As debate rages on the Congress’s prospects ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Rajiv Gandhi had diagnosed as its main weakness 30 years ago a “complete absence of the inside party structure”.
In a conversation with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in July 1987, Rajiv, who was both Prime Minister and Congress president at the time, believed the “main reason” for the electoral defeat in 1977 was the lack of a strong party, which meant “we could not counter the arguments of the other side in any way”.
A record of the conversation between the leaders is available on the website of the Wilson Center digital archive.
Giving the Soviet leader a perspective, Rajiv said the Congress suffered a great deal when it underwent an “ideological split” in 1969. “That year, an organised core of the party split off and moved to the Right from us.”
Rajiv felt that Indira Gandhi’s landslide victory in 1971 was because of her personal popularity and not the result of the party’s efforts. After 1971, the government did a lot of work aimed at eliminating poverty, but that did nothing for the prospects of the Congress as it was associated with government activity.
“Because of the absence of a truly organised party structure, ideas are associated with the government and not with the party. And, besides, there is no mechanism on the basis of which the ideas and the programme of the party would be used by the government…,” Rajiv told Mr. Gorbachev at a meeting in Moscow.
Media concerns
The record of the conversation between the leaders also showed Rajiv’s concerns about the “activity” of the mass media.
Rajiv, who was dealing with the fallout of the Bofors scandal at the time, told the Soviet leader: “The mass media in our country belongs to the private sector. Their ideology and positions are sharply different from our own. We have to constantly take this into account.”
Patting himself on the back, Rajiv said India, too, had undertaken a “perestroika” similar to that unleashed by Mr. Gorbachev, an issue that invited considerable media attention at the time.
“We managed to reach pretty good results. The rates of growth in industry and in the economy as a whole have increased,” he said.
Dipping public morals
Rajiv believed that India’s single most important problem was the deficit of ideology, the weakening of public morals.
“Our society has been poisoned by a purely pragmatic approach to life. Political parties to a large extent lost their ideological identity in the pursuit of quick success.”
“Even the Left parties often act on the basis of conjectural considerations…as a result they cooperate with the Right parties, with groups which have nothing in common with them…” Rajiv maintained.
Indo-Soviet relations
Rajiv felt that India’s friendship with the Soviet Union was not to everyone’s taste because it showed that the so-called rules of the international game could be changed.
“If there is truly a desire, it is completely unnecessary for countries of different systems to oppose each other. On the contrary, they can cooperate rather than be antagonistic even as they remain different.”
Mr. Gorbachev replied, “That’s exactly right.”
