On the night the Congress’s Himachal Pradesh government was brought to the brink by a revolt in the legislature party — the revolt remains in ferment and the government, the only toehold the Congress has in the north, is yet to be secured from the brink — an email floated into my inbox. It was from one of those who set up Rahul Gandhi’s hugely voter-intensive engagements in foreign locations and its timing was as odd as it was unsurprising. Quoted verbatim, this is what the mail said: “Rahul delivering as I send this the keynote address at a Global Leadership Summit at Jesus College, University of Cambridge.” Attached came a photograph of Rahul Gandhi at a lectern.

The question sprung up, like the irrepressible jack-in-the-box, yet again: is he the man who’d have us believe he will see off the authoritarian, cultist, divisive majoritarianism of Narendra Modi? He symbolises a pack of good, even noble, ideas, but is he committed to give them bone, blood and body?

Last seen and heard, Rahul Gandhi was on the second chapter of his yatra somewhere in Bihar where the dice had just turned courtesy a no-longer surprising turncoat act by Nitish Kumar. Last seen and heard, Rahul’s spokesperson-in-chief was telling whoever wanted to listen that the unravelling of the Bihar Mahagathbandhan would have no impact on the political fortunes of INDIA. Last seen and heard, INDIA had neither instituted a central secretariat in Delhi, a promise properly buried, nor bothered to push the refresh button on the active membership of INDIA — who’s still part of it, who isn’t any longer. We hear of a rally planned mid-March in Mumbai but not much more. The BJP’s first list of candidates is out. Is a final INDIA arrangement on shared seats in place? Between who and who? Is Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress, for instance, on board? The answer could be yes, the answer could be no. A precise answer, it turns out, is a question: who knows?

There was a time that question had a credible, tangible answer. No longer. We shall come to that answer a little tangentially, though not entirely off context. Late last month, the Congress ceded the Bharuch Lok Sabha seat to the Aam Aadmi Party as part of an election tie-up. The Bharuch exchange meant more than just one parliamentary seat given up for another elsewhere. Bharuch is where the late Ahmed Patel came from. Bharuch is where his son, Faisal Patel, wanted to contest on a Congress ticket from. The Patel scions — Faisal and sister Mumtaz — took the spurning in their stride, expressing no more publicly than “disappointment”. But other Patel loyalists took it hard. Close aide and five-term Lok Sabha MP (currently in the Rajya Sabha) Naran Rathwa left the Congress along with son, Sangramsinh Rathwa, and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. This wouldn’t have happened while Ahmed Patel was alive. This probably wouldn’t have even happened if Ahmed Patel’s legacy hadn’t been so casually disregarded by the Congress.

A lot would not have happened with Ahmed Patel around. There’s little exaggeration in arguing he is the man the Congress misses most as it hurtles towards another monumental challenge this summer. The Congress sorely requires an Ahmed Patel, someone with the depth of understanding and the deftness of touch he possessed. What’s tragically not clear, among a whole catalogue of things that the Congress of today offers no clarity on, is whether the party even realises there is a critical vacancy Patel left behind and that there is need to fill it. In fact, appointed courtiers of the court may argue the vacancy no longer exists, that it has been seen to with the appointment of K.C. Venugopal as AICC general-secretary in charge of the organisation. But that would be self-deception of a degree that the Congress has come to patent; it would be on a level with arguing that Rahul Gandhi is the party MP from Wayanad, nothing more. That allows him all-time access to whim and wantonness; that also shields him from responsibilities that Rahul Gandhi has declined to shoulder while he remains the de facto Congress arbiter. It’s what can happen with Venugopal as head of organisational matters; it’s what would not have got a free pass on the watch of Ahmed Patel, often berated, albeit without being named, as chieftain of the party’s ‘old guard’.

Ahmed Patel, as my colleague, Sanjay Jha, wrote in an apt assessment in this newspaper upon his passing in November 2020, “wasn’t a mass leader but carved a space for himself in national politics with his dedication, hard work and extraordinary ability to win people’s trust, his humility and willingness to help people earning him popularity across the political spectrum. He was Sonia Gandhi’s eyes and ears during her first tenure as Congress president. His word was blindly accepted as hers, both within and outside the Congress. Patel’s behind-the-scenes management and unselfish loyalty were key to Sonia’s 18 years as party president being bereft of any major mishap or embarrassment.”

He was often tagged with clichés such as behind-the-scenes operator, backroom boy and crisis manager; he may have been all of those but he most certainly was more. It would be foolhardy to reduce Ahmed Patel to any or all of those descriptions. He was the pivot on which the essentials of Congress politics and politicking leaned and turned during the Sonia years, also the Congress’s finest in recent decades. The sheer volume of his daily, and mostly unpublicised, engagements — from a disgruntled party worker to a dissenting leader, from ministers to office-bearers, from businessmen to bureaucrats, and from social activists to wheeler-dealers — would be unthinkable for most. But that is how he was able to feel the pulse of the requirements of politics and of power. He was, pertinently, also trusted and heeded by his boss.

It is beyond astonishment how and where India’s traditional party of power lost the keys to the kingdom, the tricks to acquiring power and holding on to it. It is nothing short of astonishing that they seem not only to have fallen in the hands of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah enterprise but are also being put to vigorous and profitable use. The swiftness and swag with which they began to manoeuvre and manipulate the handles of power and the divisive social impulses to appropriate advantage after assuming power in 2014 remain a most dramatic, and no less worrisome, work in progress. To devise brakes on it would require, at the very least, the re-invention of an Ahmed Patel, and a leadership keenly informed on the necessity of such a re-invention. The distance between an imperilled government in Shimla and a stage far removed in the English isles well describes it.

sankarshan.thakur@abp.in