Cabinet then & now

Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel at the latter's residence in New Delhi in April 1949. - THIAGARAJAN

Collective responsibility, key to the functioning of Cabinet government, is fortified by candid dissent and careful responses, both in private.

COLLECTIVE responsibility is a frayed doctrine, but it is very essential to the functioning of Cabinet government. In Israel it hardly exists. In coalitions, it suffers stress. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-II Cabinet does not present a striking picture of cohesion, prompting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to say that while he welcomed a dialogue between Ministers, since we are a democracy, it is not good that Ministers air their differences in public. Views should be first aired in the Cabinet.

On September 6, at an interaction with a small group of editors at his residence, the Prime Minister denied that the existence of multiple voices within his government was a sign of drift or discordance. We are a democracy. The Congress itself is a movement and within the Congress party, this is not today I think right from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, there have been differences of opinion and they have been allowed to be expressed in party fora, even within the government. So, I do not think the expression of differences on the part of Ministers or on the part of party functionaries is necessarily a bad thing.

Manmohan Singh said his Cabinet functioned with a degree of cohesion that I believe no other Cabinet has functioned. I ask each one of our senior colleagues to express their views, and then I sum up the consensus. He added that this Cabinet had functioned with a much greater degree of cohesion than the Cabinet under Jawaharlal Nehru. I think there were daily differences, exchange of letters between Sardar [Vallabhbhai] Patel and Panditji. And in [Indira] Gandhi's Cabinet for example, when Morarji [Desai] was the Deputy PM, journalists could go from one Cabinet Minister to another Cabinet Minister and hear different kinds of stories. That I can say is not happening. ( The Hindu, September 7, 2010).

The Prime Minister was absolutely right. Only, there are letters and letters. Those between Nehru and Patel in 1950 give the lie to the claims made energetically by interested persons that there were no serious differences between them. Is there no significance to the incontrovertible fact that while the Sangh Parivar intensely hates Nehru, it hero-worships Patel? The reasons are obvious. The last volume of Sardar Patel's Correspondence, edited by Durga Das, reflects the deep divide. They fought through proxies. Rafi Ahmad Kidwai was Patel's favourite target. Nehru defended him strongly.

In this category fall Gulzari Lal Nanda's letters to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Arjun Singh's to P.V. Narasimha Rao. But there is correspondence of an altogether different kind which Jawaharlal Nehru encouraged. The volumes of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru bear witness to that. Letters in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, confirm the impression that Nehru, for all his strong opinions, was willing to hear the views of his Cabinet colleagues. They, on their part, did not leak the letters to their favourites in the press to serve as material for obviously inspired stories.

Harekrishna Mahtab died a discredited man. The report of Justice J.R. Mudholkar, a former Supreme Court Judge, as well as of Justice Sarjoo Prasad damned him completely. He was found to have received bribes from kendu leaf traders when he was Chief Minister of Orissa. A trusted middle-person was Sophy Kelly, Principal of Hill Grange High School in Mumbai. They had become friends when he was Governor of the State of Bombay before its bifurcation; she was often summoned to Bhubaneswar as a state guest. She as well as other go-betweens gave false evidence. (Vide the writer's Ministers' Misconduct, 1973; Chapter 6 on Resourceful Mahtab; pages 183-223).

Earlier, in the Union Cabinet, apparently, he was brimming with ideas. A little over a year after the Constitution came into force, Mahtab, as Minister for Commerce and Industry, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, on March 23, 1951, forwarding a note on constitutional amendments which were then under consideration (NMML, H.K. Mahtab Papers I Instalment; File No. 21; Correspondence with Cabinet Ministers). It had a touch of the flamboyance for which he was notorious.

Not being a lawyer, but having had the opportunity of working out the Constitution in detail, the defects in the Constitution appear to me to be more real than what they would appear to a lawyer or one who has no experience of details of administration. With all respect to lawyers, I am inclined to think that they are usually prone to be guided by the tendency to follow precedents and also to quibble. For the purposes of administration, expressions in the Constitution must not be vague and incapable of definite connotations. I would therefore suggest that the Constitution may be looked upon, not from the legalistic point of view but from the point of view of administration, which has got a definite objective in view, namely to bring about a better society for the future. Let not the objective of developing a welfare state in the country and creating a classless democratic society, not only having political democracy but economic democracy in which the common man will be raised from his existing level, be lost sight of, as it has been when the Constitution was drafted.

He urged that Article 14, the guarantee of equality, needed amendment to provide protection for the poor and handicapped; a hint of reservation. So did clause (6) of Article 19 which guaranteed the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property. It was omitted in 1979 by an amendment sponsored by the Janata Party. It is now a constitutional right (Article 300-A) that protects the citizen against executive action devoid of legislative sanction. Finally, Mahtab urged amendment of Article 31 on acquisition of property on payment of compensation. The man foresaw a lot.

Humayun Kabir, Minister of Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs, was a highly cerebral person. He wrote to Nehru on May 24, 1962. The letter does credit to both its writer and its recipient. It reflected the political culture of the times. I have from time to time sent you my suggestions on various problems. As I have made it clear, they are only for your consideration and I am glad that you have occasionally approved of them.

I have recently been thinking a good deal about Kashmir and have discussed the problem briefly with Shrimati Indira Gandhi and Dr Zakir Husain. While not necessarily agreeing with all my views, both felt that they may offer a basis for further discussion. I have now recorded them in a note and am taking the liberty of sending the note to you.

The note began thus: Whatever may be the attitude of the Security Council or outside nations towards Kashmir, I would submit for the Prime Minister's consideration that we may ourselves frame some proposals for a final settlement of the issues. Apart from the impact of this dispute on our external relations, there is unfortunately an impact on our internal life and in some respects this is even more dangerous. Whether we like it or not, events in Pakistan have an impact on the relations of the communities in India and vice versa [emphasis added].

How very true indeed. Little did Nehru realise that his short-sighted policies on Kashmir, based on Sheikh Abdullah's continued imprisonment (1953-64) and his hard line towards Pakistan, fuelled chauvinism of a kind none loathed more than he. As he wrote to Sheikh Abdullah, on August 25, 1952, he had privately decided against the promised plebiscite as far back as in 1948. He nonetheless continued publicly, in the most extravagant terms, to reiterate his pledges on plebiscite. In August 1953 he entered into an agreement with Mohammad Ali Bogra, Prime Minister of Pakistan, for a plebiscite, assuring Karan Singh, soon thereafter, that but for it the United Nations would have intervened. Kashmir was in an upheaval after Sheikh Abdullah's dismissal as Premier and his arrest on August 9, 1953.

Kabir did not, of course, know of Nehru's private resolve and harped on a theme everyone does to this day: Pragmatically the conversion of the ceasefire line into the permanent boundary thus seems to be the only possible solution. Nehru offered it to Liaquat Ali Khan in 1948 and Jaswant Singh to Strobe Talbott in 1998, 50 years later. Whether this would accord with Pakistan's interests occurred to neither. We were masters of superior strength.

Nehru replied on May 26, 1962, promptly as he always did, from Chashmashahi Guest House in Srinagar: I do not think that the various proposals you make are at present feasible. No less divorced from reality were Kabir's proposals, on June 11, 1962, on the development of valleys in Kashmir. Nehru replied the same day.

On June 20, 1964, Kabir repeated them to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, throwing in, for good measure, the idea of a common market between India and Pakistan. Minister for External Affairs Swaran Singh also received the letter of June 20, and he replied at length on August 17. Pakistan was not agreeable to any of the proposals, needless to add.

Collective responsibility is fortified by candid expressions of dissent and careful, polite responses to them, both in private. A different ball game is played these days in which civility and privacy are at a discount.