In his monumental work, Birth of Non-Congressism: Opposition politics 1947-1975, socialist theoretician Madhu Limaye writes that Yadav’s victory came as a shot in the arm for the Opposition. He writes: “JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) himself hailed it as a popular victory. He warned that the success should not be regarded as a victory of a party or even of opposition parties, but as victory of the people. He wanted intensification of the people’s movement throughout the country.”
In the backdrop of Mrs Gandhi turning authoritarian and her government targeting institutions such as the judiciary and curtailing civil liberties, JP called for Opposition unity and people’s struggles. Mrs Gandhi responded by imposing the Emergency. When elections were held 21 months later in March 1977, the Congress lost power at the Centre for the first time since Independence. The Janata Party that won office was a coalition of disparate parties and ideologies (for instance, the socialists, the conservative Congress O and the communal Jana Sangh) and its success had much to do with the public anger against the Congress. The towering moral presence of JP had ensured that the janata in northern India rallied behind the Janata Party.
The Janata experiment collapsed because of internal contradictions and the vaulting ambitions of its leaders. But it successfully ended the monopoly of the Congress in electoral politics. In a way, the 1977 Janata win was the culmination of the anti-Congress politics that Rammanohar Lohia had launched in the 1950s. Lohia’s anti-Congressism was not merely about power politics, it was a critique of a political culture that allowed social elites to capture and monopolise office by claiming the legacy of the freedom movement. Lohia believed that the Nehruvian Congress had deviated from Gandhi’s ideals of swaraj by continuing with colonial institutions and legacies such as the English language. He sought a social revolution by facilitating the rise of the oppressed groups, including the backward and scheduled castes, Adivasis, and women. He saw the Congress as the preserve of a national caste and class elite who leaned on colonial institutions to prevent a radical democratisation of society and political power. His experiments with parties, electoral strategies, and coalition building had started to weaken the Congress in the 1960s itself and laid the ground for a new politics that emphasised the empowerment of backward classes and castes.
In a way, Lohia had married Gandhi’s ideals of swaraj and sarvodaya with Ambedkar’s radical anti-caste vision. Not surprisingly, first-generation politicians such as Mulayam Singh and Sharad Yadav found in Lohia an ideological mentor. In fact, the rise of leaders such as Mulayam and Sharad Yadav was the triumph of Lohia’s political vision that imagined a shudra revolution to replace the dominance of caste elites in public life.
If Lohia provided the ideological armature, the Mandal moment in 1990 provided the launch pad for the likes of Mulayam, Lalu Prasad, and Sharad Yadav to comprehensively end the Congress monopoly in UP and Bihar, which together elect 120 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The Janata Dal, itself an offshoot of the old Janata Party, and its offshoots after various splits in the 1990s — the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Samata Party, JD(S), JD(U), Biju Janata Dal — had the potential to achieve the pole position in Indian politics but that was not to be. It was the BJP, which gained ground on the back of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, that replaced the Congress as the pole of national politics after the 1990s.
The Lohiaite politicians and the Janata Parivar ended up like Abhimanyu. They broke into the chakravyuha of electoral politics that the Congress had created but could not get out or build a new formation even as the Sangh Parivar reconstituted the chakravyuha in its own ideological terms. Sharad Yadav theorised in the 1990s that Mandal was the counter to Kamandal. By 1999, Yadav himself allied with Kamandal and became a Cabinet minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Even before Yadav, one of the most charismatic Lohiaites ever, George Fernandes, had joined hands with the BJP to become convenor of the NDA. The Congress, as Lohia knew it, was long dead, but non-Congressism was very much alive!
Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad formed a bulwark against the growth of communal politics in UP and Bihar respectively. However, they can’t absolve themselves of contributing to the rise of Hindu communalism. Both held office for long years, but they preferred to consolidate their electoral gains, which were the result of a groundswell in favour of better representation for hitherto unrepresented castes, for the benefit of clan or caste members than to build political parties with a democratic culture and internal democracy. Similarly, their understanding of secularism did not envisage a politics that kept all persuasions of communalism at bay. If Lohia saw representation as a means to end the caste and class system, his followers in office manipulated it to dispense patronage and privilege. Sharad Yadav’s tirade against women’s reservation in Parliament exemplified the failure of Mandal politicians to see all women as oppressed and deserving of reservation, as Lohia had argued. Besides, Mandal failed to produce its own cultural politics, the way the Dravidian Movement did in Tamil Nadu or the communist Left in West Bengal and Kerala. The beneficiary was the Hindu right, which stepped into the ideological vacuum following the discrediting of Nehruvian socialism with Hindutva.
In practice, the Janata parivar politics failed Lohia. Lohia’s social justice politics and anti-Congressism targeted an elite political culture that worked against the principles of justice and equality. His advocacy of small machines, privileging local languages over English, reservation for oppressed castes etc were meant to further the rise of an egalitarian India where all Indians irrespective of their caste, faith and gender could realise their potential. And like his mentor Mahatma Gandhi, Lohia too eschewed narrow majoritarian nationalism. His political aesthetics was neither faith-centric nor focussed on power and personal glory.
Today, the spirit of Lohia lives not in the political parties that claim his legacy but more in the numerous, often localised, people’s movements that fight state or corporate appropriation of resources, bigotry and so on. The Mandal moment was successful in building a new OBC leadership, as Lohia envisaged, but the likes of Mulayam and Sharad Yadav failed to tap its energy to offer a counter-narrative of social justice politics that would stall the rise of majoritarianism in the country.
amrith.lal@expressindia.com