Talking Turkey: The unspoken dilemma

The crushing defeat of the Congress at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the general election highlights a central dilemma of the grand old organisation after the Nehru era. After a brief interregnum of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi took over, and, despite her tempestuous reign with its triumphs and reverses, the baton was passed on to her elder son Rajiv Gandhi.

Rajiv’s assassination led to P.V. Narasimha Rao assuming charge even as Rajiv’s widow Sonia Gandhi mourned the loss in private. The Congress was somewhat in the wilderness until party stalwarts pleaded with Mrs Gandhi to assume charge. It was remarkable that the Congress had to turn to a housewife with the magic surname to restore the fortunes of the party and even more astounding that this small-town Italian woman measured up to the challenge helping the party win the 2004 election and repeating the exercise five years later with even better results.

But then the dynastic succession went hopelessly wrong. The young Rahul had a wandering mind and a somewhat dilettante approach to politics. Ideally, the year 2009 was the right time for Mr Gandhi to assume charge of the United Progressive Alliance Government Mark II, but he was not ready for the job and Dr Manmohan Singh had to soldier on under the awkward but debilitating system of a dual-power arrangement because he was keeping the seat warm for Mr Rahul Gandhi.

Mrs Gandhi was performing her maternal duties as she understood them — her obligation to the illustrious family she had married into — in preparing her son for the top political post. With the 2014 election in mind, he was appointed the party vice-president, one notch below his mother. His campaign in Uttar Pradesh, among other states, yielded meagre results.

There was an inevitability about Mr Gandhi’s appointment as the chief campaigner for the general election, but he showed that he remained an amateur in politics, in his management of the campaign, in his unfocused television interviews and his rambling speeches. Yet he was weighed down by his legacy and desperately sought to measure up to the challenge.

What now? The resignation drama might well be played out, but posturing is hardly the answer to the formidable disaster that has struck the party. The dilemma for the Congress is acute because the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is the essential glue that keeps the party together, yet the heir apparent has proved unequal to the job.

No wonder a section of the partymen are rooting for his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to take over. She is more in the mould of her grandmother Indira, but is burdened by the weight of the business dealings of her husband Robert Vadra, already the target of the BJP.

There are no easy answers to the Congress dilemma. The “Congress culture”, as it has come to be known, always had an element of sycophancy and patronage politics. Even Nehru suffered some of these traits because over time the Congress became an efficient election-fighting machine indulging where required in caste arithmetic and gathering a war chest come election time. The tasks were allotted to weighty men according to their métier.

With successive elections, the Congress machinery became smug and as Opposition on-slaughts took individual states away, the party feared no threat to its central citadel.

Indira Gandhi was both an innovator and empire builder. She first challenged the hold of the old guard after her father’s death by splitting the party and then split it again to cement her control.

In the process, Indira destroyed the party ethos by inordinately relying on wheeler-dealers and starving the traditional roots of the party. Ends became more important than means, and her younger son Sanjay Gandhi became an extra-constitutional centre of power. As fate would have it, Sanjay died in a plane accident soon after the country lived through 18 months of Emergency rule.

Even though Indira was soundly trounced in the first post-Emergency general election before her phoenix-like rise again, the Congress had lost something of its magic in the transformation it was subjected to. For many old-time Congressmen, their party was like religion, and they sadly shook their heads as they watched Indira’s Communist-like methods to decimate the Opposition. The other Congress, called Congress (Organisation), could never capture the elan of the original, and after a contentious stint in the first post-Indira government, bit the dust.

That Mrs Gandhi was able to revive the Congress (R), before the qualification was dropped, stands to her credit. But Narasimha Rao deserves praise for completing his five-year term despite his government’s minority status and gave the country its first major economic reforms by lending his then finance minister Manmohan Singh political support.

In times of crises, Congressmen have nowhere to run but to the comforting folds of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. But the First Family’s options are running out.

The contortions the Congress had to undergo in the UPA’s two terms to keep the family succession alive worked up to a point in the first term but came a cropper in the second, ultimately leading to the disaster of the 2014 results.

The question then boils down to: What can Mrs Sonia Gandhi do to revive the party? By all accounts, she is still intent on hoping against hope that Mr Gandhi will become politically savvy after the euphoria of Narendra Modi’s unprecedented victory begins to wear off. There will certainly be marathon introspective sessions analysing the causes of the party’s disaster.

The unspoken dilemma is: Can the Congress survive without the family? All indications suggest that in that event it would become another regional faction or factions adding to the plethora of formations that dot the country’s political scene.

For many Congressmen, hope never dies about seeing the regeneration of their party, with which Independent India’s 67-year history and its pre-independence avatar are inextricably intertwined.

The writer can be contacted at snihalsingh@gmail.com