The Congress in India -- Crisis and Split

Abstract

n November 1969, the Congress party of India was torn apart after four months of inner-party conflict. The truncated leadership of the party organization, isolating itself from the will of the majority of the Congress Parliamentary Party, expelled Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, from the Congress. In the centenary year of Mahatma Gandhi's birth, two Congress parties fought for the tattered standard of the nationalist movement. From the time the Congress first assumed the responsibilities of public office, there has been conflict between the governmental and organizational wings of the party. In the early years after independence, as the political center of gravity shifted from the party to the Government, Prime Minister Nehru battled party presidents, and in 1951 assumed the Congress presidency himself. To hold the Prime Minister accountable to the party, Nehru argued, would reduce parliamentary democracy to a mockery. The responsibility for decision-making lay with the Government. With Nehru's decline and death, however, the leadership of the organization, a coterie of state bosses called the Syndicate, reasserted itself and, engineering the two successions to bring Shastri Lal Bahadur (1964) then Indira Gandhi (1965 and 1967) to power, sought to dominate the office of the Prime Minister. The traditional conflict between the two wings was accentuated by the widespread defeats inflicted on the Congress in the 1967 elections and the loss of power in half the states. Beyond this, however, increasing political consciousness among the mass electorate underscored two basic facts: (1) the obsolescense of a Congress political machine which rested on the support of wealthy peasants and landowners, and (2) the widening economic disparities of the nation, reflecting the gap between Congress policy and effective implementation. In the tension between the Government and the party organization, the presidential election in 1969 brought the conflict to the surface and initiated the four month crisis that split the 84-year-old Indian National Congress. In challenge to the Syndicate, Indira Gandhi sought to securely reestablish