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Deja vu

B. S. Raghavan

NEWS of recent happenings in India on the political and financial fronts must have acted like a deja vu effect on old timers who had been following public affairs in the country since Independence. They must have been overcome by a strange feeling that t hey are reliving the early years of the Nehru era. They must also have been realising the truth of the French aphorism that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

First, the political burlesque surrounding the threat of resignation of the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Knowing as we do that Mr Vajpayee seeks to model himself on Jawaharlal Nehru, it is not surprising that he is eagerly taking a leaf out o f Nehru's book. For, it was the well-honed technique of Nehru to throw in his resignation whenever he found the going sticky. That was how he worsted Purushottam Das Tandon, when the latter sought to assert the supremacy of the Congress Party and his pos ition as the Congress President over the Government.

Nehru used to brandish the threat of quitting office off and on as a way of securing reaffirmation from the party flock and the people at large of their unflinching faith in his leadership. When, soon after the Chinese aggression, the party with one voic e wanted him to drop V. K. Krishna Menon from the Cabinet on the charge of taking the country to disaster, Nehru played the same card but found that he had done so once too often. He had the mortification of being told in an open party meeting that he ha d better go if, in his view, Menon took precedence over the country.

Mr Vajpayee too needs to be careful not to use the ploy lightly. He would be the first to understand that there is considerable uneasiness within the BJP, the National Democratic Alliance and the country over his weakening grip over many aspects of gover nance, and he cannot expect the resignation card to turn up trumps every time. Indeed, it is a safe principle for one in top position not to use the card at all, except when he means it and packs up and leaves the instant he makes the announcement.

Next, the ruckus over the UTI. Some 45 years ago, there was one Haridas Mundhra whom the Life Insurance Corporation (the only public sector financial institution in those days flushed with funds) bailed out of a financial scrape by buying the shares of h is company worth a little more than one crore of rupees. The amount was minuscule by present day reckoning, but there was an uproar in Parliament and outside on the ground that the funds of the LIC were misused with the ulterior motive of obliging a priv ate individual; at the behest of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, who was said to have pressured the Chairman and Managing Director of the Corporation (who belonged to the twice-born ICS) through his Finance Secretary, H. M. Patel (anothe r ICS), to make the shady deal. The most embarrassing part of the commotion from Nehru's point of view was that the matter was raised in the Lok Sabha by his own son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi!

The Government appointed the then Chief Justice of Bombay High Court, M. C. Chagla, as a Commission of Inquiry to go into the transaction. Chagla was merciless in exposing the prevarications in the testimony of Krishnamachari and Patel, and to Nehru's ch agrin, not only held open hearings but broadcast them by installing a public address system. His report was scathing on the mala fides of the purchase, as also on Krishnamachari whom it found untruthful and unreliable as a witness.

There is less chance of the truth coming out in the case of the UTI, in view of the brazen character of public life and the shamelessness of politicians since those days.