The Congress party will be indifferent to history if it doesn’t put on its website the report of the A.K. Antony Committee that was tasked to go into the causes of the party’s debacle in the recent Lok Sabha election. The report has just been submitted to party chief Sonia Gandhi, but its contents are not available for public scrutiny, though one may guess at what it contains from comments made to the media by Mr Antony on Friday.
At any rate, a case can be made for making public at least a redacted version of the report if some interlocutors of the Antony panel spoke to it in confidence. But no case can be made for the suppression of the panel’s findings, especially as these deal with a historical defeat of the Congress, and the country deserves to be given a chance to understand what went wrong, as the party sees it. We must understand the era of Stalin is long past.
If the Congress cannot afford indifference to history, can it disregard the present? It can avoid giving that impression if it calls a Congress session to debate the debacle and places the report for discussion at that forum. That will give sinew to its reputation of being a democratic party.
Without going into details, the impression Mr Antony has conveyed is that Mrs Gandhi and party vice-president Rahul cannot be blamed for the defeat. He also gave the impression that they ought to be kept above criticism by party colleagues. He did this when he suggested that those in the party who had come out castigating Mr Gandhi didn’t have the party’s interests at heart. This is a pity. The veteran Congress leader is being completely out of step with the times. More, he is being unfair to the Gandhis themselves since right after the poll results were known Rahul stepped forward and took responsibility for it.
For all his drawbacks, Rahul has been a democratising presence in his party. He sought to introduce the system of “primaries” to check the old trend of giving party tickets to fellow dynasts or to those who remain loyal to the traditional patronage system. Many believe this led to a degree of internal sabotage in the election. There were serious political and organisational failures as well, besides the rapidly declining reputation of the UPA-2 government in the run-up to the polls.
There are obviously multiple causes of the Congress’ disastrous showing, but the top leaders can’t ever say they are not to blame.
