“Millions of ordinary Congress workers throughout the country are full of enthusiasm for Congress policies and programmes,” Rajiv Gandhi had said at the Congress’s centenary session in Bombay in 1985. “But they are handicapped, for on their backs ride the brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy.”
More things change…
Over three decades later, this weekend, his son Rahul Gandhi echoed those words at the 84th Plenary of the party in Delhi as he formally assumed its presidency. The wall between the party rank and file and their leaders, he said, had to be demolished so that talented, energetic, committed, young party workers could occupy centre stage and be given tickets to contest elections rather than those who had parachuted in.
Ironically, an hour or so before he spoke, cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu, who recently “parachuted” into the Congress, got star billing at the Plenary. Hours later, a TV channel played his speech, along with one he had made at a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forum, when he was with that party. The speeches were similar, barring the names of those who came in for praise. Mr. Sidhu also revealed that he was in the party, thanks to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
A little over three months after he became Congress President, and almost 15 years after he entered politics as heir apparent, Rahul Gandhi is still battling the party system — possibly even family members — that has chosen him to lead it. If Rajiv Gandhi had spoken of power brokers a year after he had won India’s largest parliamentary mandate, Rahul Gandhi is doing so at a time when the Congress has just 48 Lok Sabha seats. It is in power only in Mizoram, Karnataka, Puducherry and Punjab. By end-2018, that number could shrink unless the Congress is able to retain Karnataka and Mizoram, or win some of the other three States that go to the polls, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
A creaking party machine, an absence of political power in most parts of the country, and entrenched interests make the task that Mr. Gandhi has said he will take on virtually impossible to achieve. He had, for instance, talked of holding elections to the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s apex decision-making committee. But perhaps mindful of history, he ended up getting himself authorised to nominate its members. P.V. Narasimha Rao, as party president, had allowed elections to the CWC at the AICC’s Tirupati session in 1992. His detractor, Arjun Singh, won by the highest margin. Sharad Pawar (who was then still in the Congress) won too. To ensure that they did not pose a challenge to him, Rao asked the entire newly-elected CWC to resign on the pretext that women and Dalits were underrepresented. He later reconstituted the CWC, including Singh and Mr. Pawar in the nominated category. For his part, Rajiv Gandhi neither held a CWC election, nor succeeded in ridding the party of its power brokers.
A crucial year
Just about a year remains for the general elections, in which Rahul Gandhi’s leadership skills will be tested. If in the time since he became a party functionary, he has not succeeded in breaking down the walls within the party and recreating the organisation, it would make more sense for him now to focus on the elections – first to the Assemblies of States including Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and then to the Lok Sabha. The signs are propitious in these States: the results of by-elections in Uttar Pradesh have sent out the message that the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not unbeatable; and in the last three the BJP also faces anti-incumbency. If it puts up a good show in the Assembly polls, the Congress would be back in the game in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections.
Mr. Gandhi has grown in confidence, and has already shed much of his image of a reluctant heir; a series of wins now would project him as the leader who can effect changes, and take on the power brokers, if not eliminate them. It would bring him that much closer to his dream of recreating a Congress party run at the top by a collegium of equals as it was in pre-Independence India, when it had stalwarts of the stature of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose and Azad, each capable of assuming leadership as the situation demanded.
Smita Gupta is Senior Fellow, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy
