Personal Rule, Honor and Sonia Gandhi's Political Ascent

Personal Rule, Honor and Sonia Gandhi's Political Ascent

Pamela Price, University of Oslo

When Rajiv Gandhi, Congress (I) party candidate for Prime Minister, was assassinated in 1991, his Italian-born widow Sonia Gandhi withdrew from the public eye and devoted herself to bringing up her daughter Priyanka and son Rahul. She led a quiet life, mingling socially with wealthy Indians and receiving politely the many politicians from her husband's party who came to visit her. There were several major Congress politicians who were known to urge her continually to enter politics and a chorus of Members of the Indian Parliament, Lok Sabha, sang her praises at the slightest provocation. It was widely commented in the press that Mrs. Gandhi had not wanted her husband to enter politics in the first place and that she was not attached to the idea of such a life for herself. She was a woman of mystery in Indian politics, saying very little and by so doing seeming paradoxically to gain in influence with every passing year.

After seven years of relative seclusion, in January 1998 Sonia Gandhi declared her willingness to campaign for the Congress (I) in the forthcoming election for the Lok Sabha. She travelled throughout India loyally giving speeches for the party, sometimes in the company of Priyanka or Rahul. Thousands gathered to catch a glimpse of Sonia, wherever she appeared, but the Congress (I) still did not win enough Lok Sabha seats to stake a claim on the government. It lost a little more than 3% in voter support and six Lok Sabha seats compared to its perforance in the election of 1996. However, most observors believed that the Congress (I) would have done much worse without her support and that she had prevented the disintegration of the party. In March of 1998, shortly after the Lok Sabha election results were known, Sonia Gandhi first became president of the Congress(I) party and, then, chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party, even though she herself was not a member of the Lok Sabha. In their haste to make her their formal leader, major politicians of Congress (I) bypassed the party constitution, claiming that Sonia would rejuvenate the party. With Sonia at the head, the fond hope was that the Congress would rule India again, someday soon.

Shortly after Mrs. Gandhi became head of the Congress(I) a Indian journalist visited Orbassano, the small industrial suburb of Torino, where Sonia had been born. There he met with the mayor of the town, who commented that from the point of view of an Italian, it seemed a bit strange that India would allow a foreigner to take over the party which had symbolized the country's struggle against foreign rule.[1]

The Congress(I) was what was left of the great umbrella-like movement which had, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and his young heir- apparent, Jawaharlal Nehru, forced the end of British colonial rule. Jawaharlal Nehru was the son of a leading nationalist who had been an early associate of Gandhi. He became the first Prime Minister of India, later to be followed by his only child, Indira (who had married a man with the same last name of the Mahatama). Rajiv was Indira's oldest son and took the position of Prime Minister when his mother was assassinated in 1984. There have been seven other Prime Ministers besides the Nehru-Gandhis, all but one having short terms in office. However, up until the 1990s, the Congress was the foremost party in India and the Nehru-Gandhis provided its leadership. Some Indians have the opinion that the Congress (I) has, in the words of an editorial in a prominent newspaper, showed "irrational devotion to a single family" in elevating Indira Gandhi's daughter-in-law to positions of power in the party.[2] In thinking about why the Congress (I) would welcome a foreign woman with little direct experience of politics as its head, we need to consider several aspects of political leadership in India.

Indian politics is highly centered around the person of the leader. As a corollary of this, relatives of leading politicians frequently will try to enter politics. I will develop this theme below, arguing that exploring the nature of personal rule in India is a useful way to understand Sonia Gandhi's entrance in politics at the end of the 20th century. It may be necessary first, however, to point out that person-centered politics is found in many parts of the world to greater and lesser degrees. If we look at recent Norwegian history, we can begin by mentioning Einar Gerhardsen's great popularity and his long tenure as Prime Minister. His son Rune has had a reasonably successful career in public life, while Rune's wife and their daughter also are active in Norwegian politics. Gro Harlen Brundlandt has been a major national personality and an asset to her party. She is the daughter of a politician and has a sister who has also entered public life.

When a person becomes well known in politics s/he can acquire political capital.[3] This means that he has invested time and energy in activities which he hopes will result in name-recognition and positive images in the public mind, giving "profit" in terms of voter support at election time. If his efforts succeed widely, he can run for election with lesser costs in campaigning than others because of the political credit which he has acquired. His children may have advantages over competitors because they have picked up valuable contacts in politics through their family connections, they have knowledge of how politics works formally and informally, and they have name-recognition by virtue of their relationship. Ordinary people know who they are without a political party having to lay out enormous expense in campaign costs.

A major difference between person-centered politics in India and most parts of Europe is that in Europe, even if some politicians develop a large personal following and their relatives can also become successful, party constitutions and rules of procedure will still guide behavior in important areas and parties will feel constrained to develop and promote policies as part of their electoral campaigns. Once in office, politicians will endeavor to put policies in practice, knowing that they will be held accountable by the electorate if they fail to live up to at least some of their promises. Informal influence plays a role in decision-making, of course, and there are charges of lack of principle and "horse-trading". However, person-centered politics is a much more highly developed and institutionalized part of political behavior in South Asia in general than it is in Europe.

The elevation of Sonia Gandhi to the head of one of the most important political parties in India has partly to do with the accumulation of political capital by the Nehru-Gandhis. The family is often refered to ironically as the "dynasty" by journalists and political commentators. Just before Sonia declared her willingness to campaign, an important Congress (I) Party functionary in the southern state of Karnataka told me that charismatic personalities were particularly important in a country with high rates of illiteracy and poverty. A person whose name and face are easily recognized are a great asset for a political party. Charisma could win without money, he said, meaning that a party with a charismatic candidate would not be so dependent as others on corrupt practices in order to cover finance campaign costs.[4]

Charisma becomes part of the political landscape relatively easily in India because authority has been tied more closely to persons than it to codes of party procedures or to political parties as institutions. It has been historically difficult to establish voluntary institutions--like political parties--which survive the departure of the founder or a strong leader from office. It is difficult for ambitious men in an organization to develop relations of trust. If a rival to a founder emerges, great skill is needed to incorporate him successfully into a structure of leadership in the organization. The result is often a split in which the rival leaves, taking his personal following with him, often establishing a rival organization. Heads of organizations find it easier to accommodate a relative--perferably a son--as a rival. The successes of a son reflect positively on the leader, who in turn has trust in his son not to run him out of the organization before he is ready to leave. He can also trust that his son will not leave, forming a rival organization, because the son can count on taking over eventually.

One aspect of the focus on persons in Indian politics is that commonly the head of a group, large or small, is conceived of as representing the group in his person. He stands in a somewhat different relationship to his group, its status and its image, than what we are used to in European politics. Because he is an embodiment of group identity, emotions are intense concerning his success or failure in inter-group transactions. The treatment he receives from others in society, particularly from other leading figures, is carefully observed by his followers. Treating him with respect and honor reflects on the respect or honor of the group as a whole.

Before going any further, at this point I need to point out some basic developments in Congress Party politics since Independence in 1947.

Under the pressure of forcing the end of colonial rule, the Indian National Congress was able to function as a political party and to govern India without serious competition until the death of Nehru in 1964. Indian politics experienced "one-party dominance" until the late 1960s. The Congress had a party constitution and formal rules; however, its informal structures were more relevant to its day-to-day functioning. The party was informally organized into large and small groups of men and women who were the clients of political patrons, powerful men in the party who reflected its many different interests and ideological currents. The "factional" patron-leaders were in continuous rivalry, putting strains on the Congress organization. The party was able to stay together in great part because of Nehru's great personal prestige. Perceived to be above factional conflict, the Prime Minister provided a unifying force in the heterogeneous party. Within a few years after his death, however, a process of splitting started within the Congress which resulted over the following decades in the formation of a series of smaller political parties founded by men whose ambitions the Congress could not accommodate--Morarji Desai, Chandra Sekhar, V. P Singh, etc. In the meantime, until her assassination in 1984, Indira Gandhi held on to the largest Congress segment, which was named Congress (I) in 1978, with the I standing for Indira, not India. In the 1970s a slogan for the party faithful was "India is Indira and Indira is India."[5]

Since the 1960s, most observors have concluded that ideology and party policy is of little importance to members or, even, to voters in general in India, because of the importance of personalities. Perhaps the notion of what constitutes a party ideology has been too narrow. There is a tendency to overlook the fact that cultural nationalist ideologies of various sorts have have played a major role in mobilizing both urban and rural voters. Since the late 1980s Hindu cultural nationalism, in particular, has gained in support such that in the 1998 Lok Sabha election its political organ, the Bharata Janata Party (BJP), could form a coalition to take the government at the center. Cultural nationalist ideologies usually do not form a basis for party discipline in India. However, the BJP and the extremist organizations which have provided its core cadre have for the most part been enable to prevent serious splits of a long duration.

One of the great problems which the Congress has had to face since the 1960s is the success of electoral politics in mobilizing new groups, including poor and low status people. These groups organize around what they perceive to be their interests, phrased usually in cultural nationalist idioms. From the beginning this mobilization was damaging to the Congress because the party's stability was based on the capacity of patrons, in long patron-client links down to the local level, to control the political behavior of poor and low-status clients. As increasing numbers of people discovered the power of the secret ballot, they found new leadership which led them into political ventures outside the Congress Party. This post-Independence mobilization was so rapid that in the election of 1967 Congress lost control of state governments to various regionally-based parties in eight states and won only 54% of the seats in the Lok Sabha, compared to 73% in the previous election in 1962.[6]

A process of regionalization of political mobilization continued into the 1990s with the result that in 1996 and 1998 elections to the Lok Sabha no single political party was able to form a government amidst the 40 parties which contested and won seats. In 1996, a coalition of nine parties calling itself the United Front formed a government with "outside support" from the Congress (I). In 1997, however, the Congress (I), under the leadership of septugenarian Sitaram Kesri, withdrew support from the government in an action that was widely perceived to be irresponsible, forcing an expensive general election on the country. The BJP won one seat more than the Congress in the election of 1998, but votes of both parties together amounted to less than 50% of the total. Even with Sonia campaigning the Congress (I) won only 25.7% of the vote. The BJP was forced to dampen its extreme demands in order to form a coalition government at the center with ten political parties .

Political commentators see India as entering the 21st century with one of two alternatives facing the country as far as national governance is concerned. Some argue that India is approaching a two-party system in which the BJP will evolve to be less extreme in its religious demands and more of a generally conservative, right wing organization, while the Congress (I) will evolve itself more to the left, away from the center, allowing for a left-right polarization in Indian politics. The other alternative is that, with so many different groups electorially mobilized in this highly complex and variated society, coalition governments are here to stay and that the country is in for a long process of adjustment as politicians learn how to cooperate in coalitions at the center. The Congress (I), however, does not like to admit that its great days of one-party dominance are mostly likely over and appears to have adopted as its party line that coalitions are to be seen only as a short-terms alternatives and that it will not enter campaigning for national elections already bound by coalition agreements[7].

The mass mobilizations from the 1960s onward have produced new competive forces in electoral politics. Not only in the creation of new parties, but within parties themselves competion has been increasingly fierce. Writing in 1988, political scientist, James Manor noted that, "The years from 1977 to 1984 were, broadly speaking, a time of abrasive conflict and bad feeling between political parties and a period marked by decay and fragmentation within parties"[8] Concentration on the person of the leader has been a feature of this competion. This concentration has become so prominent that another political scientist, Atul Kohli, published an analysis of the Indian party system in 1990 in which he argued that party organization had declined to the point that deinstitutionalization was setting in. Personal attachment to leaders had taken the place of adherence to party constitions and the holding of elections to party office was exceedingly rare.[9]

Lack of interest in party elections is only one aspect of the implications of focus on the person in politics. In some states, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, for example, members of parties of cultural nationalism have worshipped their party leaders as a kind of god. Leaders in both states had been movie stars before entering politics, playing roles which gave them wide personal popularity. It was not difficult for them to develop an almost cult following in these states.[10]

Political commentators complain that personal rule, rather than rule by laws and codes, continues to make large gains in Indian politics. Newly established political parties tend to be organized around persons. As political scientist James Manor observed:

[D]uring the 1970s, the principal source of discipline within most political parties...had become the personal authority of leading politicians. Parties had become personal fiefs and factions, or clusters of such entities and had lost most of their corporate character and substance [his italics] .[11]

Powerful personalities develop informal domains of influence and authority which cross the boundaries of formal institutions, including the institutions of the state. Increasingly since the 1960s, personally ambitious politicians have, when elected to office, tried to turn members of the central and state administrative services into tools to further their careers in politics, expanding the domain of their influence.[12] It is quite often in the "interference" of elected politicians in the administration of both the national and regional state that we find charges of corruption, as politicians try to get advantageous contracts for businessmen or contractors who have supported them financially--or for themselves. Charges of corruption in connection with the contract which the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors landed with the Indian army became world famous. This was in great part because the case become symbolic for many people of levels of corruption in public life which were becoming intolerable. Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister at the time and when V. P. Singh, one of his closest associates, criticised lack of progress in the investigation, Rajiv forced him out of the Congress (I).