The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
After Indira assassination, 400 paar for Rajiv
The young Prime Minister with an unprecedented mandate had a turbulent tenure. He would lose power amid a huge corruption scandal in 1989, and the Congress would never again achieve a Lok Sabha majority on its own
THE ONLY politician who actually went “400 paar” in Lok Sabha was Rajiv Gandhi, who found himself unexpectedly pitchforked into the job after Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984.
Riding a nationwide tsunami of sympathy, Rajiv’s Congress won 404 of the 514 seats in the first phase of the eighth Lok Sabha election held on December 24, 27, and 28, 1984, and another 10 seats after votes were cast in militancy-hit Punjab and Assam in September and December 1985 respectively.
The goodwill vanished remarkably quickly. India’s youngest Prime Minister — Rajiv was only 40 when he took office — lost power amid a huge corruption scandal in 1989, and the Congress could never achieve a Lok Sabha majority on its own after 1984.
Churn in Opposition
The years after the collapse of the Janata experiment and Indira’s return to power saw massive churn in the political opposition and important developments in the states. Chaudhary Charan Singh’s Janata Party (Secular) splintered into his own Janata Party (S-charan Singh) and Janata Party (S-raj Narain). In August 1982, Charan Singh’s group, now called Lok Dal, too split as the Bihar leader Karpoori Thakur went his own way. Both Charan Singh and Thakur were honoured with the Bharat Ratna earlier this year.
The opposition had several single-personality parties — Jagjivan Ram’s Congress (Jagjivan), H N Bahuguna’s Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and Chandrajit Yadav’s Janwadi Party. George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye, Devi Lal, and Biju Patnaik were in the Lok Dal (K).
Farooq Abdullah became Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir after his father Sheikh Abdullah died on September 8, 1982. In Karnataka, Ramakrishna Hegde became CM in a Janata government on January 10, 1983. A day earlier, Telugu actor-turnedpolitician N T Rama Rao had taken oath in Andhra Pradesh.
As efforts were made for a possible alliance or merger of some “progressive and socialist” national and regional parties, Chandra Shekhar’s Janata came together with K Ramachandran’s Congress (Secular), Bahuguna’s DSP, and Ratubhai Adani’s Rashtriya Congress in a United Front. The BJP, which had earlier opposed the idea of a merger of parties, said it would follow a policy of “meaningful cooperation” — and following multiple rounds of talks between between BJP chief Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Charan Singh, the two parties came together in August 1983 in the first avatar of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
But this version of the NDA did not last. A year after it was formed, the BJP decided to break away, and Charan Singh formed the new Dalit Mazdoor Kisan Party (DMKP).
An early election
The Lok Sabha election would have taken place in the normal course in January 1985. On August 25, 1984, the Election Commission of India (ECI) called a meeting of all parties to discuss the alleged misuse of official machinery in the election campaign. Some parties wanted a ban on the use of official aircraft by ministers and other leaders from the last date of withdrawal of nominations to the day of polling.
The assassination of Indira Gandhi was followed by terrible anti-sikh violence. More than 3,000 members of the community were killed across the country, including more than 2,500 in Delhi. Some accused, including a few Congress leaders, have been convicted.
The ECI was forced to bring the Lok Sabha election forward by a few weeks. During the campaign, the Janata Party and the BJP objected to a Congress advertisement with the line: “Why should you feel uncomfortable riding in a taxi driven by a taxi driver belonging to another State?” The ECI’S report said that “according to the complainants, the reference to taxi driver was in fact intended to refer to Sikh community and that it aimed at fanning communal prejudice and disaffection among different sections of the people”.
The ECI concluded that the ad “did not offend any electoral law or run counter to the principles laid down in the Model Code of Conduct”.
Unprecedented mandate
Elections were held in 17 states and in all nine Union Territories on a single day. No voting could be held in Punjab and Assam — to facilitate this, Section 73A was added to The Representation of the People Act, 1951, which allowed the ECI to “take steps in relation to elections…in the State of Assam and the…state of Punjab separately and in such manner and on such dates as it may deem appropriate”.
The counting of votes began on December 28, 1984 in states and UTS where polling was held on December 24 and 27, and on December 29 in Nagaland and Meghalaya, where voting took place on December 28. Results were declared for almost all constituencies by December 31.
Rajiv won in Amethi, defeating his sister-in-law and Sanjay’s wife Maneka Gandhi. Actor Amitabh Bachchan defeated the former Congressman and veteran leader H N Bahuguna in Allahabad. K R Narayanan, the future President of India, won in Kerala’s Ottapalam, Prakash Chand Sethi in Indore, Ghulam Nabi Azad in Washim in Maharashtra, and P V Narasimha Rao, who would be Prime Minister, in Berhampur. Abida Ahmed, the wife of Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, who was President during Indira’s Emergency, won in Bareilly.
NTR’S Telugu Desam Party won 30 seats in Lok Sabha. The CPI(M) won 22 seats, Janata 10, CPI 6, and Lok Dal (C) 3. The BJP won just two seats — Chandupatla Janga Reddy from Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh and A K Patel from Mehsana in Gujarat. Vajpayee lost in Gwalior, and Janata’s Chandra Shekhar was defeated in his home turf of Ballia in UP.
Charan Singh won in Baghpat. Jagjivan Ram, who had left the Congress to join Congress for Democracy and later formed a new party, the Congress (J), won in Sasaram. Sharad Pawar of Congress (Socialist) won in Baramati.
New phase of politics
By the time of the 1984 election, most Opposition giants of the earlier generation had passed on. C Rajagopalachari, the architect of humiliating Congress defeats, died in 1972. Jayaprakash Narayan, the force behind Opposition unity in 1977, died in 1979. J B Kripalani passed away in 1982.
Among the new Opposition parties and leaders, the TDP, founded in March 1982, was the most prominent. Several new faces gained prominence in the Congress too, as Rajiv carried out a revamp of the party. In 1985, the central government signed the Rajiv-longowal Accord in Punjab and the Assam Accord with the leaders of the Assam movement. In 1986, the government brought a law in Parliament to effectively nullify the Supreme Court’s progressive judgment in the Shah Bano case. The contract with the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors for the supply of field howitzers was followed by revelations of kickbacks of Rs 64 crore in the deal, which was considered a big amount at the time. The Bofors scandal would haunt Rajiv for the rest of his tenure and his life.
In 1989, the Congress crashed from the dizzying heights of 1984 to just 197 seats in Lok Sabha, paving the way for the formation of another non-congress government.