The Congress dominated India’s politics both at the Centre and at the states for the first two decades after Independence. The year 1967 was significant in the evolution of our democracy as it was the last time that central and state elections were held simultaneously. Thereafter, the calendars in the states stopped matching the Centre’s, as regimes fell before their terms were over. It was a process that led us to the present era, where we have very different schedules for state and central elections.
In the first three elections held in India – 1952, 1957 and 1962 – the Congress won three-fourth of the seats in Parliament and in most states. The most significant defeat came in Kerala in 1957, when the Communist Party of India (CPI) formed the government, the first instance in the world of communism coming through the ballot box, another example of our extraordinarily rich and varied experience with electoral democracy.
What must also be stated is that, in that era, the Congress was boosted by the first-past-the-post system as the BJP is today.
In the nation’s first general election in 1952, the Congress got 45 per cent of the votes but 74 per cent of the seats. All the non-Congress votes were divided, so political groups such as the socialists of that era failed to record their 10 per cent vote share in seats. (A more recent example of the first-past-the-post system not reflecting voter sentiment with precision can be observed in the 2014 Lok Sabha result, when the BJP converted a 31 per cent vote share to a simple majority; conversely, the BSP got 20 per cent of the votes in UP in 2014 but did not win a single Lok Sabha seat.)
The other significant point about the nature of the Congress in early Independent India is that it actually represented a coalition of interests: It accommodated those who had a rightward tilt both in matters of identity and economy, and also socialists and liberals like Nehru. That gave the party that led the national movement a remarkably elastic nature and the ability to absorb factional fights. It also had, significantly, the ability to represent both the rich and the poor. The nature of the national leadership was that it often came from the English-speaking elite, such as Nehru himself. But the mass movement for Independence also transformed it into a mass party that could represent varied social groups and communities. The Congress was, therefore, in the first two decades of Independent India, omnipotent and omnipresent.
But India’s sheer diversity began to throw up challenges for the Congress in the post-Nehru era. First, Nehru died in 1964, and Shastri by consensus became prime minister (the great Congressman from what is now Tamil Nadu, K Kamaraj, then president of the party, oversaw the process). But Shastri died rather suddenly on a foreign visit in January 1966. The issue of succession now came up in the Congress between Indira Gandhi and Morarji, who had been chief minister of Bombay state, present-day Maharashtra and Gujarat. Indira Gandhi won that round and became prime minister, but at a time of great economic challenges.
Birth of Anti-Congressism
By 1967, the Congress’s grip on absolute power, from the Centre to the states, began to loosen. In the national election held that year, the party, under Indira Gandhi, won a fourth consecutive term in power, but by smaller margins than in the three elections under her father. Price rise, drought, a dip in forex reserves, and protests and strikes by communists and socialists formed the backdrop of the fourth national elections, when states voted simultaneously.
A significant figure of that age was socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, whose contribution to the political ideas that have shaped our country’s history has perhaps not got its due recognition. He was a freedom fighter and one-time member of the Congress who became deeply critical of Nehru. He developed several radical ideas about caste, class and what can be called socialist theory applicable to a once-colonised nation like India. He gave multiple political ideas in his writings. He began to see the Congress as inimical to the interests of the people of India.
He died young at the age of 57 in 1967, but it was he who had, in principle, advocated the coming together of parties of different ideologies to defeat a common foe. He coined the phrase ‘anti-Congressism’. This is relevant today, as the idea of disparate forces coming together to take down a common foe is one of the primary impulses that drive coalition politics. The difference is that from anti-Congressism, we have moved to anti-BJP-ism as being the impulse behind the process.
But back to 1967, which would turn out to be a watershed in the history of challenges presented to the Congress. As we have noted, the Congress under Indira Gandhi managed power at the Centre. But the party lost seven states in one fell swoop. New players emerged on the political landscape, most significantly the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Madras state, now Tamil Nadu, after leading an anti-Hindi agitation. The other states where the Congress lost power were UP, Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa (now Odisha) and West Bengal.