poll reduced Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress to 197 from 414 of 1984-85. The next largest party, Janata Dal, of which V P Singh was the biggest leader and the obvious choice for Prime Minister, had only 143 seats. The Congress staying out enabled an unlikely alliance of the sharpest ideological enemies, the BJP and the Left, to install V P Singh with outside support.

Rajiv Gandhi had obviously thought that such a contradiction will be short-lived and he will be back in a fresh election. He miscalculated on several things.

The biggest was not understanding the risk of opening the door for L K Advani to package the BJP as a national alternative to the Congress. Mr Advani’s party soon hit three figures and, with the Congress declining, was able to shed its untouchability for enough regional parties to form a coalition in 1998. The key to ridding itself of this chronic untouchability was the acceptance of an alliance with its ideological opposites, the Mandal parties and the Left. This was the 1989 gift from Rajiv.

His party might have got power for 15 years subsequently, but continued to weaken. This one miscalculation ended the Congress epoch in Indian politics and in 2014, began the BJP’s.

Think about it. The Congress gave up power with 197 MPs while all coalitions for the next 20 years (1996, 1998, 1999, 2004) were led by a party with fewer. The number was crossed by the Congress itself in 2009, and only marginally (206 seats). We are only talking of coalitions, excluding the Congress’s minority government under Narasimha Rao, 1991-96. Rajiv’s inability to see the inevitability of the coalitions, and ceding power lazily to his most vicious adversaries changed the course of Indian politics.

By January 2004, the BJP leadership was on a high, having swept the three Hindi heartland states. What happened here, they presumed, was going to happen in the rest of their catchment as well. Their think tank, led by Pramod Mahajan, and the usual hangers-on around Mr Advani concluded it was time to advance elections and ride the tide. The only one sceptic, Vajpayee, was outnumbered.

There was also a barely concealed motive driving the Advani group: The assumption that Vajpayee’s health won’t last five years, giving Mr Advani a smooth succession. For three quarters, India had averaged 8 per cent growth. This was reason enough to launch the India Shining campaign.

In that heady mood, the BJP forgot to do the one thing that had brought them power: Keeping their coalition allies together. The result was a spectacular loss of power, with the BJP reduced to 138,  seven below the Congress. For some key regional parties and likely coalition allies, the old untouchability was back after the Gujarat riots.

Not only did this bring the Congress to power for a decade, it also ended the careers of Mr Advani and all his peers. The intervening period gave Mr Modi the time to prepare and rise.

Now, let’s consider the rankings. I would put Rajiv Gandhi’s at the top as its impact on India’s future politics has been the greatest. The reason I’d rank it ahead of his mother’s legitimisation of the RSS is simply because she had been able to still keep it marginalised until 1984. Even after her death, Rajiv reduced the BJP to just two seats in December 1984.

If he hadn’t given up power so easily in 1989, the politics of the subsequent decades would have played out very differently. To that extent, he compounded his mother’s blunder. She gave the RSS a national political profile and respect. Mr Advani’s blunder lies essentially in the fact that it destroyed his own ambition. Of course, it paved the road for Mr Modi, who just thanked him with the Bharat Ratna.

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