From the India Today archives (1999) | Congress: Time to make changes

An odd thing happened while the election results were coming out. No sooner did it become clear that the mighty Congress party was likely to face its worst defeat in 50 years than all the party’s combative spokesmen quietly disappeared. There was no dramatic beating of the retreat, no gracious acknowledgement of a battle honourably lost, just an ignominious slinking off into the woodwork. Could it be that there was suddenly nothing left to say? As for Sonia Gandhi’s bellicose speech writers, who only weeks earlier caused her to charge the prime minister with treason, they lapsed into such ominous silence that when there was finally a “statement” from 10 Janpath it came in the form of one short sentence. Introspection, it said, was the need of the moment.

Not particularly profound in terms of political analysis but since it has so far been the only attempt at critical review, it would have been useful had party functionaries not instantly understood it to mean that the Congress president must be protected at any cost. So, within hours, droves of irrelevant, unelectable political leaders submitted their resignation’s to Sonia as if the blame for the party’s disgraceful performance lay with them. Apparently, nobody in the party is brave enough yet to tell Sonia that it is her leadership, or lack of it, that has brought India’s oldest political party to this sorry pass.

Privately, any number will tell you that had she decided to remain only the party president and she had no prime ministerial ambitions, the Congress would have done a lot better in this election. Privately, they also admit that it was when she announced in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan, unable to keep the smirk off her face, that “we have 272 and more are coming” it was the beginning of the end. Publicly, the competitive chamchagiri (sycophancy) continues.

It is this sycophancy that has been largely responsible for Sonia deluding herself into believing that only the Indian middle classes were appalled at the idea of her becoming prime minister. Had she encouraged plain-speaking in party circles many of her closest supporters would have told her that she was not a credible leader either in terms of her origin or her experience. But candour is a bad word in Congress circles. It gets you expelled as we saw from what happened when Sharad Pawar, P. A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar dared to draw attention to Sonia’s Italian origin.

If Sonia is seriously in an introspective mood she needs to ask herself what is it about her leadership that causes reasonable men like Oscar Fernandes to say on national television that she has “generations of experience of administration” because she travelled everywhere with her husband and mother-in-law. So did their security men, drivers and flunkies. Do they all qualify to rule India?

When other political parties are defeated in elections it is usual for the rank and file to start questioning the leadership. In the Congress party this only happens when it is not being led by a member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and, frankly, it is mainly with the dynasty that the party’s current problems lie. So abjectly dependent was the Congress on Sonia and Priyanka and their charisma that it made no effort to offer voters anything else. Even a casual analysis of the party’s campaign message will reveal that other than the Gandhi ladies the only other subjects broached by the Congress were the sacrifices of other members of the Dynasty and a less than credible attack on A.B. Vajpayee’s government. Nobody believes that Vajpayee colluded with the British during the freedom movement and nobody believes that he colluded with Nawaz Sharif to buy Pakistani sugar while armed intruders were crossing the border. Yet, this formed the bulwark of the Congress campaign.

What made the Congress campaign even less credible was Sonia masquerading as Indira Gandhi. Her attempts to shriek her speeches out Indira style, to imitate her walk, her mannerisms, the kind of saris she wore, only made the Congress campaign seem even more of a charade. So, while the party needs to do some introspection, so does she. It might lead her to ask herself why she wants to be a political leader at all. She has admitted, more than once, that despite being the daughter-in-law of one prime minister and the wife of another she hated politics. So why this sudden desire to become an active part of it? She wants to serve the people, she says. Are there no other ways of doing this?

Meanwhile, if the party is serious about introspection it might discover that sycophancy can play no part in this process. Only when sycophantic pronouncements are replaced by serious analysis will the Congress discover what has really gone wrong with it in the past 10 years. Only when party leaders have the courage to tell the Congress president that the days of Dynasty are over will there be a chance for the Congress to rediscover itself as a political party.

One of the best things that have happened to Indian politics is that we now have a semblance of a two-party system. In this the Congress has a definite role to play but it must first shake off the past and begin a process of renewal. Real political parties need programmes, policies and organisational skills. Even at the best of times, charisma can only be the icing on the cake, never the real thing. No political party in India needs introspection more than the Congress. But will this be allowed to happen? That is the real question.

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