The Accidents of History

Indira Gandhi was assassinated on 31 October 1984. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948

The accidents of history have a much bigger role in shaping a nation’s destiny than one usually thinks. That is because accidents cannot be broken down into causes and effects, which is the historian’s standard tool. Accidents are after all, just accidents. On a whimsical note I sometimes wonder about India’s tryst with assassinations and whether Naturam Godse, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam and whatever mysterious reason caused Sanjay Gandhi’s plane to crash have unknowingly done as much to further India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ as our national heroes.

While there is no doubting Gandhi’s greatness and his contribution to achieving India’s independence, one wonders whether Gandhi’s ideas about constitutional democracy completely aligned with Nehru’s liberal notions. And given the weight Gandhi’s opinions had with the Indian populace, making him a source of almost extra-constitutional power, I think Nehru would have found it far more difficult to lay the foundations of our democratic institutions. Indira Gandhi’s assassination, unfortunate as it was, ended her authoritarian brand of politics and paved the way for RajivGandhi’s limited but significant technological and economic reforms.  Something which would not have happened if Sanjay Gandhi hadn’t met the end he did.

What would India been like if Sanjay Gandhi had been alive and taken over after Indira Gandhi’s death? It is difficult to say with any certainty, but the emergency does give us some clues. And whether one thinks of the economic reforms, which Manmohan Singh inaugurated as a mistake or as progress, it is doubtful whether it could have come about if Rajiv Gandhi had continued to dominate the Congress. India had entered an era of successive coalition governments and it was doubtful if any party could have got anything near a majority based on politics alone. Rajiv Gandhi’s tragic assassination and the sympathy wave it generated meant P V Narasimha Rao, whom the Congress has written out of its history, had enough seats to steer forward unpopular reforms that a weaker government could not have.

If our national course has indeed been steered by political assassins, what does that say about us and our democratic political process?