The Congress' Blind Spot

EIGHT months ago, when the Congress party was on the verge of disintegration, Mrs Sonia Gandhi stepped in to prevent its breakup. In the campaign that ensued she breathed new life into the party by, among other things, taking up the issue of corruption, also apologising to the Sikh community for its sufferings in the '80s. She was not able to prevent a further erosion of the Congress vote in the March elections, but the party that emerged was a good deal more homogenous and purposeful than the demoralised rabble that had been catapulted into the elections by Mr Sitaram Kesri.

The change did not come a moment too soon. The utter rejection of the United Front by the electorate in the 1998 election and its subsequent collapse ensured that despite the fall in its share of the vote, the Congress would emerge as the all-important second magnetic pole of the political system, the secular pluralist alternative to the BJP. In the months that followed, as the Congress consolidated its position by taking responsible stands on national issues, the imprint of Sonia Gandhi's personality on its behaviour became more and more apparent.

One blind spot has, however, remained, and today that is threatening to undo much of the good that the party has done itself in the past six months. That blind spot is the Jain Commission's inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. From the time when selective, and slanted, leaks appeared in some newspapers of the interim findings of Justice M.C. Jain, the Congress as a whole has been far more interested in using the report to attack its political enemies and climb back to power on their discomfited backs than in making sure that the lapses and flawed perceptions that contributed to Rajiv's death should never occur again.

As a minor counterpoint to this theme, old and newly converted Rajiv loyalists have used the report to settle scores with their opponents within the party, and in so doing to ingratiate themselves with Mrs Sonia Gandhi. These twin assaults have left no one untarnished—from Mr Karunanidhi, the DMK and the entire Tamil people, to Mr V.P. Singh, Mr Chandra Shekhar, and Mr Narasimha Rao, not to mention scores of Central and state police and intelligence officials.

By so doing they have not only created dangerous new strains in the Indian polity, and undermined ordinary peoples' confidence in their leaders, but done a grave disservice to the memory of a patriotic and dedicated prime minister, who was also a decent, sensitive human being.

Today, the Congress would do itself, the nation, and the memory of Rajiv Gandhi a service if it accepted the government's proposal to set up a Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), with statutory powers, to probe further into the many issues concerning the security of VIPs that the Jain Commission highlighted in its interim and final reports. Notwithstanding its justifiable doubts about the immunity of the CBI to political pressure—after all no party did more to undermine the independence of that investigative agency than the Congress itself—there can be little doubt that this is the best way to proceed. The main reason why former prime minister Narasimha Rao first delayed the work of and then tried to wind up the Jain Commission was that its inquiries threatened to expose and, therefore, destroy the entire edifice of intelligence gathering that had been set up to cope with India's insurgencies. Keeping the follow-up inquiry within the purview of the CBI will limit this damage.

Even if the MDMA in its proposed form is only a second best solution, the Congress should cooperate with it, instead of trying to extract some last shreds of political mileage from it. For, a close reading of the Jain Commission's main conclusions shows that apart from a looseness of language and lack of caution in ascribing blame, which has allowed readers to draw erroneous conclusions from it, the Commission has done valuable work in pinpointing the lapses in the interpretation of intelligence and in the action taken on their basis, which contributed to Rajiv's assassination. Perhaps its most important contribution is to point out that the threat to a former prime minister does not decline when he steps out of office, but is very likely to increase. This happens because while he may be a less important person when out of office, he becomes a much softer target. A terrorist organisation has to balance the added publicity and political mileage to be gained from killing a prime minister, against the greater ease and certainty of being able to kill a former prime minister. In the case of Rajiv Gandhi, the son and grandson of prime ministers and the initiator of the assault on the LTTE, the balance came down heavily in favour of going for him, rather than for the charismatic but much less well-known Chandra Shekhar.

In retrospect, it cannot be denied that the failure of the intelligence agencies and of the political leadership of the time to grasp this fact may have weighed the scales in favour of his choice for assassination. That was an undiluted tragedy, but the failures, both of Mr V.P. Singh and Mr Chandra Shekhar, on which the report has dwelt at such length, are ultimately failures of imagination, and that too of harassed prime ministers who, from the moment they came to power, never ceased to be on the defensive. Both prime ministers relied on their intelligence agencies and their security advisors to assess the threat to Rajiv, and went by the book in extending protection to him.

It was the book that was wrong: it was possible for Rajiv to be both less of a target when he was out of power than when he was prime minister, and still be in greater danger. Where Justice Jain went unconscionably wrong was in suggesting that the oversights were deliberate and attributing motives to Messrs V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar. The entire report contains not a shred of evidence to substantiate these charges.

Given the time bomb that Justice Jain has thrown in our midst, we have two choices: a healthy nation would study the report dispassionately to learn lessons from it. We cannot bring Rajiv back, but we can pay him the homage of promising him that we will, to the best of our ability, not permit this to happen again. A sick nation, on the other hand, would use the report selectively to tear itself apart. Some of those who profess undying loyalty to Rajiv want the nation to do the latter.