By M D Nalapat
He learnt to function in the groove dug out for him by the bureaucracy.
He learnt to function in the groove dug out for him by the bureaucracy.
Rajiv
Gandhi was a charismatic personality. However, what was equally
undeniable was the under-performance during his 1984-89 stint as Prime
Minister. There were indeed some green 21st century shoots emerging from
the muddy field of policy, such as in telecommunications or panchayati
raj. Credit for the first goes to Satyen Pitroda, who anticipated the
telecom revolution which followed two decades later. Rajiv made some use
of Pitroda, but not enough to make an overall difference, such as by
inducting him into the Union Cabinet or ensuring that the bureaucracy
was kept away from the telecom sector. That last has yet to happen.
Indeed, the babus are firmly in the driver’s seat. The electorate had
overwhelmingly supported Rajiv Gandhi in 1984, less out of sympathy than
hope that this youthful leader would ensure change. However, soon after
he took charge, officials steeped in the past closed in around Rajiv,
blocking him off from the outside world so far as policy formulation was
concerned. Satyen Pitroda was an exception. Mani Shankar Aiyar was
another exception, and had he been given executive powers to devolve
authority to the lower administrative units, the country may have been
transformed.
Rajiv Gandhi soon learnt to be
comfortable with the bureaucracy, and largely functioned in the groove
dug out for him by them. As for his ministerial team, most were chosen
for their caste or closeness to those interests seen as vital to the
kind of politics that has long been the norm in India. Rajiv’s
spinmeisters created a hostage to the future by painting Rajiv as “Mr
Clean”, in a context where the monetary expenses of doing politics were
rising exponentially. It was during the time that middle-rung party
functionaries regarded stay in 4-star hotels, travel by air and the
ownership of flashy cars as being the essentials of democracy. In 1989,
the Congress Party lost despite its resources, not simply because the
economy was still too shackled to the constraints of the 1970s, but
because Rajiv Gandhi too often bowed to 19th century minds, as over Shah
Bano. Rajiv continued the policy of appeasement of fundamentalists by
giving weightage only to the views of fringe elements in the Muslim
community, and ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of
Muslims in India are as moderate and progressive as any other community.
Rajiv Gandhi, early in his political
debut, understood the need to ensure the crafting of a governance matrix
that reflected the needs and aspirations of the present, rather than
the colonial past. A visitor to his 1 Akbar Road office during 1981 and
the most part of 1982 would see scientists, writers and thinkers being
escorted to an honoured place in the living room, while politicians even
of ministerial rank milled around in a back portico, drenched in sweat.
However, by the close of 1982, Arun Nehru became the key adviser to the
AICC general secretary. Nehru focused on the immediate future,
sometimes ensuring quick results, but in ways that created longer-term
problems. Slowly, independent voices lost their access to Rajiv Gandhi.
Much of the time of the Heir Apparent was spent with those who had, for
decades, been prominent in the party, and who were averse to the changes
that Rajiv had earlier vowed to bring about. More and more, he began to
follow the line urged on him by the party satraps, adopting boilerplate
solutions to new problems rather than fresh approaches.
Later, the same post-1982 tendency of
going by conventional un-wisdom continued during his stint as Prime
Minister. Not that flashes of the pre-1983 Rajiv were entirely absent.
For example, as PM he went ahead with what could have been path-breaking
peace initiatives in Punjab and the Northeast, but which fizzled out at
the last mile because of over-reliance in implementation on the same
bureaucratic machinery that had allowed such problems to fester for so
long. The result was that the core of the problems remained, breaking
out again and overcoming the beneficial effects to the periphery of the
concerned issue that had been tackled by the move. A policy is only as
good as its “last mile”, or at its point of delivery, and it is here
that Rajiv’s complacent dependence on an unreformed bureaucracy worked
against the changes he sought. Comfortable in the official cocoon
wrapped around his every move, he refused to accept that no surgeon can
conduct a successful operation with obsolescent instruments.
Had Rajiv Gandhi used the considerable
goodwill that was his for the asking till mid-1986 in going through with
administrative reforms on the same scale as, for example, seen in the
UK during the 1980s, even the Bofors scandal would not have felled him.
Voters expect politicians to collect money. They know that few elections
are won by saints. What they seek from their leaders is a visibly
better life with hope for still more improvement in the future. By the
close of 1986, the hope that Rajiv would be a transformational leader
was almost extinguished. This lowered his political resistance
sufficiently to enable the first major scandal, that of the Swedish gun,
to deny him success in 1989.
In 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru,
Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel and other Congress leaders
adopted the democratic (i.e. Homeland British) model of politics,
throwing away the colonial construct that had so diminished India the
previous century. Why they retained the colonial construct of
administration rather than adopt the democratic version of governance
implemented within the UK itself was as incomprehensible as it was
tragic. Hence the contradiction between a democratic Constitution of
India and a hyper-colonial Indian Penal Code. Why the founders of the
republic failed to factor in the contradiction between a democratic
model of the polity and a colonial model of administration is a question
that historians committed to acting as public relations agents for
Nehru have not bothered to examine. The country’s politicians, who
almost entirely focused narrowly on immediate political needs rather
than empower citizens in the race towards a Middle Income India, acted
in tandem with the official practitioners of colonial governance to
ensure that the promise offered by Rajiv Gandhi to the electorate in
1984 remained that. A promise unfinished, a vow unfulfilled.
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