Though Manmohan Singh led the country for 10 years he could not emerge as a central political figure

Soroor Ahmed | Clarion India

MORE than the opposition unity, what octogenarians Sharad Pawar and Yashwant Sinha should focus on is developing consensus on a central figure in the non-BJP camp and groom him or her so that he or she can lead them. Perhaps the main difference between the post-Rajiv Gandhi Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party is that while the latter has succeeded in projecting a leader, the Congress — or the then Janata Dal — failed to come up with any such personality.

The irony is that the non-BJP camp has more talents, yet in the last 30 years they have not succeeded in finding an alternative leader. In the first four decades after independence the Congress enjoyed that advantage. One can easily argue that it was largely due to the dynastic rule and blame the Gandhi-Nehru family for that. But the actual truth is not just that as in-between the death of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on May 27, 1964 and taking over of the baton by his daughter Indira Gandhi there is a gap of 20 months. In that intervening period Lal Bahadur Shastri was the Prime Minister. He successfully tackled several crises, the most important one being the attack by Pakistan in 1965.

So, when he died on January 11, 1966 in Tashkent in modern day Uzbekistan, then a part of Soviet Union, after meeting President Ayyub Khan of Pakistan the previous night, there was a sort of vacuum in India. It is not that there was no person of calibre to succeed Shastri. The truth is that there were more than one in Congress. As they were unable to come to terms among themselves the choice fell on Indira Gandhi, who they thought would be just like ‘gungi gudiya’ (dumb doll)—an expression once used by the socialist stalwart Ram Manohar Lohia.

These leaders, called Congress Syndicate, wanted to remote-control Indira. It is another thing that three years later she emerged out from their shadow and split the Congress. Prominent among the group were the then Congress president K Kamraj, Morarji Desai, S Nijalingappa, Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy, etc. The fact is that Morarji Desai was the senior-most person after the death of Nehru but he was not liked by most of the party bigwigs, who chose Shastri as successor. But as Shastri died soon the same problem arose once again.

It is another thing that after the post-Emergency election held in 1977 when the Janata Party came to power, the same Morarji Desai became the PM. However, after Indira’s assassination on Oct 31, 1984 the then President Zail Singh invited her son Rajiv Gandhi and administered oath to him as the next Prime Minister. After Rajiv’s defeat in November 1989 election and his subsequent assassination in a suicide bombing by LTTE on May 21, 1991 the Congress lost the prime ministerial candidate. Though P V Narasimha Rao captained the ship very successfully for full five years in the troubled political waters, he could not lead his party to victory in 1996 Lok Sabha poll in which the Congress could get only 140 seats against the BJP (161), which was in all practical purpose led by Lal Krishna Advani.

Ever since late 1980s, he had been groomed as the prime ministerial material by the Sangh Parivar and got support from a sizeable section of the media. However, his prospect was marred when his name figured in the Jain Hawala case of early 1996. It was only then that the saffron party had to put forward the name of Atal Bihari Vajpayee — just before the May 1996 Lok Sabha poll. Vajpayee apparently did not play any significant role in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi movement, yet after the appearance of Advani’s name in the Jain Hawala case the Sangh soon put his name forward.

Though many scholars are of the view that Narasimha Rao was a much talented figure (than Advani), who overcame the challenge after the collapse of the Soviet Union and dexterously tackled the Mandir and Mandal movements with the help of his Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation policy yet he could not help his party win the election. This was largely because the post-Rajiv Congress lacked the organisational skill to market his achievements.

On the other hand, Advani first and Vajpayee later enjoyed the support of propaganda machinery of RSS and had the backing of a sizable section of media, especially in the Hindi-speaking belt. The four PMs from the Janata Parivar — V P Singh, Chandrashekhar, Deve Gowda and I K Gujral — ruled for brief periods. They did not have the backing of family or that of any outfit like Sangh Parivar. Left with no other options, the Congress had to fall back on the family. But the vociferous opposition to Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin by the BJP and likes of Sharad Pawar and P A Sangma compelled Sonia to herself propose the name of Manmohan Singh as PM after the Congress emerged as the largest party in 2004 poll.

Though Manmohan led the country for 10 years he could not emerge as a central political figure. On the other hand, Sonia, and later her son Rahul Gandhi remained somewhat reluctant to lead the party from the front, though it is true that in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll Rahul played a decisive role. In the meantime, the post-Vajpayee BJP started grooming Narendra Modi, especially after Advani goofed up in June 2005, when he applauded the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah while on his visit to that country. In promoting Modi, the BJP got backing from an overwhelming section of the media and public opinion makers.

The non-stop media campaign against the Manmohan Singh government and ridiculing of Rahul as Pappu, which he never was, shattered the confidence of the Congress rank and file on their own leaders. So more than promoting and projecting one’s own leader the Sangh Parivar strategy was to destroy the emergence of any key figure in the rival camp. Today it may not be very difficult to form a sort of loose alliance of regional parties against the BJP, but it is not easy to come up with an alternative all-India leader who can be a PM face.