Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The only problem for his critics was that his citizenry loved him and would almost certainly vote for him, as it had done ever since his great tour in the 1930s, when he had travelled around the country, charming and stirring up vast audiences. Mahesh Kapoor knew this — as, indeed, did anyone with the faintest knowledge of the political scene.

While walking around his farm, discussing with his manager irrigation problems in a season when rainfall had been disappointing, Mahesh Kapoor’s mind often turned to Delhi and to the momentous events that, he felt, had left him no choice but to leave the party to which he had given his allegiance for thirty years. He, like many others, had hoped that Nehru would come to see how futile were his efforts to maintain his policies in the face of Tandon’s activities and would take some firm measure of control; but Nehru, though his own supporters were haemorrhaging away from his party as it drifted into its right-wing orbit, refused to leave the Congress or to take any positive action other than to plead, in meeting after meeting of the All-India Congress Committee, for unity and reconciliation. As he vacillated, his supporters floundered. Eventually, by late summer, a point of crisis had been reached.

In June a special convention of the Congress Party was held in Patna. There, at a parallel convention, the fledgling KMPP was established by several leaders, including Kripalani, who had recently resigned from the Congress, accusing it of ‘corruption, nepotism and jobbery’. Kidwai, without actually resigning from the Congress, had been elected to the Executive Committee of the KMPP. This action brought down upon him the wrath of the right-wingers; for how (as one of them wrote to Tandon) could he continue to be a Central Minister of the Congress government and simultaneously belong to the executive of the party that was one of its most vociferous opponents — one which, indeed, hoped to supplant the Congress itself? Kripalani had tendered his resignation as a member of the Congress Party to Tandon, but Kidwai had not. Surely, argued his critics, he had better do so at once.

In early July the Working Committee and then the All-India Congress Committee met once again in Bangalore. Kidwai was asked to explain himself by the Working Committee. He hedged, claimed in his easy-going way that he had no immediate intention of resigning from the Congress, stated that he had tried to get the KMPP session postponed but had failed to do so, and expressed his hope that the Bangalore session of the Congress would make his anomalous position and the atmosphere in general much clearer.

The Bangalore session, however, did no such thing. Nehru, seeing at last that resolutions in his support were not enough, demanded something much more concrete: a complete reconstitution of the two most powerful committees of the Congress — the Working Committee and the Central Election Committee — so as to reduce their domination by the right wing. At this, Tandon offered to resign together with the whole of his Working Committee. Fearing a permanent split in the Congress, Nehru backed down. A few more conciliatory resolutions were passed. Some pulled in one direction, some in another. On the one hand the Congress disapproved of groups within its ranks; on the other, there would be an open door back to the party for those ‘seceders’ who agreed with the general aims of the Congress. But rather than rejoin the Congress, two hundred more Congressmen resigned and joined the KMPP at Bangalore. The atmosphere remained as murky as ever, and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai decided that the time for vacillation had passed. The battle had to be joined.

He returned to Delhi and wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, resigning both from the Cabinet as Minister of Communications and from the Congress Party. He made it clear that both he and his friend Ajit Prasad Jain, the Minister for Rehabilitation, had resigned because they could not stand Tandon or his policies or his undemocratic method of functioning. They emphasized that they had no quarrel with Nehru himself. Nehru pleaded with them to reconsider their decision, and this they did.

The next day they both announced that they had decided not to resign from the Cabinet after all. They also announced, however, that they would continue to work against the Congress, at any rate against the Congress President and his cohorts, whose views and strategies ran counter to every important resolution or declaration of the party. Their statement explaining their decision was a startling one, coming as it did from two Ministers of the Government:

Is there a parallel in the world where the executive head, i.e. President of an organisation, is the very antithesis of everything that the organisation stands for? What is there in common between Shri Purushottamdas Tandon and the policies of the Congress — economic, communal, international and refugees? Even at this juncture when our ways parted, we wished and hoped that the working of the Congress would fall in line with its profession.

Tandon and the old guard, goaded by what they perceived as rank disloyalty and indiscipline, demanded that Nehru call his Ministers to heel. There was no way that the dissidents could be allowed to function as Ministers and attempt at the same time to do down their own party. Nehru was forced, sadly, to agree. Jain remained in the Cabinet, agreeing not to issue further provocative statements. Kidwai, unable to agree to such a constraint, offered once more to resign. This time Nehru realized that it would be fruitless to plead with his old colleague and friend, and accepted his resignation.

Nehru was now more isolated in his own party than ever. Together with all the crushing burdens of the Prime Ministership — the food problem, the warmongering on both sides of the border, the Press Bill and the Hindu Code Bill and the endless legislation to be passed through Parliament, the relations between the Centre and the states (which had come to a boil with the declaration of direct Central rule in Punjab), the day-to-day running of the administration, the working out of the First Five-Year Plan, foreign affairs (an area that particularly exercised him), not to mention endless emergencies of one kind or another — Nehru was weighed down by the hard realization that his ideological opponents in his party had, in effect and at last, defeated him. They had elected Tandon, they had forced Nehru’s supporters to leave the Congress in droves and form a new opposition party, they had taken over the District Congress Committees and Pradesh Congress Committees and the Working Committee and Central Election Committee, they had forced the resignation of the Minister who, more than any other, was sympathetic to his way of thinking, and they were poised to select their own conservative candidates for the impending General Elections. Nehru’s back was to the wall; and he may perhaps have reflected that it was his own indecisiveness that had helped put it there.

Certainly, Mahesh Kapoor thought so. He was in the habit of unburdening himself to whoever was at hand, and it happened to be Maan with whom he was walking through the fields on a tour of inspection.

‘Nehru has finished all of us — and himself in the process.’

Maan, who had been thinking about the wolf-hunt he had enjoyed when he was last in the area, was brought back to earth by the despair in his father’s voice.

‘Yes, Baoji,’ he said, and wondered how to go on from there. After a pause he added, ‘Well, I’m sure something will work out. Things have swung so far this way that they have to correct themselves.’

‘You are a fool,’ said his father shortly. He recalled how annoyed and disappointed S.S. Sharma had been when he and some of his colleagues had said they were resigning from the party. The Chief Minister liked to balance the Agarwal and Kapoor factions of his party against each other, so that he himself had maximum freedom of action; with one wing missing, his craft listed uncomfortably and his own decision-making abilities were necessarily more constrained.