Congressmen in general are incapable of thinking out of the box about the party's leadership or future. The tame response of its Working Committee after the latest devastating electoral defeat is further evidence
Congress president Sonia Gandhi seemingly will not be chastised by the massive and crushing defeat her party has received, as she has again sought to duck the challenge of leading her party in the lok Sabha, preferring the 73-year-old Mallikarjun Kharge to sit at the job.
Once again it is a nominee with little political clout — even in his own State of Karnataka — who will act for her on this important post. Ms Gandhi has chosen to overlook veteran parliamentarian from her own party and former Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath for the post.
The Congress president’s reason seems to be two-fold. Most importantly, she wants to re-assert to the world that she is in total command of the party and could place anyone anywhere as she likes. Mr Kharge is a Dalit face; and tokenism has been the Congress’s weapon to give the depressed people an assurance of the party taking care of them, while doing nothing serious.
Recall that Jawaharlal Nehru had made Damodaram Sanjivayya the Congress president and even elevated him as Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister. This party was in power in Andhra Pradesh continually from 1950 to 1983, but the Dalits remained outside the real power structure and got no improvement in their condition.
In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Congress has lost the support of the Dalits in the last 25 years, for all the tokenism of making a Dalit leader ‘somebody’ in the party or the Government here and there. The attempt to keep the Dalit qua Dalit, the poor as poor, the Muslims as Muslims over decades of its power at the Centre, has, by 2014, brought the Congress to a mere 44 from the level of 206 in the lok Sabha earlier.
Mr Manmohan Singh was the last tokenist VIP the party had, but his leading the Government did not win it even a single vote, so to say in the name of Sikh minority. The Congress game had flopped totally.
Obviously, no one in his right senses expects the party to nominate Mr Kharge to head the Government in the unlikely event of the Congress ploughing back to power five years hence. But, through Mr Kharge’s nomination, Ms Gandhi haughtily persists in not only her tokenism but tactic of ducking responsibility.
Neither she nor her son and party’s vice president Rahul Gandhi — at least one prominent Congress leader from Kerala had the guts to term his campaign leadership as a flop and his role as that of a joker — wants to expose themselves to the challenge of actually confronting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the fire of debate, discussion and leadership quality, in the open, in Parliament.
In her 16 years of power as the head of the Government, Indira Gandhi had changed the Congress leaders close to her almost every 18 months. Some analysts have compared that to Queen Elizabeth I of England who kept changing her closest courtiers and ending them up in the Tower of london after some months of elevating them to the near top.
No wonder, after being the lapdogs of the Nehru-Gandhi family for ages, Congressmen in general are incapable of thinking out of the box about the party’s leadership or future. The tame response of the Congress Working Committee after the latest devastating and depressing electoral defeat is further evidence of it. What are some of them demandingIJ They want to bring back Ms Priyanka Vadra to the leadership role. So, it will be somebody from the royal family again even if Mr Gandhi is not adequate. The reports are that the ‘get Priyanka’ bandwagon is growing by leaps and bounds.
That could be yet another reason that Ms Gandhi does not want her son to be further exposed as the party’s parliamentary leader, even as a deputy leader. More particularly, when she knows that apart from Prime Minister Narendra Modi there are many others in the front row of the BJP Cabinet who could dwarf Mr Gandhi repeatedly when Parliament gets to debate and discussion stage.
Mr Gandhi’s performance in the 15th lok Sabha was so listless and so far apart that he had ceased to be part of the proceedings most of the time. He was projected as the hope of the youth, and with the young dominating the Indian demography, was supposed to give an edge to the Congress in its confrontation with the BJP.
On May 16, the results confirmed what many Congress leaders perceived and suspected when the campaign was at its peak. Mr Gandhi did not measure up to the challenge of a national leadership even among the young whom he was to supposed to represent in the party structure, and get the youth of the country to respond to his ideas and presentations.
Out of some 120 million, 18-25 age group new voters, as many as 100 million voted for the BJP. The Congress was decimated both in the cities and the villages. The poor, whom the Congress claimed as lifted out of poverty, showed that they did not believe this propaganda.
There was more empathy with the Aam Aadmi Party among the young, such as university students and professionals, than with the Congress-led by Mr Gandhi. Naturally the 70-plus years old Mr Kharge would keep the 40-plus Rahul Gandhi insulated from further exposure as the 16th lok Sabha gets into action. Whether that would also silence the pro-Priyanka Vadra murmur that is now seen to be growing, will be revealed later.
But the fact is that the thousands of Congress leaders at all levels of the polity, are not thinking of any other leader, especially a non-Nehru family member, to assume a decisive leadership role to take on the BJP. All this reveals the poverty that has struck the ‘grand old party’, as the end of the Nehru dynasty in perpetual power has now been marked by the BJP under Mr Modi, triumphed from end to end of the country’s stretch.
But much more than the total poverty of a robust leadership competition within the Congress, what must concern the country is that this situation seriously undermines the hope that, after this election has cut the regional parties and bit players with their ambitions too big for their national support base to size and further told the once hyperbolic left that is irrelevant to the new India, there would be a binary political rivalry to prop up democracy.
As the Congress declines and has already lost its support base among most of the sections that had propped it up in power over the last six decades, the space it would be forced to vacate appears to be destined to remain vacant.
The writing on the wall as the 16th lok Sabha gets into stride is that to sustain the binary system, the country must look to a new entity. Mr Kharge’s elevation as the Congress leader only confirms this prospect, though Ms Gandhi might have sought to use the 70-plus year old for a different purpose.
