The high command: Triggering new lows for decades

Not just Congress, the high command culture now plagues nearly all parties. Its emergence in the BJP is more alarming

In July 2021, the BJP's central leadership dislodged two of the party's sitting chief ministers — Tirath Singh Rawat of Uttarakhand and B S Yediyurappa of Karnataka. Rawat's appointment in March, his ouster five months later, Yediyurappa's exit, and their respective successors' selection largely ignored the inner-party democratic process of consulting BJP legislators.

Since then, the two new CMs — Pushkar Singh Dhami in Uttarakhand and Basavaraj Bommai in Karnataka — have frequently looked over their shoulders towards the party's central leadership to fix for them the composition of their respective council of ministers and portfolios of ministers.

The developments of the last few weeks are curiously reminiscent of those that took place exactly 50 years back, which ushered into Indian politics the era of the "high command".

In July 1971, Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, sacked Rajasthan's Congress chief minister of 17 years, Mohan Lal Sukhadia. In March of that year, Indira Gandhi had led her party to a famous Lok Sabha victory. After the win, she ruthlessly booted out those she thought were not loyal to her. Sukhadia's support to the Syndicate sealed his fate. Indira Gandhi handpicked Barkatullah Khan as his successor.

Khan was one of a handful of Congress legislators in Rajasthan who, in 1969, had voted for Indira Gandhi's presidential candidate V V Giri. He was also a rare one to address her as bhabhi, the Hindi honorific for brother's wife, since he was a close friend of her late husband, Feroze Gandhi. Loyalty trumped ability and popularity.

By the end of September, Indira Gandhi sacked Andhra Pradesh chief minister K Brahmananda Reddy. In October 1971, Thought, a now-defunct journal published from Delhi, carried an article titled 'Mummy Knows Best'. It said it mattered little who might succeed Reddy. The report said that anyone who does would have to look to her sitting in faraway Delhi and not Congress MLAs in Hyderabad for his survival.

The "high command" became the leitmotif of the Congress decision making post-1971.

The party high command ejected and installed chief ministers at will.

The high command chopped and changed chief ministers on five occasions in Uttar Pradesh from 1980 to 1989. The story of Congress chief ministers in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Gujarat was similar.

The high command culture influenced party decisions even when a Nehru-Gandhi family member was not at the helm. As Sharad Pawar has written in his autobiography, Sonia Gandhi's nod meant P V Narasimha Rao and not Pawar became the prime minister in 1991. "I know for sure that the outcome would have been different had 10 Janpath not intervened the way it did," Pawar has written. To Pranab Mukherjee's abiding regret, Sonia Gandhi picked Manmohan Singh over him in 2004.

Consequences

Since the mid-1990s, the high command culture made Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, and Y S Jaganmohan Reddy quit the Congress. It has debilitated the Congress in Bengal, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. But limitations of the high command, surrounded by a coterie of sycophants who acted as gatekeepers, were evident by the 1970s.

It meant the top leadership of the Congress did not have its ear to the ground. It failed to accommodate the aspirations of the intermediate castes of northern India, which had benefitted from the Green Revolution and sought greater political representation. Charan Singh in Uttar Pradesh quit the Congress, as did Chandra Shekhar and others.

The Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls of 1983 comprehensively exposed the whimsicality of the high command model. N T Rama Rao led the fledgling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) to a massive win on the plank of Telugu pride after Congress general secretary Rajiv Gandhi had humiliated and sacked party CM T Anjaiah.

The TDP's victory heralded the glory years of regional parties in Indian politics. The Congress, however, had sown the seeds of that debacle earlier. Between 1978 and 1983, Indira Gandhi appointed four different CMs. Two of them, including Anjaiah, had lost in the legislative assembly polls, and their only quality was loyalty to her.

In 1990, Rajiv Gandhi sacked Karnataka CM Veerendra Patil. In 1989, the Lingayat leader had ensured the Congress returned to power in the state after seven years.

Over the years, the high command culture has become more pernicious. It now plagues nearly all political parties. Regional parties are either supremo-run or family-run dynastic enterprises, and all have their respective high commands with negligible inner-party democracy.

Alarming trend

The BJP and CPI(M), two cadre-based national parties that take pride in their internal democracy, were thought to be, at least until recently, immune to the malady. But these last forts with a semblance of inner-party democracy are in danger of crumbling in the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah era in the BJP and Pinarayi Vijayan leading the CPI(M) to a second successive Assembly win in Kerala.

However, the emergence of high command in the BJP is more alarming. Since 2014, the party's central leadership, with little or no consultation with its legislators, has appointed several of the BJP chief ministers. With the BJP winning even the Assembly polls on Modi's popularity, it mattered little if the CM was popular among the masses or party legislators.

Haryana's Manohar Lal Khattar, Gujarat's Vijay Rupani, Goa's Pramod Sawant, the three CMs of Uttarakhand since 2017, Biplab Deb of Tripura, Jharkhand's Raghubar Das and Himachal Pradesh's Jairam Thakur were all high command nominees. In Haryana, Khattar could not lead the BJP to a majority of its own in the 2019 Assembly polls. In the same year, the BJP lost Jharkhand, and Devendra Fadnavis could not keep its alliance intact in Maharashtra. In Uttarakhand and Tripura, the BJP is nervous about the forthcoming Assembly polls. It survived a close shave in Gujarat in 2017.

Only Yogi Adityanath, currently waging a cold war with the central leadership, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Himanta Biswa Sarma, have bucked this trend.

The absence of fair and regular internal elections in political parties in India is a fertile ground for high commands to take roots. Some have suggested a regulatory framework to ensure internal polls. The Dinesh Goswami, Tarkunde Committee and Indrajit Gupta Committees argued for reforms in the party system.

The high commands eventually come to centralise sources of political funding and morph into oligarchies of entrenched elites. In the Indian context, it has also contributed to the fragmentation of the party system as dissenters, or groups seeking political representation, are forced to chart their independent paths.

India can learn from western democracies that have laws to ensure inner-party democracy. But would our political oligarchs frame laws that might erode their power?

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