Leadership selection: The consistent failure at the heart of our politics

(first published on December 26th 2008 on the now-defunct website, India Banao!).

Leadership, and institutionalised mechanisms to choose those who will rise to the top, has been the bane of our politics. Thus we face the remarkable paradox of the world’s largest democracy having been ruled for 38 of our 61 years of independence by the members of one family, and for a further 10 years by leaders owing allegiance to a party named for and controlled directly by that family (the Congress-Indira).

During the other thirteen years, the longest rule has been by a septuagenarian whose supreme oratorical skills were waning (Atal Behari Vajpayee), an octogenarian past his administrative prime (Morarji Desai), and a succession of leaders who lasted less than two years (Lal Bahadur Shastri, VP Singh, HD Deve Gowda, IK Gujral, Chandrasekhar, Charan Singh).

In recent years, the world’s most powerful democracy (the US) has also seemingly succumbed to the dynastic principle. But the Bush father-son combine was only the second such pairing to rise to the top of the American political pole in 220 years. On both occasions, the son gained power in a disputed election several years after the father, and his term in office ended in ignominy. The dynastic principle is likely to die a quick death in America. By contrast, the American system has a remarkable capacity to renew (and often cleanse) itself every few years, as one set of principles are discarded for a new, often rebranded and reformed version of previously-discarded principles. One might object to the long-winded process of choosing a leader through innumerable primaries, but there is little doubt about the legitimacy – and consequent authority – of the new man who rises to the presidency at the end of that painstaking process.

In most mature democracies, the mechanisms to choose a party leader follow a well-laid path of internal democracy. Once elected through that process, the leader is normally in office until the next election (or until egregious lapses of ethics, propriety or leadership cause his/her premature overthrow). NONE of India’s political parties has yet achieved such a process of leadership (s)election, or indeed of any institutionalized process of talent recruitment. Instead, almost all our political parties have effectively been reduced to tools for the brand management of personality cults.

Perhaps the greatest missed opportunities for the non-Congress(I) opposition came immediately after their epic electoral triumphs in 1977 and 1989. On both occasions, the Prime Minister was not elected by the newly-elected legislators of the victorious coalition but chosen in an opaque process that left a bitter taste for the other contenders – sowing the seeds of the coalition’s eventual downfall. In 1977, a deep-seated bond had been formed among the leaders of the major opposition parties – Congress-O, Lok Dal, Jana Sangh, and the two Socialist parties – during their years of joint incarceration under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (June 1975 to January 1977), but the leaders of the Congress for Democracy (Jagjivan Ram, HN Bahuguna and Nandini Satpathy) had also played a part in the electoral victory. Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan had been the undisputed leader of the pre-Emergency national upsurge, closely followed by Congress-O’s Morarji Desai, whose success in leading the Janata Front to victory in 1975 over the Indira Congress in Gujarat played a part in precipitating the Emergency.

JP had been a hero of the Quit India movement of 1942-43, had subsequently led the Praja Socialist party that sought to pursue the left-wing policies that Nehru professed (particularly on land reform) while retaining an independent stand on foreign policy (including meetings with the Israeli PM in the 1950s), had subsequently quit electoral politics to pursue the idealism of Sarvodaya until he came out of self-imposed political sanyas in 1974 to lead the movement for Sampurna Kranti from the corruption and authoritarianism of the post-1971 Indira Congress government.

Desai also had great moral authority as a former Deputy Prime Minister, and highly-regarded Finance Minister in the late-1950s and 1967-69 – albeit a decidedly “right-wing” one (opposed to the principles pursued by JP and the Socialists in the Janata Party). JP chose not to take the prime ministership on health grounds, but Desai was challenged for the leadership by Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh (briefly a former CM of UP, a farmers’ champion and the leader of the Lok Dal, on whose electoral symbol all the Janata Party MPs had been elected).

The Janata Party had been hastily cobbled together before the election, and was seen by its elders as too fragile to outlast an open leadership contest. So JP and Acharya Kripalani (the Congress party president in 1947, and a prescient opposition MP in the 1950s on such key questions as India-China relations) were deputed to choose the leader – and settled on Morarji Desai, 81. Morarjibhai would almost certainly have won the job in an open contest – but probably on the second ballot, not a simple majority in the first ballot. The absence of any internal ballot, however, undermined the legitimacy of his prime ministership from the outset, and led to persistent intrigues and infighting, eventually leading Charan Singh to bring down the government 27 months after it had been formed.

Similarly, when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-I was defeated in a close general election in 1989, the Janata Dal chose Vishwanath Pratap (VP) Singh as Prime Minister in an opaque process (involving a backroom deal between Singh and former Lok Dal leader Devi Lal) at the expense of Chandrasekhar, the Janata Party president since 1977 whose nationwide padayatra in 1983 had galvanized the youth of the nation, but who had clearly fallen by the political wayside in the “sympathy wave” after Indira Gandhi’s assassination that wiped out much of the opposition in the December 1984 election. The 1989 government was formally a coalition called the National Front, comprising the Janata Dal’s 143 seats, BJP’s 85 and the Left Front’s 42 (plus some smaller parties) – but the BJP and Left supported the government from outside, so the Janata Dal chose the Prime Minister. While VP Singh had been the galvanizing force for the Janata Dal, his Jan Morcha faction (comprising those who had left Congress-I on grounds of principle) was smaller than the Janata Party and Lok Dal factions (owing allegiance to Chandrasekhar and Devi Lal).

The leaders’ unwillingness to institutionalize a process of leadership selection weakened both the Janata Dal and the National Front, eventually touching-off a period of bitter caste conflict that consumed Indian politics in the 1990s. Instead the Janata Dal has since splintered into several small offshoots – each a vehicle of a particular regional politician (Lalu Yadav, Mulayam Yadav, Naveen Patnaik) with only the Samata Party in Bihar having a modicum of institutionalized processes independent of an individual leader.

Of the many offshoots of the original Janata Party of 1977, only the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become a genuinely national party with an institutional structure that is closest to that of a modern political party in most mature democracies. The BJP was formed after the 1980 general election (in which the Janata Party was led by Jagjivan Ram, after the Congress-I had brought down Charan Singh’s government to precipitate a national election). While the core of the BJP came from the old Jana Sangh, it also included several prominent members of the Congress-O (such as Sikandar Bakht) and the old Swatantra Party (which had merged with the Lok Dal) such as Jaswant Singh. Subsequently, Yashwant Sinha (a former confidant of Chandrasekhar and finance minister in his short-lived cabinet) also joined the BJP in 1992. This diversity of leadership backgrounds gets little prominence in the media, as the BJP too has failed to develop a transparent process of electing its national and state-level leadership.

Like the communists, the BJP takes refuge in being a cadre-based, disciplined party. But unlike parties in mature democracies (like the Democrats and Republicans in the US; Labour, Conservatives and LibDems in the UK; CDU and SPD in Germany; Socialists and Gaullists in France; GNP and Democrats in South Korea, or even UMNO, PAS and Parti Rakyat in Malaysia), the BJP has not created institutional mechanisms to elect its national or state-level leaders. This is a weakness that is likely to hurt the party in the longer-term, once the two “tallest leaders” (Vajpayee and Advani) have retired from the scene. Continuing perceptions that the BJP’s decision-making occurs through an opaque process of consultations with the Sangh Parivar, rather than internal democracy, detract from its modernisation and institutionalisation as a genuine centre-right party of robust nationalism in foreign policy, social conservatism and liberal economics. There is some airing of different views by prominent BJP stalwarts (Arun Shourie, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, LK Advani) through their books and articles. But internal discussion of major questions of economic, security and social policy is still rather threadbare – and certainly not given sufficient airing – for a mature political party.

Nonetheless, the Congress-I’s gradual degeneration into a family fiefdom has been the greatest debacle of the last four decades of Indian political history. To a limited extent, the rot began with the Tripuri session of the Indian National Congress in 1939. With the tides of war lapping our shores, Mahatma Gandhi made it impossible for Netaji Subhas to function as Congress president after he had won re-election resoundingly. But this was an exception that proved the rule.

Despite having a “High Command” (mainly Mahatma Gandhi himself), the Congress was fundamentally a democratic party during the freedom movement, debating all major questions vigorously before coming to democratic conclusions. Occasionally, Gandhiji over-ruled the party’s decision – most prominently, when he chose Nehru as prime minister when the party leadership’s choice was Sardar Patel.

Note that original sin, however: even in its first major decision regarding the post of Prime Minister, the party of our freedom movement did not institute a process of democratic leadership election. At that time, however, backroom deal-making and opaque selection was still the norm in democracies around the world. But as the rest of the world became more democratic and institutionalised, the Congress (still easily the dominant party in India through the 1960s) became increasingly more opaque.

When India faced its greatest foreign policy debacle in 1962 (after Nehru’s carefully-constructed myth of “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai”, including implicit acceptance of Maoist China’s invasion of Tibet -- which no Han-Chinese dynasty had ever ruled or even exercised suzerainty over -- lay in tatters after the October 1962 Chinese invasion), the Congress president came up with his “Kamaraj Plan” to insulate the party from the impact of the debacle. The culpable defense minister Krishna Menon was immediately forced to resign, and was replaced by the dynamic chief minister of Maharashtra, YB Chavan.

But instead of Prime Minister Nehru resigning too, it was decided to sacrifice the #2 in the cabinet, Finance Minister Morarji Desai, and ask him to return to party-building activity. It was a transparent ploy by the Syndicate (comprising Kamaraj and other regional Congress satraps such as SK Patil in Bombay, Atulya Ghosh in Calcutta, Nijalingappa in Bangalore and Sanjeeva Reddy in Hyderabad) to push out the man who was likely to be the least malleable among the top leadership of the party. Backroom manoeuvres were thus used to ensure that Lalbahadur Shastri (rather than Morarji Desai) would succeed Nehru in May 1964. While Shastri was an honourable man, it was remarkable that India’s second prime minister had never ventured outside the country when he became PM, and otherwise had a narrowness of vision that derived naturally from his lack of experience – especially in economic, defence and foreign policy.

The Syndicate subsequently selected Indira Gandhi to succeed Shastri, again bypassing Desai on the assumption that the gungi gudiya would be much easier to control. After the 1967 general election (in which Congress lost numerous states for the first time), Indira did defeat Morarjibhai in a legislature election, but that was the first and last time a formal internal-party election was held to choose the PM. By 1969, Indira Gandhi decided to split the Congress, remove Desai as Finance Minister (and soon after as Deputy PM too) and force out the Syndicate.

Instead, she abolished the Right to Property, nationalized the banks and packed the Supreme Court with judges who were “committed” (to her, and to “socialism” as she defined it). The streak of authoritarianism was backed by a resounding electoral triumph in 1971 (when the Garibi Hatao slogan, based on her shift to socialist policies) was soon followed by the greatest Indian military triumph since the first Battle of Tarain – the Liberation of Bangladesh on December 16th, 1971. It was Indira’s finest hour – and a truly magnificent feat of leadership. Despite all that Indira Gandhi did to destroy our institutions (Supreme Court, the Congress party itself, the relative autonomy of the bureaucracy, transparency in political donations), she was a remarkable practitioner of the art of realpolitik.

At the start of 1972, Indira Gandhi was the mistress of all she surveyed in Indian politics. Having nationalized the banks and defeated Pakistan, however, she failed to use either effectively. The banks degenerated quickly into politically-influenced lending that decimated their asset quality, while the ambiguities of the Shimla agreement made it a diplomatic triumph for Zulfi Bhutto rather than for the military victor (India and Indira).

As soaring oil prices in 1973-74 caused inflation to surge and the current account to deteriorate, it was becoming increasingly clear that the promises of socialism were degenerating into corruption, inefficiency, ossified social structures and a dearth of employment opportunities for a new generation of youth. As industry stagnated in the 1970s, the JP Movement channelized the idealism of a new generation toward a new project of nation-building – and Indira Gandhi responded with extreme authoritarianism. The Emergency was a new low for Indian democracy, and a triumph for India’s opponents who had always said that democracy wouldn’t work in a poor country.

To her credit, Indira Gandhi did call an election in March 1977 -- fully expecting to win, based on IB inputs. The Janata Party’s sensational victory resulted in the effective renewal of many of the institutions and constitutional norms that Indira had destroyed since 1970, and most of the ills of the Emergency (including the abridgement of press and individual freedoms) were overturned. However, the manner of Morarjibhai’s selection as PM undermined his ability to reconcile the ideological contradictions between the right and left of the Janata Party. The party split in acrimony in July 1979, the Charan Singh interregnum proved short-lived, and the new election in December 1979 brought Indira Gandhi back to national power.

By then, however, the party she led was called Congress (Indira), and her 1980 cabinet included just one minister (ABA Ghani Khan Chowdhury) who had ever been a union cabinet minister before. The new finance minister (R Venkatraman) had been Industry minister of Tamil Nadu, the new Foreign Minister (Narasimha Rao) briefly the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, but NONE of the stalwarts of the pre-1977 cabinet were deemed worthy of being in the new cabinet. Unswerving loyalty to Indira Gandhi (and the lack of any ability to challenge Sanjay Gandhi’s claim to be her political successor) was the only criterion determining suitability for a Union Cabinet berth.

Sadly, those qualities have increasingly become the prime ones in determining major ministerial appointments by the Congress-I. There was some infusion of new blood and ideas when Rajiv Gandhi became PM, although his inexperience (having never held a cabinet post before being sworn in hastily as PM upon his mother’s assassination) ultimately undermined his well-meaning initiatives – including the Punjab and Assam accords (to try ending two of the festering wounds of Indira’s 198-84 government), the introduction of computers into the public sector (which laid the seeds of the subsequent software revolution), and the beginnings of fiscal reform.

The accidental prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, turned out to be one of our best PMs, bringing far-reaching economic reform, ending the Punjab problem, quietly burying the divisive Mandal reservation agenda, and reorienting our foreign policy toward greater engagement with East Asia and the US. But he was steadily undermined by the dowager empress of the Congress-I residing at 10 Janpath, and her coterie of loyalists. Tragically, when Narasimha Rao died, the Congress-I would not let his body enter the party headquarters in Delhi or be cremated along the banks of the Yamuna (where Nehru, Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi all have elaborate memorials), instead forcing his family to fly his body to Hyderabad for a low-key cremation in virtual obscurity.

The progress toward modernity briefly achieved by the Congress-I under Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao has been rudely undermined during the decade that Sonia Maino Gandhi has led the party. The 2004 Union Cabinet betrayed the classic characteristics of Indira’s criteria for ministerial selection after 1980. The key positions of Prime Minister and Home Minister had to go to individuals who were not elected members of the Lok Sabha, undermining a key norm of India’s parliamentary system and ensuring that they would be pliable instruments in the hands of 10 Janpath.

Pranab Mukherjee (the Indira loyalist who had just won the first popular election of his long political career, by becoming a Lok Sabha MP for the first time) was deemed too potentially-independent to be given the Home Ministry, which instead went to Shivraj Patil (deemed “safe” precisely because he had lost his Lok Sabha seat in Latur, and thus would have no independent source of power). This was quite clearly Sonia’s decision (made not with the national interest in mind, but with that of the Gandhi-family’s future), and the nation paid the price of that decision most grievously on November 26th 2008 (and on innumerable other occasions when terrorists have struck across the length and breadth of the country in the past four years). Similarly, while the press revelled in the fact that several dynamic young MPs (mainly princelings of other Congress-I dynasties) had been elected to the Lok Sabha, none of them were taken into Cabinet in 2004 – as they might become rivals to the crown prince of the Congress-I.

Our current prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, announced upon taking office that his prime goal would be to reform the bureaucracy to make it more capable of delivering services to citizens. However, not a single one of his ministerial colleagues owed any allegiance to him: with no right to appoint or dismiss any ministers, Dr. Singh was no more than the administrative head of the cabinet, not its political leader. Thus, despite life-long experience as a technocrat within government, Dr. Singh’s goals of administrative reform and governmental effectiveness have made no progress whatsoever.

Nonetheless, when he chose to lead on the issue of the India-US Civil Nuclear Cooperation agreement, he proved remarkably effective. Using his moral authority to the hilt (and an implicit threat of resignation), Prime Minister Singh was able to first oblige his Italian-born left-leaning party leader to fall in line, then get the rest of his cabinet to follow his lead, and eventually convince parliament (through fair means and foul) of the strategic importance of signing the deal. His leadership (and that of his superb diplomatic team) then shepherded the agreement through the rocky shoals of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (where China attempted to put a spoke in its wheel) and both houses of the US Congress before the US election cycle could scupper the deal. It was one of the greatest triumphs of leadership on a significant matter of national interest in modern Indian history.

The tragedy of Dr. Singh’s prime ministership is that he has not led (or been allowed to lead) on any other issue as he did on the India-US nuclear accord. Thus, he inherited an economy that was on the cusp of a sharp economic acceleration with the fiscal deficit in secular decline. Economic reform has made absolutely no progress under the current UPA government, and instead took a giant leap backward with this year’s Budget – which went one step further in irresponsibility than Charan Singh and Devi Lal by using taxpayer funds to encourage farmers to become loan-defaulters. The fiscal deficit (as a percent of GDP) will be larger this year than what the UPA inherited, despite an economic boom (fuelled partly by NDA economic policies and partly by favourable global conditions).

Our borders have been continually violated by China without any response from this UPA government, Bangladeshi infiltration has reignited socio-political turmoil across the North-East (undermining the progress toward permanent peace in that region during the previous NDA regime), and the peremptory abolition of POTA has undermined our ability to respond to terror. Were we to believe the PMO, Dr. Singh would have preferred to have taken a different stance on most of these issues (particularly on the economy, and national security), but has not been able to persuade Sonia and the cabinet.

As citizens, we need to ensure that our political parties are held to a higher standard of genuine democracy. We (and they) must realize that the nature of our political parties will determine the quality of leadership we receive. Some of our finest leaders (Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik, Rajiv Gandhi) have emerged fortuitously from the dynastic cauldron, but a mature democracy cannot depend on accidents to give us the leaders we deserve. Institutionalizing a process of democratic leadership selection is essential if our political parties are to truly emerge as vehicles of national aspiration and effective governance.