Royalty doesn’t like to be outshined. When Louis VIII, the Sun King of France who built Versailles, visited the magnificent mansion of his finance minister, Marquis Nicolas Fouquet, he was incensed that a courtier should own a palace grander than the king’s. Fouquet was immensely popular in court and with the people, which angered the monarch. Louis decided that the minister had stolen money from the treasury, and soon Fouquet found himself in jail and his property confiscated by Louis. There is a lesson in this for Shashi Tharoor, the urbane Congress MP who, by omission, looted the party’s treasury, whose sole wealth is the Gandhi political currency.
Genetics and leadership aren’t credible companions. The Congress myth that genes play a complementary role in the making of its leader has demolished numerous leaders with pedigree. The delusion is that a Gandhi alone can bring Acche Din to the party’s rained-out fortunes. As a result, no new winnable Congress leaders who can also get others to win elections have emerged. As the winning capacity of the Gandhis wanes, its hyper-sycophantic megaphones are out in force to silence anyone who seems to threaten their mascots’ fading charisma. For the past few weeks, the encyclopedic Tharoor has been the target of the wrath of the Congress. The 66 year old MP is being ostracised for contesting against 80-year-old Mallikarjun Kharge. Tharoor’s unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Gandhis is garnering over 1000 votes out of 9000 plus polled, which no other rebel candidate has ever got in Congress history. Rhodes scholar Tharoor, a historian by education, a diplomat by profession and an intellectual by predilection, who has authored over two dozen books, is a hardcore Nehruvian in action and ideology. He can explain the Congress political manual to domestic and international audiences in a better language than anyone in the Rahul cabal. Born in England to an upper-class Nair family, he speaks English as well or even better than Malayalam. Despite past personal controversies, he is the darling of the youth and won the Lok Sabha election thrice from Thiruvananthapuram. He was a minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet. But after he threw down the election gauntlet, his party men now boycotted all his functions. Though Sonia ostensibly gave him permission to stand against Kharge, Tharoor’s own state leaders treat him like a pariah. Tharoor’s was an ideological plunge to show that the Congress was open to the democratic traditions of its founders. But his blackballing reflects that the fourth Nehru-Gandhi generation won’t re-engineer or discover its lost heritage. It is only interested in promoting Rahul’s Yatra to rediscover himself.
A Gandhi’s position in the Congress can’t be altered by the outcome of a guided democratic process. For a 137-year-old party, the chief’s election was multifariously significant. First, ward off criticism that it hasn’t held internal elections in the past two decades. Second, no Gandhi was in the race for the top job. Until Independence, the Congress was run by a phalanx of powerful national and regional leaders. Collective leadership ensured its electoral victories. Nehru was undoubtedly its public face. But he became the father of dynastic succession after getting his daughter Indira Gandhi elected as Congress president in 1959 when she was just 40. Today, the Gandhis may have earned temporary credibility by holding the party president’s poll. But they continue to follow the footsteps of patriarch Moti Lal Nehru who groomed son Jawaharlal for the Congress leadership and then carried on the family legacy by leveraging daughter Indira a strong foothold in the Congress. Indira as prime minister and party president decimated regional satraps in her own party and continued the family tradition of inducting progeny into politics. First, Sanjay Gandhi called the shots in the party and government by appointing AICC members and CMs. After Indira’s assassination, Rajiv became Prime Minister and Congress President and followed the template. After Rajiv’s death, Sonia refused to be politically involved initially, keeping both Rahul and Priyanka away from the cruel limelight that took away her beloved mother in law and husband. However, she and her lickspittles unceremoniously ousted subsequent party bosses P V Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri. After Sonia became Congress boss, no party election was held for the next 19 years. Though she refused to become PM in 2004, her iron grip on the party remained intact. Following family practice, she made her son Rahul general secretary, then Congress Vice President and subsequently party president in 2017. When he quit after the party’s 2019 rout, Sonia became president again, hoping Rahul would come around. After he refused, she backed Kharge, who would keep the seat warm for a Gandhi. He hasn’t appointed the Congress Parliamentary Board and postponed CWC elections. He has denied important party positions and responsibilities to Gandhi Parivar’s challengers. And he denied Tharoor a place in the 47 member panel to manage party affairs.
The truth is that Shashi Tharoor is an outsider. He doesn’t owe his rise to a godfather or an omniscient parent. His son isn’t in politics. He is perhaps the only Congress leader with independent prominence and fandom. Such is Kharge’s fear of Tharoor’s honorificabilitudinitatibus that the MP has been dropped from the star campaigners list for the upcoming state polls. Under the Gandhis’ watch, the party forfeited the Centre and most states. They may have lost power, but not the party— trichotillomaniacs who rage at anyone even remotely seen as a challenger. One word that hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian Tharoor, the walking taking Thesaurus of Indian public life, may identify with is antidisestablishmentarianism because his conduct indicates a belief in the separation of church and state—the cornerstone of democracy. Like the Sun King, the Gandhis demand malleable court jesters, not charismatic outsiders. Dynasty is nasty, and Tharoor has become a victim of his own independence. History’s allegories are atavistic; the Sun King’s descendant, Louis XVI was overthrown and executed by French revolutionaries along with his queen, Marie Antoinette. Is Tharoor contesting the Congress election the beginning of a revolution? Is the rule of the Gandhis awaiting the metaphoric guillotine of public disapproval? Will Rahul’s Yatra, hyped by the Gandhi Congress, become the tonic of redemption and revival the dynasty desperately needs as Sonia ages? The answer awaits in 2024 when Rahul will take on Modi, the nemesis of the Gandhis. Shashi Tharoor, never a courtier, may have the last laugh.
PRABHU CHAWLA
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
Follow him on Twitter @PrabhuChawla