[India Today]

Published date: 28th Feb 1982

There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from his experience, a vision of a funny world. The difference, of course, is that everybody is talking about three old men-charan Singh, 79, Morarji Desai, 86, and Jagjivan Ram, 74, And the elephant they are exploring is called Opposition Unity.

Sometimes the elephant takes on the name of’ spirit of 77′. and then it returns, Like Marley’s ghost, to haunt the Ebenezer Scrooge. the pivotal figure of the ‘national alternative’: the gaunt. vulpine Charan Singh, his hair closely cropped. a man who recoils from the word Nehru as from a pestilence and yet is an archetypal Congressman. a man whose world has shrunk to a few trusted-and despised advisers, “secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster”.
Charan Singh symbolises the tragicomedy of the unity moves. Ever since he initiated them in November last year, he has made no bones about his objective: to be chosen leader of the united Opposition party, to confront Mrs lndira Gandhi at the hustings, and then to return to power. the Power he wielded for so brief a period in 1979, as ‘caretaker prime minister’.

Bitterness: Charan Singh suffers from towering weaknesses. and he admits to them. He has no reply except rage to the labels stuck to him: a Jat leader. a ‘kulak’ Messiah, a crotchety old man who cannot brook the emergence of a second-line leadership. Cocooned in his bitterness, he squats in his sparse work-room at 12, Tughlaq Road in Delhi, bereft of the shiny-eyed throngs that crowded his lawns two-and-a-half years ago as the Janata government crashed and his own star soared. Only two young men are now in his ‘inner circle’, Satpal Malik, 34, and Satya Prakash Gautam, 45, and they are being attacked by every one of Singh’s old faithfuls-Devi Lal, Biju Patnaik, Karpoori Thakur, George Femandes. and Madhu Limaye.

And the upshot ofit all is that these men want Charan Singh out. They feel he is too old. too set in his ways, too faint a star to hitch their futures to. Charan Singh reacts with fury. “Am I a government servant that I should retire at 58?” he hisses. “Have you studied history at all? Have you forgotten Field Marshal von Hindenberg, who ruled Germany till he was 87? or Konard Adenauer?”

Two things snap at Charan Singh’s heels every day now: Haryana. and his age. Haryana is crucial in his scheme of things. and he wants to prove, when elections are held there in June, that hecan sweep the polls and finis11 Chief Minister Bhajan Lal. But his Haryana lieutenant Devi La1 is an equally acerbic Jat. So often have the two men’s egos clashed that each encounter has become farcical.

Impulsive Actions: In mid-January Charan Singh cancelled’ the results of the Lok Dal organisational elections in Haryana after Devi Lal’s men had swamped their opponents. Devi La1 and Biju Patnaik (who was in charge of Haryana affairs) quit the party’s executive. Charan Singh accepted their resignations-and later treated them as withdrawn after peacemakers had skittered around in panic.

Last fortnight, furious because he was not being made leader of the proposed united front-the coordination committee kept hemming and hawing about that point in particular-Singh withdrew his party from the talks. Again, the wiser counsel of his younger colleagues prevailed. and he simmered down. ”I know, I know I am an impulsive man,” says the Lok Dal chairman.

But the leadership question has become everything for Singh, and that is where the – bankruptcy of policies and ideology shows up. Three of his key men are tugging in directions that can only lead to the splitting open of the schisms that run through the Lok Dal-Devi Lal in Haryana, Biju Patnaik in Orissa, and Karpoori Thakur in Bihar. And Devi Lal is a good example of the ambitions that run rampant through the Lok Dal.

Allegations: He is convinced that his party has become prey to “money politics”. He alleges that the purses being presented to Charan Singh at meetings in Haryana contain money planted by Bhajan Lal. “Chaudhuryji does not realise this,” he says, a tall, craggy man who has kept his government bunglow in Delhi stark and lined with folding cots, a man who offers you food cooked in asli ghee and tangerines grown on his own land.

Devi Lal is convinced that these men in Haryana will win on Lok Dal tickets in the Assembly elections-and then walk over to their secret patron Bhajan Lal.
Devi Lal reels off a long list of names, allegations. and invective. “There are three alternatives.” he says. “pass an anti-defection bill, or kill defectors, or blacken their faces with hot gridirons.” But he does not talk about his dearest desire-to see his son Om Prakash ascend the Haryana throne. Ultimately, Devi Lal is a major force in Haryana politics: But his survival there will depend on the number of men he can pack into the Assembly. So he is quietly critical of Charan Singh: “Chaudhuryji is a simple man,” he smiles, .”and you will always find him giving his facts-and-figures speeches.” And there is a note of fatalism to it, a certainty that their days together are numbered

Personal Appeal: Again and again. Charan Singh has had to back down before the onslaught of his younger partymen. Talk bout Haryana, and he says: “You have mentioned my weakest point. I have been too indecisive there, I have listened too much to the advice of some people.” In the contitution of the seven-member committee to supervise Haryana affairs, and in the continuance of the unity talks, he has lost out to the pro-change elements in his party.
In the end, Charan Singh cannot be sidelined altogether. He exerts a personal appeal that is eerily similar to Mrs Gandhi’s. If unity does finally occur, he may be offered the sop of leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The tragedy is that even a united party will never muster the number of seats-55-required to elect such a leader.

Jagjivan Ram is in grave danger of being the saddest has-been of Indian politics. Ask his factotum how many seats the Congress(I) has in the Lok Sabha. “We don’t believe in Congress J, or S, or I, or O.” you will hear. “We believe in the Indian National Congress.” How many votes can Babuji command in the Lok Sabha? This time around. the factotum will reply more accurately: “Three.” Three votes, including Babuji’s. Little wonder then that he is referred to with the same words these days: “Babuji is an irrelevant factor.”

The mathematics of power are brutal and simple. Assuming that Mrs Gandhi coasts along until 1985, which leader is the safest bet? Certainly not Morarji Desai, who, although he is healthier than Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram. has lately been suffering from a peculiar allergy to dust in his Bombay apartment. And, says Janata Party president Chadra Shekhar. “is looking very pulled-down “.

What is therefore becoming clearer and clearer is that Chandra Shekhar himself is now the ‘consensus’ candidate for eventual leadership. At 55, he enjoys not merely the advantage of relative youth. He is acceptable because he did not wield ministerial power during the Janata regime, and retained a sheen of goodness as he tried to keep his brood together like a distraught mother hen.

But Chandra Shekhar admits that the old fire of his Young Turk days has, been dissipated. Wrapped in a shawl, fondly supervising his little backyard zoo-a rabbit hutch, a pigeon coop, a talking parrot that has replaced a garrulous mynah-Shekhar is very frank, and very sure of himself. The whole approach to unity is wrong. he says, and the people he is dealing with are over-obsessed with personalities and not issues, programmes, policies.

“An alternative means to modernize your mind.” he says. “We can’t go on sticking to old habits. Occasions arise when people don’t fit in in a given situation. Most of us are getting outdated. We refuse to learn from the past.” Like other percipient observers, Shekhar points, out that the unity moves have been beleaguered by akhbari (newspaper) leaders, men who hanker after publicity. “We must create a semblance of cohesive functioning.” he concludes. “we must not only say the correct things but appear to be saying the correct things.”

Old Fears: Within the Janata itself, Chandra Shekhar faces muted dissidence from the, Morarji Desai-Subramaniam Swamy group. Swamy is clear that unity will have to mean the total subsumption of other in the Janata Party’s structure. But Swamy is vehemently against the inclusion of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP itself is divided over the merger issue, but the larger section, led by General Secretary Lal Krishna Advani, resolutely opposes unity. “We have been asked what we want.” he says. “and I think a coalition will work. In Gujarat, a coalition worked very well between 1975 and 1977. The basic thing is that the old fears about the BJP will never go away. I don’t have inflated ideas about my strength. but A plus B plus C plus D does not make a big thing. In the end. we are a cadre-based organisation. and the others are essentially electoral parties.

And so the arguments, and the permutations, swirl and eddy around the rocks in the unity stream. There are the big men, and then the bit players, and the bit players are, if anything, even more fiercely ambitious than their gurus. The Congress(S) and Sharad Pawar have decided not to merge, but to offer ‘electoral adjustments’, which is an euphemism for acrimony and brazen horse-trading. As late as February 7, Charan Singh said in Vijayawada that there was no need for a coordination committee since the Congress(S) did not want merger. This was while the committee was in session in Delhi.

Charan Singh is not averse to joining hands with the RJP and Jagjivan Ram in order to wipe Haryana off the Congress(I) slate. He wants to negotiate directly with Chandra Shekhar. He has been wooing BJP president Atal Behari Vajpayee. And the Lok Dal, the Janata and the Congress(S) now talk of “joint action” rather than merger.

Wild Surmises: And there are the theories flung around by’ each party in this spinning centrifuge of cynicism, each surmise more ridiculous than the previous one. Nothing is impossible where the treachery of the other side is concerned : like the Congress (S) man who posits that if Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram were sidelined. Mrs Gandhi might even induct them into her party in order to bestow their Jat and Harijan followings on Rajiv Gandhi. Or the Janata mayfly who predicts that true political polarisation would result in the BJP aligning with the Congress (I). The bittersweet fact is that everybody sees Indira Gandhi as the ultimate villainess, once again drowning in a whirlpool of personality. In the end, obsessed as the Opposition men are with names, it is easy to be confused by asking who belongs to which faction. The answer will not come from the men who have chosen to pass their winter mornings in endless squabble. Unity may be a great idea, but it is being talked about by men with small minds.