V.P. Singh cannot be easily forgotten

Former Prime Minister V.P. Singh died on November 27, 2008, the day after terrorist attacks had ripped Mumbai apart and stunned the whole country.

The news of his death was reduced to a footnote — a strip running across the bottom of our TV screens. In that hour of tragedy and horror, he was, rather conveniently, forgotten by a section of the opinion makers.

There were no 24x7 bulletins on his deteriorating health, or sepia-tinted journeys into his past. (One does not know whether those who spoke in his praise were put behind bars.)

He had done worse than patriots who speak for one community — he had “divided the society along caste lines” by announcing the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. To some he was a renegade, an aristocrat who had betrayed his lot after seeming to be one of them. Others saw him as a latter-day Lohia or Ambedkar.

PRE-MANDAL PHASE

There are many reasons to remember Singh today. The most immediate one is that, three decades after he was Finance Minister, certain corporate houses are once again in the news for the wrong reasons.

The Reliance and Wadia groups were under the scanner for alleged foreign exchange irregularities, when he was Finance Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Singh was transferred to the Defence Ministry, where he ordered an inquiry into the HDW submarine deal, leading to his fall-out with Rajiv Gandhi.

Soon after he resigned from the government, Swedish Radio broke the Bofors scandal. Singh made that the plank of his anti-Rajiv election campaign.

The pre-Mandal Singh became a middle-class hero in the 1989 general elections — a prince who first went after dacoits as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh before taking on the Gandhi family, no less. This was reality imitating Bollywood. The corruption debate then was utterly personalised; it created a wave of anti-Congressism and shrill nationalism that swept the Congress out of power.

But Singh’s National Front government inevitably lacked an ideological consensus, what with the CPM and BJP propping it up.

The Government was destined to fall in less than a year; Singh and the Left, “his natural allies”, parted company with the BJP on the Ayodhya agitation.

THE JOURNEYMAN

Had Singh been around now, he would have approved of the more institution-centric nature of the prevailing discourse on corruption, being spearheaded by the India Against Corruption movement, now rechristened the Aam Aadmi Party. Evolution and change was a constant force in VP’s political journey.

The last 25 years of his life were fascinating — from the oversimplified theme of ‘corruption’ in the context of Bofors, to Mandal and, finally, a search for an alternative politics reminiscent of the early socialists. Those accustomed to his earlier Bollywood-type persona could not stomach this twist in the tale.

His early years were spent in a Congress party discredited by the excesses of the Emergency. But as ex-PM and cancer patient, he supported acts of resistance against slum demolition in various parts of Delhi.

This ability to evolve and learn from his past actions assured him of a place in the hearts of millions who saw him as an agent of change — even if his contributions were not acknowledged in the tomes of official historians, and by the mainstream media.

Newspaper photographs of an ailing VP joining small slum dwellers’ rallies are vividly etched in the minds of many. ‘V.P. Singh camp’, a slum colony wedged away between Tughlakabad railway station and the CONCOR container terminal nearby, was named after him because of his efforts to provide its residents with ration cards.

In his last years, he grew closer to Gandhian-socialist movements outside the organised political space. His political skills and understanding were a product of the breadth of his associations. This ability to straddle diverse political spaces is no longer to be seen in Indian politics.

Farmers and adivasis struggling to hold on to their land and forest rights in the face of forceful acquisition by the government and corporate groups would have found in the ex-PM — for that was when his notion of Bahujan samaj assumed a broader dimension — an ever-willing supporter.

LESSONS FOR US

The Aam Aadmi Party, which appears to identify itself with the early socialists, or so one hopes, could draw lessons from the unsavoury consequences of earlier anti-Congress political movements.

A measure of ideological clarity can help in avoiding the pitfalls of 1989.

Anti-Congressism should not become the sole yardstick for expanding its political base.

The new party should strive to inhabit the space occupied by VP in his last years, with one foot in formal politics and one outside it.

That would be the best tribute to a man who showed the courage to shake up a centuries-old caste order, who stood by the downtrodden generally neglected by news channels, and who began as a crusader against corruption, but went way beyond that.