Sonia Gandhi’s presidency extended for a year
Ms Sonia Gandhi’s rambunctious attack on the Modi Government at her party’s Working Committee Meeting on Tuesday seems to have drowned out one other development: The extension of her own term as president by one year. Ms Gandhi’s current five-year term began in 2010, and the internal party election was to be held in later this month. Now, that election has been postponed till next year or at least till after the Bihar Assembly election. The party is also considering some constitutional changes such as revising the five-year term of office bearers to the previous three-year term, and to this end, it has sought to portray the CWC’s decision as one that stands on mere technicality.
Be that as it may, the extension of Ms Gandhi’s presidential tenure is an important indicator of the leadership crisis that plagues the Congress. Ms Gandhi is already the party’s longest serving president, having held her position since 1998 and, clearly, it’s time for her to move on — if for nothing else, then surely for leading the party to its worst ever electoral performance in the 2014 lok Sabha poll. Yet, Ms Gandhi remains the party’s only real leader at the helm. This is not so much a poor reflection of her — she, afterall, did rejuvenate the party and steer the coalition Government it led for two full terms — but a damming comment on the failure of the next generation of Congress leaders, particularly Ms Gandhi’s son and heir apparent Rahul Gandhi, to come into their own.
Mr Gandhi has been the king-in-waiting since he joined politcs in 2004 and, even after his 2013 anointment as vice president, failed to make his mark. It is reportedly the lack of enthusiasm among some some Congress leaders over Mr Gandhi’s candidature that led to the postponement of the party election. There are two theories here: First, Mr Gandhi is facing a lot of resistance from the old guard while putting together his team of relatively new and young leaders and, hence, the delay in the election; and second, the vice president himself is reluctant to take charge at a time when the party is in a tough spot. Both speak poorly of Mr Gandhi’s leadership skills. For all practical purposes, the leadership of the Congress is being handed over to him on a silver platter. The so-called opposition to his presidency can, in a worst case scenario, only be nominal, but Mr Gandhi lacks the political skill to handle that even that little amount of resistance. No wonder then that he is shying from the big electoral challenges that lie before the Congress. The party has hardly recovered from the beating it received last summer and will possibly be battered again in the Assembly elections in Bihar and West Bengal; as well as lose ground in Assam and Kerala. Ideally, Mr Gandhi should have led these battles from the front; instead, he’ll be shooting from his mother’s shoulders yet again.
The real tragedy here is not of the Gandhis but the Congress. Once India’s grand old party and a platform for some the country’s tallest statesmen, today it is so diminished that, not only is its parliamentary strength insignificant, it has no leader who can turn things for the better. Worse still, the Congress can’t detach itself from the Gandhis because it will then disintegrate but at the same time, if it sticks with the Gandhis, it will surely be drowned.