RESULT OF BJP ATTEMPTS

The logic they had advanced was very queer indeed. They came out with the slogan of uniting the "socialist forces" which include people like George Fernandes and Ram Krishna Hegde who are openly backing the BJP and are part of the government led by it. And now the Sharad Yadav group has merged with the Samta Party and Lok Shakti, evidently in a move to join the NDA as a bigger entity. Some were seeking to achieve precisely the same aim in the name of uniting the "erstwhile Janata Dal Parivar." Efforts are on to rope in Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal (BJD) also.

This split in the Janata Dal is one more example of how the BJP has been trying to disrupt other parties in order to break the unity of the Left and secular forces which can pose to it a serious challenge. This was preceded by the BJP's attempt to egg on Sharad Pawar so that the anti-BJP votes are split and the BJP has a cake walk in the coming polls. The Shiv Sena-BJP coalition decided on recommending the dissolution of the Maharashtra assembly only after ensuring this thing in the context of the state. The BJP has been working on other parties as well with precisely the same aim.

It will be noted here that while Gujral had won the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat in 1998 with the not so tacit support from the BJP and the Akalis, Paswan had won his Hajipur seat with similar support from the BJP and Samta Party. In the repoll in Madhepura, the BJP-Samta supported Sharad Yadav too.

However, the majority (11 members) of the Janata Dal's PAC, including the former prime minister H D Deve Gowda, veteran socialists Surendra Mohan and Madhu Dandawate, Jaipal Reddy, Shrikant Jena, C M Ibrahim and S R Bommai, have refused to accept the line of supporting or aligning with the BJP in any manner. This majority section of the PAC also commands the support of a majority chunk of the Janata Dal MLAs, MPS, former MPs, etc, in various states. This section has now expelled the defectors and elected H D Deve Gowda as president of the Janata Dal.

Here the question worth pondering is: How is it that a party which played a major role at the national level and which led two non-Congress governments in the last one decade, has come to such a sorry pass? This requires that one goes through the history of the Janata Dal in order to derive valuable lessons for the sake of its future.

HISTORY OF JANATA DAL

It will be recalled that the Janata Dal came into existence in 1989 when the issue of corruption in high places was rocking the whole country, and V P Singh had had to come out of the Congress party on this very issue. It was at that time that the centrist forces joined hands and formed the Janata Dal.

However, V P Singh was not averse to joining hands with the Left on the one hand and the BJP on the other, in order to win the November 1989 elections. V P Singh went on to pursue this line despite vehement oposition from the Left parties. However, after the elections, a clear majority eluded the Janata Dal. On the other hand, riding on the back of the Janata Dal, the BJP came to acquire 89 Lok Sabha seats while it had won a miserable two in the 1985 elections.

The Left then took the initiative to salvage the situation. It proposed that (a) the Janata Dal-led National Front must be allowed to form its government; (b) both the BJP and the Left must extend support to that government from outside; and (c) the government must be allowed to function on the basis of its own manifesto. This was precisely the arrangement that got going. The Janata Dal soon came to form its governments in several states also, including the electorally important Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in Orissa, Karnataka, Haryana, etc.

Apparently, such an arrangement was not to the liking of the BJP which continued to bring pressure on the government to make it toe the BJP line. Then, when the National Front government announced its intention to implement the Mandal commission recommendations about giving reservation to the backward classes in government jobs, the BJP suddenly panicked, fearing a loss of its mass base. While the party had initially been taking care not to openly identify itself with the Babri Masjid dispute, saying it was a plank of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, now it gave up all pretentions and began open mobilisation on this same communal issue. The then BJP president, L K Advani, began a rathyatra for the purpose, leaving a trail of riots and mayhem in its wake.

However, the Bihar state government, led by Janata Dal's Laloo Prasad Yadav, did not allow the rathyatra to proceed beyond the state; he also arrested Advani himself.

This was the point where the BJP withdrew support from the V P Singh government, causing its downfall. In Lok Sabha, the BJP and the Congress as well as a splinter group of the Janata Dal led by Chandrashekhar voted against the confidence motion tabled by prime minister V P Singh. Thus, to put the record straight, V P Singh's was the second non-Congress government that came down because of BJP. Earlier, in 1979, it was the adamant attitude adopted by Jan Sangh component of the Janata Party on the double membership issue that had brought down the Morarji Desai government; only some time later, precisely the same component had walked out of the Janata Party to form the BJP.

After the V P Singh government fell, the Congress extended support to the defectors led by Chandrashekhar who formed a government. This continued for four odd months only, followed by general elections and formation of a Congress government led by P V Narasimha Rao. Janata Dal fared badly in the 1991 elections. But the BJP was able to increase its strength.

BIRTH OF UNITED FRONT

The Rao government was voted out in the 1996 general elections. Not only its IMF-World Bank dictated policies created discontent among the masses in general, the government also alienated the minorities by its role at the time the RSS-led lobby was out to destroy the Babri Masjid. The BJP emerged as the single biggest group after these elections. But the Janata Dal too got as many as 96 seats.

The then president, Dr S D Sharma, invited the BJP to form a government when the Congress made an inexplicable delay in sending to him its letter extending support for a non-BJP government. However, the BJP government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee lasted for only 13 days and had had to stage an ignominious exit when they failed to make any of the non-BJP non-Congress MPs defect, despite all the allurements of money and office they doled out.

The Left parties and CPI(M) again took the initiative and brought together all the non-BJP non-Congress parties on one platform; it was thus that the United Front (UF) was born with the participation of 13 parties. The CPI(M) and some minor parties were part of the United Front but did not join the government and extended support to it from outside. The then Karnataka chief minister H D Deve Gowda was elected to lead the UF government.

But the Congress party could not for long reconcile with its status of a party out of power, and began to exert pressure on the government. Deve Gowda had had to resign. But the situation was salvaged through a compromise which allowed the same Janata Dal's I K Gujral to form another government. However, the same attitude on part of the Congress did not allow the Gujral government too to last long, and foisted yet another election on the country.

The 1998 Lok Sabha elections saw the Janata Dal in a very pitiable state; its strength came down from 96 to just six.

REASONS FOR SORRY STATE

But one does not have to go far to seek the reasons. Even though the Janata Dal was the biggest constituent of the United Front, and had had eight or nine ministers in the two United Front governments, it failed to leave any solid impact on the people's psyche. It did take certain valuable steps in the foreign policy sphere and some other areas but, obviously, they were not enough to project the party as a credible alternative to the Congress and the BJP. The moves initiated by Deve Gowda as prime minister regarding education, drinking water, etc, also failed to bring dividends to the Janata Dal.

The Janata Dal was born on the slogan of removal of backwardness of the country as a whole as well as of specific classes and sections of the Indian people. But the party could not project any record of achievement in this area either.

On the other hand, the internal bickerings and successive splits in the party further marred its image among the people. Already during the Narasimha Rao regime, two sections of the party, one led by Fernandes-Nitish Kumar duo and the other by maverick Ajit Singh had quit the party; the former formed the Samta Party that is today an ally of the BJP. Then Laloo Yadav walked out and formed the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) that fared better than the parent party and secured 17 Lok Sabha seats in 1998.

Behind all these bickerings and splits lies the Janata Dal leadership's dismal failure to build up the party's organisation on the basis of policies and principles. This was coupled with the leadership's failure to launch mass movements and agitations on issues affecting the common mass.

The fact is that, in so far as Janata Dal leaders are concerned, all their political activity has been confined to confabulations at the top levels; it is the leaders who have been deciding everything without much role for the rank and file. The latter were never educated about the Janata Dal's aims and objectives; as a result, they never brought any pressure on the leaders to abide by the party's ideology.

It is this failure of the party leaders and cadres which has brought the party to the pitiable situation in which it finds itself today.

ALL IS NOT LOST

Now that the split has already taken place, those who split the Janata Dal at the behest of the BJP and its equally unscrupulous allies, and just for the sake of power and pelf, will have to certainly give an account of their actions. They will have to explain, for example, if the Janata Dal led two governments in order to keep the BJP away from power, why they have suddenly developed a fondness for the same BJP? Has the danger of communalism, posed by the BJP, RSS and its frontal organisations receded a bit? Has the nation's unity been secured beyond all threats? And whom did they want to benefit by splitting the Janata Dal and joining the NDA? The people are not going to spare them of such questions.

However, given the fact that the majority of the Janata Dal's PAC is still opposed to rallying to the BJP camp, either openly or under the facade of some entity proposed by those like Fernandes, Hegde and Sharad Yadav, one can definitely say that all is not lost. As said, a majority of the legislators (and presumably of the rank and file) is still with the parent party and can be mobilised for the sake of the party's resurrection.