Opinion

The Socialist As Selfist

A short history of the undoing of an important political strand

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The Socialist As Selfist
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It’s pathetic to see the plight of the  socialists of yore, what with the current goings-on in George Fernandes’s life and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s politics. Without miring this column in these controversies, we take the opportunity to see why the socialists failed to fulfil their promise in an evolving Indian democracy through the 1950s to the mid-1970s. After independence, the Socialist Party, led by the relatively younger stalwarts of the freedom movement, like Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Dev, Achyut Patwardhan and Ram Manohar Lohia, was viewed as the Congress’s major challenger. Unlike the RSS-Jan Sangh and the Communists, the socialists had inherited the halo of the freedom struggle and challenged Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru on his own ideological turf with an alternative roadmap of decentralisation, language nationalism and subversion of the caste pyramid. Before feminism made the principle “personal is political” famous in metropolitan India, Lohia, the sharp socialist, insisted on it as practice, though without enunciating it in those words and in that order. Such was his insistence on the principle that, in 1950, he demanded the resignation of Pattom Thanu Pillai, his own Praja Socialist Party colleague, from the chief ministership of Travancore-Cochin, holding him personally responsible for the death of seven people in a police firing. Moreover, in a very conservative social-political milieu, he had publicly and without hypocrisy argued that any relationship between man and woman was legitimate as long as it was not based on inducement or force. As if on cue, young men and women of the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini phase of the post-JP movement encouraged live-in relationships and court weddings as part of their politics.

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Lohia died in 1967, after the triumph of his political strategy that led to the Congress losing power in nine states. What followed over the decades was an erosion—or even perversion—by his followers of his principle of “personal is political”. The “personal”, for many of them, came to represent self-interest rather than personally practised values. Ego or self-interest caused splits in the socialist remnants, whether in the pre- or post-Janata phase. It started with Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal (later made famous by his Mandal Commission report) splitting the Samyukta Socialist Party to become the chief minister of Bihar. Looking back, can anyone recall any real issues behind the first major split among the socialists after Lohia’s death, between the groups led by Raj Narain and Karpoori Thakur on one side and Madhu Limaye and George Fernandes on the other? While the Janata Party split in 1979 owing to conflicting pulls from its five vastly different constituents, the example in crass personal opportunism was set by Fernandes, a former firebrand socialist who zealously defended the Morarji Desai government in the no-confidence motion one day, only to desert and vote against it the next day. The saga of the personal appropriating the political extended later to such an extent as to convert Laloo Yadav’s RJD and Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party into mostly family- and crony-based outfits. And Fernandes increasingly handed over political management to his personal companion Jaya Jaitly, much to the chagrin of his political colleagues. While this is true of most political parties today, the irony is that socialists had been the most critical of dynastic and crony-based Congress politics.

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One must say that the socialists were prone to splits and desertions from the very beginning. JP charted his own separate Sarvodaya way in 1954. Lohia and his opponents split later into the Samyukta Socialist Party and the Praja Socialist Party. Ashok Mehta, Chandra Shekhar, Mohan Dharia and others deserted the Praja Socialist Party to join Nehru. But these breaks were preceded by much ideological hair-splitting; they weren’t necessarily motivated by the loaves and fishes of power. In the post-Lohia phase, this reversed.

Why did the socialists, whose anti-Congressism and subversion of the caste pyramid was a game-changer in 1967 and 1977, become so pathetic? While anti-Congressism was a tactical response to specific circumstances and would have lost relevance any way in the post-Congress monopoly phase, caste became an overwhelming passion that subsumed the rest of the socialist politics. The socialists failed to evolve constitutional and policy contours of their economic and political decentralisation plank, their poverty, prices and land relations position, their language rhetoric, their plank of civil and democratic rights. From speaking for the deprived castes, it was but one unguarded step down to your own caste and then the tempting decline to kin and self.

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