Political History
(After Independence)
The gradual emergence of India as a self-governing entity had been partly envisioned in the Government of India Act of 1935, and following India's independence in 1947, the Constituent Assembly deliberated over the precise constitutional future of India. On 26 January 1950, India became a Republic, and the Constitution of India was promulgated.
The Indian National Congress, which had led the country to freedom, remained the largest and most influential party under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru, who served as India's Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964. His 'regime' was marked by the advent of five-year plans, designed to bring big science and industry to India; in Nehru's own language, steel mills and dams were to be the temples of modern India. Relations with Pakistan remained chilling, and the purported friendship of India and China proved to be something of a hoax, when China invaded India's borders in 1962.
Nehru was succeeded at his death by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who led the country to something of a victory over Pakistan in 1965; he could not even relish the thought of triumph, dying of a heart attack the day after the treaty was signed. He was succeeded by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter.
By the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi had engineered a split in the Congress, as the only means to ensure her political survival, and the Congress had been reduced to a sh adow of its former self. In 1971, India crushed Pakistan in a short war that also saw the birth of Bangladesh, and Indira was now at the helm of her powers. But the shine wore off, and as domestic problems mounted and popular movements directed at her began to show their effect, she resorted to more repressive measures.
An internal emergency, which placed almost the entire opposition behind bars, was proclaimed in May 1975, and only removed in 1977; and the same opposition, which hastily convened to ch art its strategy, achieved in delivering the Congress party its first loss in national elections. This government, serving various political interests, lasted a mere three years, and Indira Gandhi rode a large wave of victory in 1980. But she did not li ve to complete her term: shot by her own Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the destruction unleashed upon the Golden Temple, the venerable shrine of the Sikh faith, by Indian government troops given the task of flushing out the terrorists holed in the shrine, she was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi.
In the December 1994 Lok Sabha elections, Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party won a landslide election. But Rajiv’s premiership was to be marked by numerous political disasters, and Rajiv’s own name was tainted by the allegation that he had received huge bribes from a Swedish firm of Bofors, manufacturers of a machine-gun for which the Indian army placed a large order. His own finance minister, V. P. Singh, was to turn against Rajiv; and in 1989, V. P. Singh led the Janata Party to an electoral rout over the Congress. However, the Janata party mustered only 145 votes, and it had to take the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by L. K. Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, in order to form a government.
Thus was born the era of coalition governments. V. P. Singh would soon be brought down by two disputes: one over the status of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque that Hindu militants claimed had been built over the Ram Janmasthan [birthplace], and the second over the recommendations of the Mandal commission pertaining to quotas for various elements of India’s underprivileged masses.
On 7 November 1990, by a vote of 356-151, V. P. Singh lost the confidence of the Lok Sabha, and some days later Chandra Sekhar, with the support of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress, was sworn in as the next prime minister. However, Congress withdrew its support in March 1991, and elections were called in May.
On May 21, as intense electioneering was taking place, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Sri Lankan suicide bomber. The mantle of Congress leadership fell on the veteran P. V. Narasimha Rao, who led the party to triumph, even as the BJP raised the number of its seats in Parliament from a little over 80 to 120.
On 6 December 1992, acting in defiance of Supreme Court orders, Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid, and so initiated one of the most intense crises in India’s post-independent history. Rao weathered many a storm, and presided over the liberalization of the economy (the architect of which was Manmohan Singh, the Finance Minister), but he could not keep the BJP and its friends in check.
In the general elections of 1996, the BJP emerged as the largest party, but its 194 seats were not enough to give it a working majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, and Atal Behari Vajpayee’s first government lasted a mere twelve days.
A 13-party coalition of the United National Front and the Indian left was brought into power, and Deve Gowda, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, was raised to the office of the Prime Minister; but after less than a year in office, he resigned and was succeeded by Inder Kumar Gujral, whose main contribution in office was to bequeath "the Gujral doctrine" — a reference to his genuine attempts to mend India’s relations with its South Asian neighbors, based on the principle that as the largest country, India could afford to be generous, and did not have to require reciprocity for all its munificent actions.
But Gujral’s government similarly lasted less than a year; and in the general elections of February 1998, the BJP emerged again as the single largest party, this time with 200 seats. Vajpayee was invited to form a government, and did so with a coalition of several parties, including the AIADMK, led by Jayalalitha. Nothing that the BJP did was so ripe with consequences as the decision to turn India into a nuclear state with a series of nuclear tests in May 1998.
The coalition, not unpredictably, broke down; but the general elections of September 1999, in which the BJP again emerged as the single largest party, and the Congress had a poor showing at the polls, despite being led by Sonia Gandhi, a scion of the ‘Nehru dynasty’, were to reinforce the impression that regional parties and politics have fundamentally altered the state of Indian politics. Though the BJP continues to preside over the country’s destiny, the dominance of any one party is no longer a foregone conclusion, and coalition politics appears to be the way of the future.
Some commentators describe these times as immensely troubled, full of ominous developments, such as the coercive Hinduization of the country and the continuing lack of respect for human rights, whether manifested in state-sponsored killings in Kashmir, the north-east, and elsewhere, or in the oppressions unleashed upon Christians and women; but yet it is possible to discern in the turmoil of Indian politics the workings of one of the few truly democratic countries in the world, where politics has not been completely reduced to distinguishing between indistinguishable parties.
