The Shastri effect

I returned to India in the summer of 1965 after four years abroad. Panditji had passed away and Lal Bahadur Shastri was the PM. As I went to cinema quite often, I would see that anytime Shastri appeared in the weekly Newsreel, people would laugh. I was there for only 10 weeks between July and September. By the time I left, the India-Pakistan war had broken out. Shastri’s response stunned everyone. He became a popular PM almost overnight.

I recall this episode because there is something very similar between Dr Manmohan Singh and Lal Bahadur Shastri. There is a lot of snobbery in Delhi circles today as there was 40 years ago. Somehow no one thought Shastri was ‘high class’ enough to deserve to be PM, not after the towering figure of Panditji. He was so ordinary-looking and so humble! It is all right to feign humility but to be actually humble goes against the Indian Establishment’s grain. The Congress dadas—Kamraj, Atulya Ghosh, S.K.Patil—were much more powerful than the PM. Till he proved them wrong. I often wonder how different Indian history would have been had Shastri not died so soon after his triumph. The Congress may have never split and the Dynasty would not have flourished. But let bygones be bygones.

Manmohan Singh has similar qualities. Many in Delhi including his Cabinet colleagues think he has no right to be PM. A mere babu—they mutter and not even a proper IAS—how did he get to be above me when he was waiting outside my office with files. I have seen members of Delhi’s political class foaming at the mouth with the thought that Manmohan Singh has not only survived the entire term of the UPA government, but actually made it a success. They got even angrier when he proved to be a cunning politician and won the trust vote by managing to steal a dozen votes from the BJP and stitched up an alliance with SP. In their fury, they would not let him make his speech in reply to the debate. They shouted him down because it was not supposed to be like this. An Indian PM, they think, should be a Brahmin (six out of 12 if you count Rajiv Gandhi not as half Parsee but as Brahmin) or a Raja like V.P. Singh or even a Jat grandee like Charan Singh. Indian snobbery combines caste elitism with a British-inherited supercilious attitude about bureaucrats being beneath the political class, which for centuries was aristocratic.

... contd.

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