| Kamaraj Plan?
After India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China, the stock of the Congress in general and Jawaharlal Nehru in particular fell in the eyes of the voting public. The party, Kamaraj felt, needed a booster shot.
Part of this plan was to bring in new faces as ministers and chief ministers while getting the old and established guard to leave their posts and return to work for the party.
Another theory, widely accepted, was that this was Kamaraj’s (and Nehru’s) plan to weed out the old guard, leaders such as Morarji Desai, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jagjivan Ram, Biju Patnaik and S.K. Patil, many of who could stand in the way of Indira’s eventual elevation as PM.
The plan succeeded. When Nehru passed away, Shastri was elected, mainly because Kamaraj backed him against Desai. And, when Shastri died suddenly, Indira became PM because Kamaraj brought the old guard around. The loser was once again Desai.
However, unlike Shastri, Indira proved to be smarter, soon cutting Kamaraj down to size.
In 1969, Kamaraj entered the Lok Sabha, where, as leader of the old guard, he tried to remove Indira. In the ensuing battle, Indira outwitted the old guard, the Congress split, with Kamaraj and a handful of his old associates taking over Indian National Congress (Organisation).
However, he couldn’t recover from his loss against Indira and eventually passed away on 2 October, 1975.
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