The Congress these days is in the process of ‘electing’ its new president. It is another matter that what is more visible is that the Congress is in the process of collapsing in Rajasthan. But that is a topic of discussion for another time. The question everyone is asking is who will be Congress’s next president, 22 years after an uninterrupted Gandhi family rule over the party. For these 22 years, Sonia Gandhi remained Congress chief with two years being given to Rahul Gandhi. This Gandhi family hold on the president’s chair would have continued had Sonia Gandhi unfortunately not been in poor health and Rahul not been the reluctant scion who wants power but no responsibility.
It is now widely known that the ‘elections’ are being held because no one from the Gandhi family wants to be the president. Rahul Gandhi has refused. Sonia Gandhi, who has been the interim president for three long years, is under compulsion to make way for more permanent leadership. And Priyanka Gandhi it seems may not have even been considered for the post. So, all signs, for now, suggest the next president will be someone from outside the Gandhi family.
It is being reported that some leaders are filing nomination papers to throw their hats in the electoral arena. The Congress is patting itself on the back for creating this ‘internal democracy’. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
There have been only a few occasions in the history of independent India when no person from the Indira-Nehru family has held the top post in government or the highest office of the party. There have been many occasions when both the government and organisation have been commanded by the Nehru-Indira family. At any given point at least one post has been held by the family. The custom so far has been that if the Congress is in power, a family person became the Prime Minister and when Congress was out of government, the family kept the post of head of the organisation with itself. Therefore, amid the debate on internal democracy, it becomes imperative to analyse the situation on the basis of facts.
It has been 75 years since India’s Independence. Out of these 75 years, the Congress was in power at the Centre for about 55 years. In these 55 years, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi were prime ministers from the same family for 38 years. In the remaining 17 years, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gulzarilal Nanda, Dr Manmohan Singh, and PV Narasimha Rao became prime ministers. It is interesting to see that for 40 years in these 75 years, five people from just one family, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, occupied the Congress president’s chair. In the remaining 35 years, nine people were Congress presidents.
More interestingly, there have been only six years out of these 75 years when no member of the Nehru-Indira family was the Prime Minister, or the Congress president. This means for 69 years, someone from this family has been either at the top of government or at the top of the party, or at top of both. The six-year period in which the Congress remained ‘family-free’ after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, both in government and in the organisation, include about five years of PV Narasimha Rao’s tenure and a brief period after Nehru’s demise.
In these six years, the two leaders who were in charge of the Congress from outside the family were K Kamaraj and Rao. It is not a mere coincidence that the Congress treated both unfairly and with contempt. The Congress, which was back in the hands of the family then, did not shy away from humiliating Rao posthumously. Who can forget that a day after Rao’s death, when his body was brought to the gates of the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, it was not allowed to be taken inside for the people to pay their last respects.
What went against Kamaraj and Rao was that they refused to be family-driven ‘remote-controlled’ leaders. The Congress family also did not treat its former presidents PD Tandon and Acharya Kriplani any better.
The Indira-Nehru family is all for internal democracy as long as it suits its interests. It is strongly averse to the democratic environment that challenges the family. It’s not a new problem but a legacy the current members of the clan have inherited.
For instance, during the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, the head of the organisation used to be Debakanta Barua, who said, “Indira is India, India is Indira.” Occupying the country’s high office, Indira Gandhi ensured she put in her own person to helm the party. Indira clearly did not want someone else in the Congress to take over the power in the party.
Even today the search is not for a visionary president to run the party as it faces annihilation election after election. At the moment, the question in front of the ‘special family’ is who should it plant in the president’s chair. The entire façade of an election has been created to achieve just this one purpose. The question of who will be the Congress president after Sonia Gandhi ended the same day ‘Yuvraj’ Rahul Gandhi was crowned president in 2017 without any internal opposition despite Rahul having no administrative or leadership experience in politics.
Rahul Gandhi stepped down when election results made it clear he had no leadership qualities. After the 2019 defeat, he resigned from the post. Although he has been taking all key decisions in the party, he is shying away from being held responsible and accountable for them. Against this background, the whole exercise of electing the president is aimed at finding a new ‘Debakanta Barua’.
The crisis facing the Congress is that it refuses to see the problem by burying its head in the sand. Perhaps the Congress no longer has the strength, courage and intelligence to face reality. Congress strategists have abandoned the exercise of ideation and are all indulging in slogans, all of which are only backfiring. This is not a normal, natural course of things. It is a culture that the Congress has built for itself.
It cannot be said that the Congress is completely finished. But the narrative of democracy is not suited for the Congress. For Congress, the debate on democracy is its weak link. The Congress will not be able to achieve anything by indulging in it. It has been exposed before the people on that count.
The Congress has a well-entrenched history of stifling democracy at the level of the country and also at the level of the party. There have been many like Babu Jagjivan Ram, K Kamaraj, Sitaram Kesri, and Morarji Desai, who came out fighting for democracy within the Congress. All of them were side-lined or thrown out.
Given this past, how can the Congress ever come across as a credible voice on internal democracy? This yaksha question will remain the Achilles’ heel for the Congress.
The party cannot satisfactorily answer it unless it is free from the aura of the ‘family’ in the real sense.
The writer is associated with the BJP think tank SPMRF as a senior fellow. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Read all the Latest Opinion News and Breaking News here
Comments
0 comment