By: Dr Rajkumar Singh
The politics of majoritarianism brought a new twist in Indian politics and society as well. By practicing it, the Congress paved the way for the more ideologically committed and organisationally cohesive forces of Hindutva– the BJP, the RSS and the VHP– to emerge as major forces on the Indian political scene and the most controversial and emotional symbolic issue of the Ayodhya temple-mosque came to the fore. Some extremist Hindu groups, the VHP in particular, began demanding that the Babri Masjid be pulled down and a mandir to Ram built in its place. The demand was based on the claim that Rama, the mythical hero of the great Hindu epic Ramayana, was born exactly on the spot where the mosque stands. On the eve of 1989 elections to the Lok Sabha it, along with the corruption charges against Rajiv Gandhi, determined the further path of Indian politics. It has rightly been said, “Nehru ignored corruption when he took no action against some corrupt leaders, Indira Gandhi encouraged corruption when she described it as a global phenomenon and Rajiv Gandhi allowed himself to get besmirched by corruption in the wake of the Bofors scandal. This inning of Mrs. Gandhi’s premiership had changed the earlier role of religious figures as she began to rely on appeal to a specific category of voters. She drew Hindu religious figures into the limelight through her patronage of religious institutions and played the Hindu card against the minorities.
Background of majoritarian politics: The Fourth General Election held in 1967 proved an ‘electoral miracle’ which exerted a far-reaching impact on the Indian political scene. After holding its first national elections in 1951-52, India achieved the status of the world’s largest liberal democracy with universal suffrage. Dr Ambedkar and the other founding fathers believed this to be a necessary pre-condition, although India’s literacy level in 1947 was abysmal. But from the first election onwards, the Election Commission of India (ECI) helped illiterate electors to identify candidates during voting, by allotting a symbol to each. Once seen against a backdrop of illiteracy and social tensions, the evolution of the electoral process has involved the vitality of greater and more broad-based participation. The right to vote has emerged not only as a fundamental right, but as an instrument of political awakening. It resulted in the assertion of the Backward and Scheduled Castes in several states which had a direct bearing on the changes of Indian political situation. The ruling configurations that had dominated the Congress had been vigorously challenged by the newly empowered middle and lower castes and classes, with serious consequences at least in states. Rule by the Congress state bosses came to an abrupt end with their failure to deliver the vote banks in the 1967 general elections. While scraping through at the centre, the Congress was ousted from power in several states. The challenge of regionalism was now plainly coming from political forces outside the pale of Congress. A simple partnership with the civil bureaucracy was no longer sufficient to maintain Congress hegemony or central authority. The dynamics of centre-state relations had begun shifting the focus of power away from the Parliament towards executive authority residing in the hands of the Prime Minister.
Further move in the same direction: In 1966, Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister after the sudden demise of Lal Bahadur Shastri. In the post-1967 period discerning Congressmen realised that substantial steps had to be taken to rejuvenate the party and the government, and that mere manipulation would not work. Although the party had got a clear majority in 1967 elections at the Centre, Indira’s worry was due to organisational problems and the fast receding of the traditional vote bank of the Congress. Her support base at one time consisted of the SC, ST, women and minorities. After the split in the party in 1969, she even attempted land reforms in the 1970-72 periods, but soon she retreated from structural change and instead concentrated on strengthening her personal power base. At the time intermediate castes and classes, especially big farmers and middle to richer peasants, had been providing the principal power base of the opposition to the Congress at the state level in most regions. But there were more radical challenges in the states of West Bengal and Kerala, where left-wing coalitions came to power. The late 1960s also witnessed the Maoist Naxalite movement involving poor peasants and militant students in West Bengal as well as parts of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Faced with a variety of challenges, Indira Gandhi set about trying to link the top and bottom layers of agrarian society through renewed efforts to woo the high-caste, old landed elites and advocating the interests of subordinate castes and classes, cutting across local and regional arenas. Her populist anti-poverty programme was designed to get the Congress substantial electoral support from scheduled castes and tribes, who also happened to form the bulk of the rural poor. Mrs. Gandhi’s socio-economic programme, captured by the ringing slogan ‘garibi hatao’, helped her in getting resounding success in the general elections of March 1971 and also in the 1972 elections to the state assemblies.
Majoritarian inputs in politics: The decade of the 1980s exihibited the declining strength of Congress’s claim to power at an effectively unitary all-India Centre and therefore, the party substituted its populism with implicit, if not explicit, to religious majoritarianism. Communalism against regionalism was a well tried formula of the colonial state. Its implementation in this period must be placed squarely in the context of the many powerful regional challenges to central authority. As ideologies of secularism and socialism lost credibility the Congress regime turned implicitly to region-based majoritarianism to meet regional threats. Earlier in 1970s and 1980s several regional political parties, such as the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh. Akali Dal in Punjab and others in different parts of the country claimed to have achieved national status and some of them, especially more extreme elements of the Sikh religious community, launched a violent campaign for the attainment of a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan. It culminated in the brutal assassination of Indira Gandhi in October 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards and her son Rajiv Gandhi registered a record-breaking victory in the 1984 elections with the help of a sympathy wave and the Hindu card. Viewing Indian society through the colonial lens that revealed a majority and a minority community based on religious distinction, and the new regime took a couple of decisions. On the one hand Rajiv Gandhi’s government opened the doors of the Ayodhya mosque to Hindu worshippers. On the other, in a curious and ill-advised attempt to placate Muslim opinion after India’s judicial system had awarded alimony to Shah Bano, he railroaded through Parliament a deeply conservative Muslim Women’s Bill. The new steps appeared to give a new impetus to Indian politics.
The writer is head of the political science department at BNMU, Sirsa, Bihar, India, and can be reached at [email protected]
