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After having been out of office for thirty-four months, Indira Gandhi was once again the prime minister and Congress was restored to its old position as the dominant party. Following the wrong precedent set up by Janata government in 1977, Congress government dissolved the nine state assemblies in the opposition-ruled states. In the assembly elections subsequently held in June, Congress swept the polls except in Tamil Nadu. Though once again the prime minister and the only Indian leader with a national appeal, Indira Gandhi was no longer the same person she was from 1969 to 1977. She no longer had a firm grasp over politics and administration. She dithered in taking significant new policy initiatives or dealing effectively with a number of disturbing problems. There was a lack of direction and a sense of drift, which led to a feeling among the people that not much was being achieved. The Emergency and the Janata years had left their mark on her. She was suspicious of people around her and trusted none but her son, Sanjay. Besides, Indira Gandhi had few political instruments to implement her election promises. Most of the well-known and experienced national and state leaders and her colleagues of the past had deserted her during 1977-78. Sanjay Gandhi’s untimely death while flying a stunt plane on 23 June 1980 left here shaken and further weakened. She tried to fill his place with her elder son, Rajiv Gandhi, who was brought into politics, got elected as an MP and then appointed as the general secretary of the party in 1983. Like the first one, a major weakness of Indira’s second prime ministerial innings was the continuing organizational weakness of Congress and her failure to rebuild it and strengthen its structure. This inevitability affected the performance of the government and its popularity, for a weak party structure meant the choking of channels through which popular feelings could be conveyed to the leadership and the nature and rationale of government policies explained to the people. Despite Indira Gandhi’s total domination of the party and the government, the central leadership of the party again faced the problem of continuous factionalism and infighting—in fact, virtual civil war— within the state units of the party and the state governments. One result of this infighting and the consequent frequent rise and fall of chief ministers was that party organizational elections were repeatedly postponed and, in the end, not held. Another result was the erosion of the feeling that Congress could provide state governments that worked. An example of this erosion of the party's popularity was the serious electoral defeat it suffered in January 1983 in the elections to the state assemblies of Andhra and Karnataka, the two states that Congress had ruled continuously since their inception. In Andhra, Congress suffered a massive defeat at the hands of the newly formed Telugu Desam party, led by the film-star-turned politician, N.T. Rama Rao. The Congress won only 60 seats against Telugu Desam’s 202. In Karnataka, a Janata-led front won 95 seats in the 224-seat assembly, with Congress getting 81 seats. |
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