In a pocket cartoon drawn by the inimitable R.K. Laxman in 1982, a line of Congressmen stand respectfully as an imperious Indira Gandhi, holding an umbrella aloft, walks past, only to halt before one of them. She says: “OK, you there, you are the new C.M. What’s your name?”
The context for that cartoon was the hunt for a new chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, though the reason was not corruption. But it sums up the way political leaders — compelled to change a state’s chief executive either because of adverse public opinion or court directive — often choose a successor. The tendency is to pick someone who is unlikely to grow into a power centre; sometimes, the chief minister who is on his/her way out, plays a role in this selection in the hope of making a comeback after a possible exoneration.
However, this particular cartoon that I recalled seeing as a young journalist in Mumbai was referred to as a more apt summation of the way in which Indira Gandhi replaced Abdul Rehman Antulay — then embroiled in a financial scandal — with the relatively unknown Babasaheb Bhosale as chief minister of Maharashtra. Antulay himself was a lightweight when Sanjay Gandhi made him chief minister on June 9, 1980. In the closing months of 1981, The Indian Express ran an evocatively titled report: ‘Indira Gandhi as Commerce’, accusing the chief minister of forcing builders to contribute — interestingly, all through cheques — to the Indira Gandhi Pratibha Pratishtan (a trust he had set up) allegedly in exchange for cement quotas. Antulay was forced to step down in January 1982, and was exonerated only after a 12-year-long tortuous legal journey that ended in the Supreme Court. By then, his career had been almost destroyed: he was finally rehabilitated when he became union minister in UPA One.
When Babasaheb Bhosale was named to succeed A.R. Antulay, it took everyone by surprise. Though a freedom fighter and a barrister by training, he was best known for his repartee. Posterity may, however, remember him more kindly; as during his stint as CM, he introduced free education for girls till class 10, started the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court, handled the police strike that paralysed Bombay for a day with aplomb and ended the system of ‘Badwe’ (priests) at Pandharpur’s famous Vithoba temple, earning the gratitude of harassed devotees. But he was a fill-in-the-blank CM and lasted just 377 days. He was replaced by the better-known Vasantdada Patil on February 2, 1983. Patil remained in office till the next assembly elections in mid-1985.
Almost three decades later, in 2010, Ashok Chavan was asked to put in his papers as he had been accused of misusing his powers to secure flats for his relatives in the upscale Adarsh housing co-operative. Even though his name did not figure in a FIR, the Congress leadership felt that the party, facing the heat nationally on the spectrum allocation and Commonwealth Games scams, should be seen as intolerant of even a whiff of financial impropriety. Chavan had led the Congress-NCP combine to victory in the Maharashtra Assembly elections in 2009, just months after he replaced Vilasrao Deshmukh, who was forced out of office after public opinion turned against him for giving filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma a tour of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel shortly after the 26/11 terrorist attack.
Prithviraj Chavan, a central minister at the time and, most significantly, squeaky clean, was sworn in as CM in November 2010. The other two party seniors in contention for the post, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sushilkumar Shinde, had peripheral links with Adarsh. But Prithviraj Chavan’s ‘political lightweight’ reputation has meant that his efforts to cleanse Maharashtra has seen him battling both his own party men and Congress ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, with the latter breaking a 15-year-old alliance on the issue of seat sharing for the upcoming Maharashtra assembly polls.
Ironically, in the recent Lok Sabha polls, when the Congress was reduced to just two seats in Maharashtra, it was Ashok Chavan who not only won Nanded, but also helped party colleague, Rajiv Satav, secure the neighbouring seat of Hingoli. If Ashok Chavan proved his popularity — even after being sidelined — so did BJP’s B.S. Yeddyurappa. In July 2011, his party forced him to step down as Chief Minister of Karnataka, after the Lokayukta investigating cases of illegal mining indicted him. In November 2012, he quit the BJP to formally launch the Karnataka Janata Paksha. But after the BJP lost power in the State in the Assembly polls of 2013, the party started making overtures to Yeddyurappa. In January 2014, he announced the merger of his party with the BJP, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.
But, unlike in the case of the Congress and the BJP, when the leader of the party is him/herself forced to step down, control over the proxy chief minister takes on another dimension. In July 1997, Lalu Prasad Yadav was forced to step down on charges relating to the fodder scam after seven years as Chief Minister of Bihar. Filling the gap was his wife Rabri Devi, who was sworn in on July 25, 1997. Not only did she rule for the rest of the term till February 11, 1999, but the Rashtriya Janata Dal — as it was called by then — won a third term and she was sworn in as chief minister for a second time, finally demitting office on March 6, 2005.
Interestingly, while Yadav’s own political career saw more downs — last year, he was forced to resign his membership of the Lok Sabha after he was formally convicted — Rabri Devi flowered as a politician. When she became CM in 1997, she had never made a political speech. On assuming office, she took her job seriously, attending office with more diligence than her husband, following up on issues, learning on the job, even asking her husband to conduct his politics outside the family quarters. She also soon became a pro at making political speeches, even as she continued to maintain — Bharatiya Nari style — that she had done it all for her husband.
The case of AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa, who recently became the first chief minister to be convicted while in office, is closer to that of Yadav than the other examples cited above. For one, the choice of her successor was entirely hers as it was with Yadav in 1997. She had to step down at the height of her popularity, months after her party won 37 of the 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu, just as the Janata Dal/RJD stayed on in power in Bihar for eight years after Yadav quit as CM.
In Jayalalithaa’s case, this is the second time she has had to step down on corruption charges. The first time was in 2001 but, on both occasions, she chose loyalist and former minister O. Panneerselvam. Indeed, after her recent imprisonment, not only did her grief-stricken supporters hold protests, Panneerselvam also wept during his inauguration. In 2001, when he became chief minister for the first time, he proved his credentials as a reliable stand-in by stepping down to make room for her after she was acquitted six months later. In his brief innings as CM, he even refused to use the chair she had occupied.
Indira Gandhi would have approved.
