At Udaipur, the Indian National Congress undertook a brainstorming session. An explicit inference was that the party was amid excessive challenges. Appropriate correctives were required for exceptional solutions. A comprehensive overhaul of the party’s working attributes beckon. Even earlier, utterances of a similar bent have been made, but the subsequent treaded path eluded success. Other than invectives against the ruling central dispensation, the observable decisions from the Udaipur conclave has been the possibility of Rahul Gandhi returning as party President, later this year, and a march or padyatra across the length of the country in October for hopefully accruing more attention and adherents.
Utterances of battling alleged communal and reactionary forces are a staple of most political parties in India. The Congress keeps up its ante against the BJP-led NDA dispensation, accusing it of promoting a divisive, communal agenda. The BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leaves no stone unturned to point out that religious appeasement and actuation of tangible communal polarisation is the handiwork of the Congress, followed by other self-styled secular parties. Harping upon alleged misrule, corruption, and unfair appeasement of some minority communities, during the era of Congress rule, continues to lend credence to the BJP leadership’s fulminations against that party. Therefore, the Congress’s averment against communalism is unlikely to evoke much enthusiastic responses from the electorate.
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The Congress undoubtedly offers scope for an ecumenical, holistic approach to governance and politics. Nonetheless, strong values, effective leadership, competent workers, and regional leaders endowed with strong voter base are at a steep discount within the party. These are the structural shortcomings which require correctives. But still, there has been no discernible effort by the party towards such objectives. The dynastic pattern of leadership with seemingly diminishing efficacy has possibly gotten so deeply entrenched within the party’s structural layers that whatever laudable objectives might be enumerated, it tumbles over the proverbial crumbling edge of the abyss, disappearing into oblivion. Sonia Gandhi speaks of overcoming all challenges. Her son, Rahul Gandhi, spells out that endeavours for rectification of the Congress is akin to a fight for his life.
There are many credits to the Congress. Although opposed to partition during liberation from British colonial rule, the Congress gave in to the inevitable and accepted partition to stem further bloodshed through inflammatory religious rhetoric. Post-independence, after August 15, 1947, the Congress ruled. The government had a titan-like PM Jawaharlal Nehru at the helm; he was assisted by very able political colleagues, advisors, and experts. Gradually they built the foundations of modern, stable, and progressive India. While newly liberated countries across Asia, Africa and South America often got stuck in a cleft of misrule andsocial turbulence, the Congress Party dispensation successfully provided India a framework of parliamentary democratic stability, social coherence, and sturdy economic progress.
During concluding years of ’60s of the last century, the Congress suffered certain electoral reverses. By the early ’70s of the twentieth century the party had regained its pre-eminent political position across the country. Meanwhile, Jawaharlal Nehru and his able successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had passed into history. The country was ruled by Nehru’s daughter, the redoubtable Indira Gandhi. From Olympian heights of political success, she descended to political waterloo in the concluding years of the 1970s. But, by 1980 she was back as the country’s unquestioned leader and ruler. But then, unable to trust anybody except her kith and kin, Indira Gandhi built a policy of “Dynasty above all”. She initially propelled her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, as her political heir. When he died during stunt-flying an aircraft in June of 1980, she selected her elder son, Rajiv Gandhi, as her political successor.
Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi succeeded her as the country’s Prime Minister. When he was killed in 1991, the party initially chose a capable leader in the person of P V Narasimha Rao who became PM and governed creditably until 1996. That year, the Congress, under his tutelage, lost the general elections. Thereafter, Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, Sonia Gandhi, was made party president in 1998. The Congress’s miserable defeats in five State assembly elections, held this year, have bespoken its political regression. Dynastic succession in any political party would be overlooked if it can continue to win elections and present a credible, worthy political programme. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s supposed dazzling, distinctive and overpowering attributes determine more attention and contextual criticism of them.
Whatever decisions might be taken at present and in future by Congress leadership, a brutally honest and worthwhile agenda is necessary for political success. The Indian political evolution and revolution are strongly embowered by dynamics of parliamentary democracy. Incidentally, that was the original Congress vision. The party’s leadership could effectively pursue a policy, whereby traits as inclusive growth, social justice, abolition of poverty and protection of marginalised would be credibly put forward to the people. It could actuate pulling out the Congress from its current, apparently condemnable state of affairs.
(The author is specialised in international affairs, economy, Indian politics).
