Idealism is an ancient word. It stands for an ancient species of thought that lives only in myths and obituary pieces. And ideology is a migratory bird that appears seasonally…when you need to mouth self-validating platitudes as you switch sides. Our permanent fixture today is the career politician. They change parties the way movie stars change their over-the-top outfits on the Cannes red carpet, but they are themselves small change, mere pawns in the corporate boardgame that politics has become.
Just like the dhoti-clad leader has disappeared from the firmament of Indian politics, so has the one who fashioned himself or herself as a catalyst of socio-economic change for the people. Today, they are catalysts of a different sort of change: regime change, even if engineered messily, as in Karnataka. Our new-age change agents may refuse to strut before the camera, like the stars.
They prefer to hide in hotels and resorts. No moral/legal quandary here. No less than the Supreme Court of India has endorsed their fundamental right to have a holiday break, or whatever you choose to call it, to skip an Assembly session or two. The taxpayer funded the election that made them MLAs from a certain party, good tax money also goes in running our Parliaments and Vidhana Soudhas.
That’s just necessary protocol. Grin and bear it. Our Supreme Court’s honourable justices can cry foul in public if the roster at the court is not to their liking, but can find smooth, glib legalese to justify elected representatives taking the people on a rollercoaster ride. Never mind if a state remains virtually without a government or a cabinet of ministers. Or an Assembly session becomes a venue for a choreographed Wild West showdown, where you already know who can flaunt more guns for hire.
That being the bottomline, there is no surprise when a ‘source’ (a euphemism for a political insider who claims to be privy to things) tells you, “The Congress has no future in the Centre. It’s leaderless and radarless. It’s not as if all those MLAs need money, some of them are switching sides only to secure their own future or that of their sons and daughters!” People can go take a walk. No, that was not said, but that’s what the poet intended, as they say.
When Rahul Gandhi resigned from the Congress president’s post—trying to eke out a moral high ground —did he factor in the meltdown that would follow? H D Kumaraswamy, with his 37-odd MLAs (now reduced), was running a government with his backing. Siddaramaiah, HDK’s predecessor, too was his man; so was the AICC general secretary in-charge, KC Venugopal. Once Rahul removed himself from the equation and Sonia Gandhi did not formally or temporarily step in to hold the centre together, the MLAs had no reason to listen to Rahul’s factotums.
Just like Alpesh Thakor, brought to the Congress by Rahul in the same face of some good local heartburn, has no compunctions joining the BJP today. Like how just about the entire Congress in Goa, including the alleged sleazeballs, merged with the ruling BJP.The ragtag, leftover liberal commentariat may have dubbed Rahul as a ‘liability’, an embarassing remnant of a five-generation dynasty, but that’s not exactly how those who make up the body of the Congress see it.
For them, a Gandhi is a brand that helps them go to the people and seek votes, one who may fail here and there, but still has high recall value. Their wagon is tied neither to the lodestars of the old Congress, its past ideals or pantheon, but to the still-valid currency of the Gandhi family brand, which has not been demonetised yet. No grand sense of loyalty here, just cold calculation.
The brand still gets votes (it got 120 million votes this summer), and votes are the base capital on which their small money-making political enterprise rests. Without a Gandhi hologram flying on its mast, there’s no way the ship can weather the Modi-Shah storm...there’s no doubt about it at this point.
When barely able to hide his anger, Rahul told his party elite that he was left to battle alone. He was not off the mark at all. Only he’s realised it a bit too late: for that’s how the Congress is.
Indira Gandhi had once famously told an interviewer of a foreign channel that the Congress rank and file does not love her, only her ability to win votes for them. Decades later, her political novitiate grand-daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra bitterly realised that “her family has been used by the Congress to become martrys and win them elections”. Whether she’ll jump in now to take the brother’s place—as some faithful are demanding—is doubtful. But without that Gandhi magnet at the centre, the Congress looks like so much debris and flotsam in space. Its human resources will either merge with the winning side or create their own new Congresses.
As for the BJP, it’s actually like the corporate house that its new headquarters in Delhi resembles. In pursuit of power, pure and simple, it has set on aggressive mergers and acquisitions, mostly from the de-ideologised, de-idealised Congress rump it was fighting. Make no mistake, the victory owes not to the odd RSS hardliner extolling the virtues of Hindutva in some remote hamlet. Only to the fact that it today has what the Congress had in the past—money, might and meticulous planning. And yes, fire in the belly.