Three accidental Cong PMs

Sudheendra Kulkarni
Former close aide to ex-PM Vajpayee and Founder, Forum for a New South Asia

India has had 15 PMs so far. Of these, six were from the Congress (Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, PV Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh) and two have been from the BJP (Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi). History records only these eight as leaders who made significant contributions to the making of post-Independence India. The other seven (Gulzarilal Nanda, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, VP Singh, HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral) had tenures too short to leave any lasting impact. Perhaps a partial exception could be VP Singh, who introduced reservations for OBCs, an issue that continues to shape Indian politics even now.

The most depressing aspect of PV Narasimha Rao’s premiership was the intense infighting within the Congress that has now become endemic.

Of the six Congress occupants of the country’s highest executive office, four were accidental PMs. We can perhaps leave out Shastri from this analysis. Even though he too became PM after the demise of Nehru, he had begun gaining nationwide respect until cruel fate curtailed his life. Of the remaining three Congress PMs. Rajiv Gandhi’s sole claim to fame was that he was his mother’s son, who, with least political or administrative capability, found himself in the top job because of her tragic assassination. Despite winning a mandate bigger than that of any PM so far, he foundered due to his inexperience. He could have matured into a far more competent leader. Sadly, fate cut short this promising young life.

Rao, who succeeded him, had actually decided to retire from active politics. Considering the heavy odds that were stacked against him, both within his own party and outside, he did an outstanding job. He had deep understanding of India’s society and culture. He had long and varied political and administrative experience, both in his own state Andhra Pradesh and at the national level. He was a scholar par excellence. Yet, lacking mass popularity and a strong political base of his own within the Congress, he remained a one-term PM whose weighty achievements were ignored by his party. His predicament, the agony of a true achiever, is well described in The Quintessential Rebel, a perceptive biography by A Krishna Rao, a noted Delhi-based Telugu journalist.

The accidental nature of Dr Singh’s premiership was even more marked since, unlike Rajiv Gandhi and Rao, he didn’t even have a political background. He was a technocrat, having made a name for himself as India’s reformist finance minister in Rao’s government. He became PM only because Sonia Gandhi decided to sacrifice the opportunity, and, instead, chose him in her place. Even though he went on to become a two-term PM, he never exercised political authority, which is an essential requirement of the high office he held. Real power lay in the hands of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

The current crisis in the Congress is partly explained by the fact that, since 1984 — that is, in the last four long decades — the Congress has not produced a PM with nationwide mass popularity, strong political authority, organisational acumen, societal understanding and governance capabilities. This has happened because real power has got concentrated in the Gandhi family that is deeply disinterested in the rise of leaders capable of developing these qualities. Modi has adroitly exploited this critical weakness of the Congress by projecting himself as one who embodies all these requisite prime ministerial attributes.

Of all the contemporary Congress leaders, it was Rao who most acutely foresaw that the future of the party lay in a growth trajectory out of the total control of, but not totally independent from the Gandhi family. Having grown up in the era of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv, he was well aware of — indeed, sincerely and ideologically deferential to — the value of the Gandhi family’s legacy. Yet, as a profound intellectual, he was also conscious of the minuses as well as the pluses of that legacy. The sweeping economic reforms that he initiated, by risking stiff opposition from traditionalists in his own party, were proof of his boldness. Yet, knowing his own inherent limitations, he never tried to erase or belittle the Gandhi family’s legacy. As Krishna Rao writes in his book, ‘He knew he was responsible for the introduction and implementation of economic reforms, but he allowed the credit to go to Manmohan Singh. He behaved like a Yogi in politics.’

Rao also tried to resolve the highly sensitive Ayodhya dispute in a consensual manner. Had he received requisite cooperation from all the stakeholders, including his own colleagues in the Congress and his rivals in the BJP, the fateful developments of December 6, 1992, could have been averted.

The most depressing aspect of Rao’s premiership was the intense infighting within the Congress, which has now become endemic. At least some of this internal dissension was engineered by those who claimed to be loyalists of the Gandhi family. True, PM Manmohan Singh did not face this problem, and the credit for this should go to Sonia Gandhi. However, as the longest-serving president in Congress history (22 years), she must take the blame for the many other ills that crept into the party organisation and have severely debilitated it.

Rao’s failed attempt to create some degree of autonomy for the Congress, away from the Gandhi family’s control, is now history. The party, despite having suffered two worst debacles in its electoral history in 2014 and 2019, appears totally disinclined to experiment on the question of leadership. This will surely prove costly. On the one hand, the Gandhi family no longer has members possessing above-mentioned leadership qualities. On the other, it has blocked the path for the emergence of other leaders of national stature. Since its numbers in Parliament have declined steeply, it is no longer in a position to even have its own accidental PMs in the near future.