CHALLENGES TO AND RESTORATION OF CONGRESS SYSTEM

• When Nehru passed away, K.Kamraj, the president of the Congress party consulted party leaders and congress members of parliament and found that there was a consensus in favour of Lal Bahadur 
• He was unanimously chosen as the leader of the Congress parliamentary party and thus became the country's next Prime Minister. Shastri was a non-controversial leader from Uttar Pradesh who had been a minister in the Nehru cabinet for many years.
• Shastri was the country's Prime  Minister from 1964 to 1966. During Shastris's brief Prime Ministership, the country faced two major challenges-
• While India was still recovering from the economic implications of the war with China, failed monsoons, drought and serious food crisis presented a grave challenge.
• The country also faced a war with Pakistan in 1965. Shastris's famous slogan “Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’, symbolised the country's resolve to face both these challenges.
• Shastri's Prime Ministership came to an abrupt end on 10 January 1966, when he suddenly expired in Tashkent, then in the USSR and currently the capital of Uzbekistan. He was there to discuss and sign an agreement with Muhammad Ayub Khan, the then President of Pakistan, to end the war.

1. From Shastri to Indira Gandhi

• This time there was an intense competition between Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi. Morarji  Desai had earlier served as Chief Minister of Bombay state (today Maharashtra and Gujarat) and also as a Minister at the centre.
• Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, had been Congress President in the past and had also been Union Minister for Information in the Shastri cabinet.
• This time the senior leaders in the party decided to back Indira Gandhi, but the decision was not unanimous.
• The contest was resolved through a secret ballot among Congress MPs. Indira Gandhi defeated Morarji Desai by securing the support of more than two-thirds of the party's MPs.
• Indira Gandhi credited with the slogan ‘garibi hatao’, for victory in the 1971 war and policy initiatives like the abolition of Privy Purse, nationalisation of banks, the nuclear test and environmental protection; was assassinated on 31 October 1984.

2. Non -Congresses

• Parties opposed to the Congress realised that the division of their votes kept the Congress in power.
• Thus parties that were entirely different and disparate in their programmes and ideology got together to form anti-Congress fronts in some states and entered into electoral adjustments of sharing seats in others.
• The socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia gave this strategy the name of ‘non-Congressism’.
• He also produced a theoretical argument in his defence: Congress rule was undemocratic and opposed to the interests of ordinary poor people; therefore the coming together of the non-Congress parties was necessary for reclaiming democracy for the people.

3. Electoral Verdict 

• The socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia gave this strategy the name of ‘non-Congressism’.
• He also produced a theoretical argument in its defence: Congress rule was undemocratic and opposed to the interests of ordinary poor people; therefore the coming together of the non-Congress parties was necessary for reclaiming democracy for the people.
• The Congress lost the majority in as many as seven states.
• In two other States defections prevented it from forming a government. These nine States where the Congress lost power were spread across Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Madras and Kerala. In Madras State (now called Tamil Nadu), a regional party DMK came to power by securing a clear majority.

Annadurai: Formed DMK as a political party in1949; a proponent of Dravid culture, he was opposed to the imposition of Hindi and led the anti-Hindi agitations; supporter of greater autonomy to States

Ram Manohar Lohiy: Among the founders of the Congress Socialist Party; after the split in the parent party, the leader of the Socialist Party and later the Samyukta Socialist Party; Member, Lok Sabha, 1963- 67; founder editor of Mankind and Jan, known for original contribution to a non-European socialist theory; as political leader, best known for sharp attacks on Nehru, strategy of non-Congressism, advocacy of reservation for backward castes and opposition to English.

4. Coalition

• The elections of 1967 brought into the picture the phenomenon of coalitions.
• Since no single party had got a majority, various non-Congress parties came together to form joint legislative parties (called Samyukt Vidhayak Dal in Hindi) that supported non-Congress governments.
• That is why these governments came to be described as SVD governments.
• In most of these cases the coalition partners were ideologically incongruent.

5. Defection

• Defection means an elected representative leaves the party on whose symbol he/she was elected and joins another party.
• After the 1967 general election, the breakaway Congress legislators played an important role in installing non-Congress governments in three States - Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
• Constant realignments and shifting political loyalties in this period gave rise to the expression ‘Aya Ram, Gaya Ram
• The expression ‘aya ram, gaya ram’ became popular in the political vocabulary in India to describe the practice of frequent floor-crossing  by legislators

Aya Ram Gaya: The expression originated in an amazing feat of floor crossing achieved by Gaya Lal, an MLA in Haryana, In  1967. He changed his party thrice in a fortnight from Congress to United Front, back to Congress and then within nine hours to United Front again It is said that when Gaya Lal declared his intention to quit the United Front and join the Congress, the Congress leader, Rao Birendra Singh brought him to Chandigarh press and declared “Gaya Ram was now Aya Ram.

6. Indira Versus Syndicate

• Syndicate was the informal name given to a group of Congress leaders who were in control of the party’s organisation.
• It was led by  Kamraj, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and then the president of the Congress party. It included powerful State leaders like S. K.  Patil of Bombay City (later named Mumbai), S. Nijalingappa of  Mysore (later Karnataka), N. Sanjeeva Reddy of Andhra Pradesh and Atulya Ghosh of West Bengal.
• This group had a decisive say in Indira Gandhi’s first Council of Ministers and also in policy formulation and implementation.
• Indira Gandhi thus faced two challenges. She needed to build her independence from She also needed to work towards regaining the ground that the Congress had lost in the 1967 elections.
• Indira Gandhi adopted a very bold strategy. She converted a simple power struggle into an ideological struggle
• She launched a series of initiatives to give the government policy a Left orientation. She got the Congress Working Committee to adopt a Ten Point Programme in May 1967.
• This programme included social control of banks, nationalisation of General Insurance, ceiling on urban property and income.
• public distribution of food grains, land reforms and provision of house sites to the rural poor.

7. Presidential Election 1969

• The factional rivalry between the Syndicate and Indira Gandhi came into the open in 1969.
• Following President Zakir Hussain's’ death, the post of President of India fell vacant That year despite Mrs Gandhi's reservations the ‘syndicate’ managed to nominate her long-time opponent and then speaker of the Lok Sabha, N. Sanjeeva Reddy, as the official Congress candidate for the ensuing Presidential elections.
• Indira Gandhi retaliated by encouraging the then Vice-President, V.V. Giri, to file his nomination as an independent candidate.
• She also announced several big and popular policy measures like the nationalisation of fourteen leading private banks and the abolition of the ‘privy purse’ or the special privileges given to former princes.
• Morarji Desai was the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister On both the above issues serious differences emerged between him and the Prime Minister resulting in Desai leaving the government.
• Congress had seen differences of this kind in the past. But this time both parties wanted a showdown which took place during the Presidential elections.
• The then Congress President S. Nijalingappa issued a ‘whip’ asking all the Congress MPs and MLAs to vote in favour of Sanjeeva Reddy, the official candidate of the party.
• Supporters of Indira Gandhi requisitioned a special meeting of the  AICC (that is why this faction came to be known as ‘requisitionists’) but this was refused.
• After silently supporting V.V. Giri, the Prime Minister openly called for a ‘conscience vote’ which meant that the  MPs and MLAs from Congress should be free to vote the way they want.
• The election ultimately resulted in the victory of V.V. Giri, the independent candidate, and the defeat of Sanjeeva Reddy, the official  Congress candidate.
• The defeat of the official Congress candidate formalised the split in the party.
• The Congress President expelled the Prime Minister from the party; she claimed that her group was the real Congress.
• By November 1969, the Congress group led by the ‘syndicate’ came to be referred to as the Congress (Organisation) and the group led by Indira Gandhi came to be called the Congress (Requisitionists).
• These two parties were also described as Old Congress and New Congress. Indira Gandhi projected the split as an ideological divide between socialists and conservatives, between the pro-poor and the pro-rich
• The Indira Gandhi government recommended the dissolution of the Lok Sabha in December 1970. This was another surprising and bold move.
• The fifth general election to Lok Sabha was held in February 1971 all the major non-communist, non-Congress opposition parties formed an electoral alliance known as the Grand Alliance.
• The SSP, PSP, Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Kranti Dal came together under this umbrella.
• The ruling party had an alliance with the CPI the new Congress had something that its big opponents lacked. The alliance did not have a coherent political programme.
• Indira Gandhi said that the opposition alliance had only one common programme: Indira Hatao (Remove Indira).
• In contrast to this, she put forward a positive programme captured in the famous slogan: Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty). She focused on the growth of the public sector, imposition of ceiling on rural land holdings and urban property, removal of disparities in income and opportunity, and the abolition of princely privileges Lok Sabha elections of 1971, were as dramatic as the decision to hold these elections.
• The Congress(R)-CPI alliance won more seats and votes than the Congress had ever won in the first four general elections
• Soon after the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, a major political and military crisis broke out in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
• The 1971 elections were followed by the crisis in East Pakistan and the Indo-Pak war leading to the establishment of Bangladesh.
• These events added to the popularity of Indira Gandhi With two successive election victories, one at the centre and the other at the State level, the dominance of the Congress was restored.
• The Congress was now in power in almost all the States. It was also popular across different social sections

V .V. GIRI President of India from 1969 to 1974; Congress worker and labour leader from Andhra Pradesh; Indian High Commissioner to Ceylon (Sri Lanka); Labour Minister in Union cabinet; Governor of U.P., Kerala, Mysore (Karnataka); Vice-President (1967-1969) and acting President after the death of President Zakir Hussain; resigned and contested presidential election as independent candidate; received support from Indira Gandhi for his election as President.

This integration of the princely state was preceded by an assurance that after the dissolution of princely rule, the then rulers’ families would be allowed to retain certain private property, and given a grant in heredity or government allowance, measured based on the extent, revenue and potential of the merging state. This grant was called the privy purse. At the time of accession, there was little criticism of these privileges since integration and consolidation were the primary aims Following the 1967 elections, Indira Gandhi supported the demand that the government should abolish privy purses. Morarji Desai, however, called the move morally wrong and amounting to a ‘breach of faith with the princes’.The government tried to bring a Constitutional amendment in 1970, but it was not passed in Rajya  Sabha. It then issued an ordinance which the Supreme Court struck down. Indira Gandhi made this into a major election issue in 1971 and got a lot of public support. Following its massive victory in the 1971 election, the Constitution was amended to remove legal obstacles to the abolition of the ‘privy purse’.

K. Kamraj introduced a mid-day meal scheme for schoolchildren; in 1963 he proposed that all senior Congressmen should resign from office to make way for younger party workers this proposal is famous as the ‘Kamraj plan.

S.Nijalingappa Member of Constituent Assembly; member of Lok Sabha; Chief Minister of the then Mysore (Karnataka) State; regarded as the maker of modern Karnataka; President of Congress from 1968-71.

Karpoori Thakur- Freedom Fighter and socialist leader; active in labour and peasant movements; staunch follower of Lohia; participated in the movement led by JP; known for his decision to introduce reservations for the backward classes in Bihar during his second Chief Ministership; strong opponent of the use of English Language.