It’s an exception beyond explanation. Congress, the grand old party of Indian politics, gets more publicity in defeat than in victory. Last week, when it lost Haryana, which was billed by pendulum pollsters as a winner for them, knee-jerk pundits and media masala manufacturers trotted their tired trope of a Congress struggling for survival—to explain that a rise in vote share means nothing.
Embarrassed exit poll pundits and their insufferable interpreters, who had predicted a landslide win for the Congress, couldn’t digest the indignity of the collapse of the hoary hype of asinine algorithms. As usual, it was the local leadership—not the national netas—who were painted as the villain of the flop show. Rahul Gandhi, the party’s pugnacious commander-in-chief, was mocked with jeers and jalebis.
The usual excuses such as factional fights, wrong candidate selection, erratic voting machines, absence of a collective leadership and caste polarisation were offered as explanations why an assured victory became a humiliating loss for the third consecutive term in the state.
A section of the party blamed former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda for why a bird in hand became a turkey shoot. Others accused former Union minister Shelja Kumari and company for causing a fifth-column calamity. It was more of Congress vs Congress than Congress vs BJP. It was a free-for-all among the local caste and community chieftains. The Gandhi-helmed central leadership didn’t put its foot down to lasso them together. The party lost over a dozen seats because of its inability to rein in revengeful renegades.
However, decoding the ignominious electoral loss isn’t rocket science. Haryana was lost because the Gandhis utterly failed to contain authority-avaricious rebels. Rahul played postcard politics: everyone posing a pretty picture with him on the dais, but no photo-op of collective bonhomie sans the big enchilada. Priyanka Gandhi, an important general secretary, was conspicuous by minimal presence during the entire campaign.
The fault lies in the party’s convoluted control-and-command system. Unlike the BJP, which is directly controlled by the Modi-Shah turbo team, the Congress lacks a structured hierarchical mechanism because the Gandhi parivar treats it as a closely-held private entity. With the remote control in their hands, they have been micro-guiding party affairs from the appointment of office bearers at the district, state and national levels, to the chief ministers and ministers in the states they govern.
Since party elections are less frequent than a blue moon, it is either Gandhi acolytes or the choices of their cabal who are imposed on the states as bogus bosses. This super-centralised decision-making process had led to the Congress losing not only the general elections, but also in many states. The party that ran more than half the states till 2005 has been reduced to ruling just three. In the North, all that’s left is picayune Himachal Pradesh. The party’s geographical space has shrunk enormously under Gandhi stewardship. Having said that, the Congress is down, but definitely not out.
The Congress’s power paradox is it owes its survival to its deep rural roots and the Gandhi glue. Their loyalists control the organisation as proxies. Sonia is the unifier; Rahul is the crusader and assertive amplifier. Earlier, when he failed to handle the party as vice president and later as its chief, Sonia chose old warhorse Mallikarjun Kharge as the glorifier, thanks to being the party’s Dalit face. He was elevated thanks to his dexterity in handling Congress captains, and his seniority to relate with experienced opposition leaders who would rather not parley with Rahul.
That has changed after Rahul's two yatras. He has been consistently raising issues that embarrass the ruling party. The Congress won 99 seats under his leadership this time, but it has lost more states in the past decade because Rahul concentrated more on building his band of loyalists instead of strategically positioning himself as the party’s future. His inaccessibility and self-indulgent elitism failed the Congress. Now it has less than 25 percent of the seats in parliament and in state assemblies.
Senior Congress leaders firmly believe only Sonia can keep the party united and function harmoniously. She has been the effective unifier not just of her faction-ridden outfit, but also of most the opposition parties. She was Congress president for the longest period—over 15 years.
It was during her reign that the party captured power at the Centre twice in a row. It won just 145 seats in 2004. She was elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party and was expected to be the prime minister. But she chose Manmohan Singh instead. Her inner voice drowned out the outer voices clamouring sycophantically for her investiture and became a phrase of the day that preferred principle over post. In May 2004 she said: “Throughout these past six years that I have been in politics, one thing has been clear to me. And that is, as I have often stated, that the post of prime minister is not my aim. I was always certain that if ever I found myself in the position that I am in today, I would follow my own inner voice. Today, that voice tells me I must humbly decline this post.”
Her objective was to unite the opposition. She pragmatically accepted into the UPA old opponent Sharad Pawar, who had left the Congress citing her foreign origin. She accepted Mulayam Singh Yadav’s appeal to nominate Pranab Mukherjee as president of India. For the sake of unity, she ignored the fact that Yadav had prevented her from becoming PM when Vajpayee lost the vote of confidence by just one vote in 1998. After promoting Rahul, she has refrained from playing the same role for the past few years. The unexpected debacle in Haryana has brought her back to centre-stage.
Since Congress workers cannot visualise anyone other than a Gandhi as their meal ticket, they expect her to play an active reintegration role again. She did intervene in the scrap between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his arch-rival D K Shivakumar. She ensured the warring factions in Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh were reconciled. She was behind the forging of the successful INDIA confederation that halted the BJP from securing an absolute majority in May.
Since the Congress’s bargaining position has been marginally blunted after its Haryana humiliation, her loyalists are convinced that she and she alone can restore the party’s mojo. Moreover, the crucial states of Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Delhi and Bihar go to the polls in the next 12 months. How the Congress performs will decide its future role in national politics.
Even after 139 years, the GOP is still dependent on a Gandhi to keep its flag flying, though at half-mast after some disastrous elections. Evidently, the Congress is of Gandhis, for Gandhis and by the Gandhis. Today, in the GOP’s name-and-fame mainframe, Rahul has the claim and Sonia is the game.
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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