Sometimes a story has such a pure ring to it, you can’t be bothered whether it’s real or apocryphal. A day after the Congress’s defeat in the three heartland states earlier this month, a friend with reliable access to the party came by and related a tale so succulent it could only belong to the Congress. Guess why some Congressmen believe the result is a happy one, he ventured; the way they look at it is that it has helped them finally get rid of Kamal Nath and Ashok Gehlot, two more of the old order — often cited within the party as obstacles to the Rahul Gandhi scheme — gone. Pity the house was charred, but hey, the good news is the rodents got roasted too.
He proceeded, his account not entirely juiced yet, to reveal a WhatsApp notice that announced: “90 MINUTES WITH RAHUL GANDHI, Politician, Indian National Congress”. The date: December 11, 2023. The venue: 1880, a Singapore club. The issue: in the light of the approaching general elections, “pressing issues and the future of democracy in India”. He let his eyes twinkle; he needed to do no more.
Rahul Gandhi didn’t eventually make his Singapore assignation, but that’s barely the point. There indeed are pressing issues among us, and ever-mounting concerns over the future of democracy, but they need to be addressed and countered here at home, not at conclaves abroad. There are a hundred good things that can be said of Rahul Gandhi, the art and practise of the politics of power to do the good he wants done aren’t among them. Why, for instance, would he undertake such a long and laudable mass-contact endeavour as the Bharat Jodo Yatra and state along the way that it was neither for politics nor the Congress party? Whatever was it for? The Congress is India’s first party of power, and Rahul Gandhi is who he is and where he is as a consequence of that truth. Neither the Congress nor Rahul Gandhi can, or should, exist without the institutional memory and the purposes of political power.
The Congress is a family-held court and has best functioned as that for decades — command flows from the top, command is followed, and that is how what gets done in the Congress gets done. It’s all down to the Gandhi name and the de facto supremacies and supplications it enjoys. Take the Gandhis away and you may not be able to count the number of ways the organisation splits in a single breath. Yes, Mallikarjun Kharge is president of the Congress but real power remains in the hands of the Gandhis, they are the essential glue to whatever remains.
Recall the day in March 1998 that Sitaram Kesri was removed as Congress president and Sonia Gandhi assumed charge — it was effected with the swiftness of a coup by the loyalist vanguard; almost its first act was for a group to barge into the 24 Akbar Road AICC headquarters, wrench off Kesri’s nameplate from the party president’s chamber and nail in Sonia Gandhi’s.
Rahul Gandhi — and this is least of all for him to deny — is a central pillar of the Congress court. That central pillar very often decides to position itself in a way that the court cannot proceed. For very long, the stalemate over electing a new president to replace Sonia Gandhi’s holding act was a consequence of such positioning.
It must be said he inhabits, and seldom omits to articulate, the central ideas of the Constitution and the politics of compassion, plurality and inclusion which he believes are gravely imperilled. When he resigned as Congress president in 2019, his parting missive had, in fact, presaged some of the darkness that has now come into open play. “The attack on our country and our cherished Constitution that is taking place is designed to destroy the fabric of our nation,” he wrote with cold clarity, “The stated objectives of the RSS, capture of our country’s institutional structure, is now complete… The capture of power will result in unimaginable levels of violence and pain for India. Farmers, unemployed youngsters, women, tribals, Dalits and minorities are going to suffer the most. The impact on our economy and nation’s reputation will be devastating…” He spoke too in that letter of his “commitment” to fight the challenge “as a soldier”.
But does his demeanour reflect those intentions? Has he been able to invent strategies — or display commitments — that will invoke that battle? Is he willing to give his worldview the legs and the energy to compete in the race, much less win it? Is the objective of power even in his crosshairs? He has kept his party effectively confounded on much of that. A former aide who worked closely with him post 2015 laughed out loud when asked to describe Rahul’s style of functioning and mindset in a sentence. “He is impatient, he is inattentive, he is inconsistent, he is excited by an idea one day and he has forgotten about it the next, he is great at procrastinating, he will shift positions, he will run away, one moment you think you’ve convinced him about something, the next moment he’s slipped out. He was right to feel frustrated by the so-called Sonia old guard, but he was party president for two years, enough time to have restructured. He either did not have the will, or failed at it, or merely let things drift because he did not want the responsibilities of taking full grip. Rahul Gandhi, he never completes the circle…” Neither, it would appear, do some of his colleagues. The default manner in which they turned to blame EVMs for their defeats — the irony remains that they also boasted of a higher tally of votes than the Bharatiya Janata Party and near zero-loss of vote share — is probably symptomatic of that. Doesn’t bode well for a party that will want to prevent a hat-trick of Lok Sabha routs in less than six months from now.
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in
