| Rajiv
Gandhi appeared to adopt a bolder approach when he took over as
Prime Minister on the assassination of his mother in October 1984.
But he too found it necessary to accompany the programme of easing
controls by punitive raids on leading business houses as if to keep
them terrorized and aware of their lowly place in the Indian power
hierarchy. He chose in V.P.Singh a finance minister who positively
revelled in ordering such raids as a passport to political
prominence which he had not enjoyed earlier. His calculations proved
to be right. That is one index of India's anti-business political
culture.
As is well known, non-alignment in
the East-West conflict, with a clear tilt in favour of the Soviet
Union, and secularism, never coherently and meaningfully defined by
anyone in authority, have been the other two pillars of the Nehru-Indira-Rajiv
order. Obviously, non- alignment is over with the collapse of the
Soviet bloc, however unwilling its proponents may be to recognize
this reality, even after the ridiculous stance it pushed them into
at the time of the war against Iraq by the US-led coalition for the
liberation of Kuwait and the destruction of the awesome military
machine Saddam Hussain had assembled. Thus apparently only one of
the three pillars - secularism - can be said to be still in place.
Surely, one pillar cannot support a structure so far sustained by
three. But before I deal with the new situation, it would be in
order to examine the leadership and the support base system of the
Congress.
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