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There was a time when you only became prime minister of India if you were dynamic,
charismatic, nationally popular and competent. The Nehru-Gandhis had charisma on
their side. Lal Bahadur Shastri was competent. Morarji Desai was one of India's
best known politicians and a former deputy prime minister when he moved into South
Block in 1977. And Vishwanath Pratap Singh had led the crusade for cleanliness in
public life that drove the Congress from office in 1989.
All this changed in 1991. The Congress had no succession-planning. When Rajiv
Gandhi was assassinated, a panicky party turned to Sonia Gandhi and begged her
take over. She did the sensible thing and told them to go away.
The vacuum led to a syndrome that still endures: the emergence of a leader by
manufactured consensus.
The logic of democracy is that the people elect their representatives. In such
countries as the United States where there is a presidential system, the President
is directly elected. In the UK, both major parties have a complicated method of
electing a parliamentary leader who becomes either prime minister or leader of the
opposition.
This is how it should be because ultimately , democracy is about choice. But in
India, our political parties incline to the bizarre view that democracy involves
elections only when the general public have to be intruded in the exercise.
Within the party, elections are a Very Bad Thing because they cause people to
oppose each other.
This extraordinary view was first trotted out in 1991 when a small coterie of
has-beens and no-hopers installed Narasimha Rao as Rajiv Gandhi's successor.
The arguments against Rao's selection was formidable. This was a man who had
difficulty winning elections. He may have spoken ten languages but he was unable
to make up his mind in any of them. He had not even contested the 1991 elections
on the grounds that he was an old man and wanted to retire.
There was only one argument in his favour: he was so inoffensive that he posed no
threat to anyone.
Naturally, he jot the job.
It is of course another matter that Narasimha Rao turned out to be a piranha
masquerading as a gold fish. Within six Months he had disposed of the coterie and
seized control of the party God may have gifted him with the charisma of a
comatose sheep but despite his inability to win elections, he was able to
transform India and history will probably remember him as one of our better prime
ministers.
In a sense, Rao's success probably did India a disservice in the long run because
political parties decided that it was okay to kidnap a man on the verge of
retirement and throw him into Race Course Road. When the United Front met to
choose a leader last year, competence or leadership ability.
The job went to H. D. Deve Gowda, a little-known figure outside his native
Karnataka, who commanded the Loyalty of a grand total of 12 MPs (and even some of
those were trying to keep R. K. Hegde happy at the same time).
But by then the principle was firmly established. When you looked for a prime
minister, you did not look for positive qualities. You looked for an absence of
negative.
Deve Gowda may have been a homely sort of fellow whose approach to every problem
was to handle it as he would have in his Karnataka days, but he posed no threat to
anybody. He had no national base and seemed in no danger of being able to create
one. He entered Race Course Road as a man from nowhere. And at the end of ten
months, he returned to nowhere.
When the time came to choose Deve Gowda's successor, exactly the same logic
applied. Mulayam Singh Yadav was out because he posed a threat to Laloo Yadav and
vice versa. Chandra Shekhar was out because he was too strong a personality. Ram
Vilas Paswan was out because the other Harijan-backward leaders did not want him
to outshine them. Chandrababu Naidu was out because M. Karunanidhi did not want
another leader from the south to get the job. And so on.
Finally, it boded down to three candidates: S. R. Bommai, Inder Gujral and G. K.
Moopanar.
Of the three, Moopanar was the most politically-substantial figure. Naturally
this ruled him out. Neither Chandrababu nor Karunanidhi wanted a South Indian at
Race Course Road. And Harkishen Singh Surjeet, in his new avatar as the Red
Rasputin of the United Front, was concerned that Moopanar would not listen to him.
That left Gujral and Bommai. By the end, Laloo Yadav was a fervent supporter of
Bommai's candidature. When you consider that Bommai's Hindi is of the same
calibre as Laloo's English, you recognise how much of a communication gap there
must have been. And yet Bommai was Laloo's choice; not because he was any good by
because he posed no threat.
Fortunately, Laloo did not get his way. And the eventual choice, Inder Gujral, is
a good man with both experience and goodwill on his side.
My intention this week is not to berate Inder Gujral. He deserves a chance. And
who knows? In 1991, a 70-year-old former foreign minister got a job nobody
expected him to but still managed to change the face of India. In 1977, a
77-year-old former foreign minister might still manage to repeat Narasimha Rao's
success as Prime Minister.
My point is this: is it enough for us to just hope and pray that by an accident of
destiny the right man has got the job?
Isn't it time we stopped choosing our prime ministers on the basis of their
inoffensiveness? There is something seriously wrong with a country where S. R.
Bommai comes within a whisker of the prime ministership. And the leadership of
India cannot be a race in which the hares decide to give the gold medal to the
tortoise.
Part of the problem is the lack of inner-party democracy. Mulayam Singh's
supporters say he had 103 votes and could have been elected leader of the United
Front in a free and fair election. Perhaps they are exaggerating. But the only
way to find out is to test these claims. And the only way to do that is through an
election.
You need men of competence and vision to run India. Our prime ministers need
dynamism and charisma. If we are led by the lowest common denominator then that
is where we will remain in the community of nations: at the lowest level, without
any hope of catching up with the rest of the world.
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