Fix the responsibility

Rahul Gandhi shouldn't lead Congress in Lok Sabha

The Congress Parliamentary Party met on Saturday after its worst electoral performance that reduced its strength in the 16th Lok Sabha to only 44 members, about a fifth of what it was in the previous Lok Sabha. The show was so poor that it was not enough to confer on its leader in the lower House the right to enjoy the status of leader of the Opposition. Not unexpectedly, the meeting took note of the unprecedented setback and elected Congress president Sonia Gandhi to head its parliamentary party. This is as it should be since the party had no choice other than that. Nor could anybody find fault with Ms Gandhi's advice that there should be no public acrimony over the defeat and that appropriate lessons should be drawn from the debacle.

If this is an indication that Ms Gandhi is planning to take away the poll-battered party's leadership from her son, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, the development needs to be welcomed unequivocally. Mr Gandhi's record since he took charge of the party's 2014 election campaign has not been inspiring. His campaign paled into insignificance when compared to that of Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who struck a chord with people almost instantly and talked of more concrete issues of development and governance, rather than the abstract concepts of empowerment that Mr Gandhi mouthed during his speeches - often with little conviction and less credibility. The talk about shared responsibility for the defeat may be true, but when an army loses a war, it is the general who is dismissed, not the majors and colonels. The fact is Mr Gandhi had led the Congress party's election campaign and he must take the full responsibility for its rout. Instead of allowing the party to look for scapegoats, Mr Gandhi should make way for someone who can be its leader in the Lok Sabha and help rebuild the party.

It is not just the poor campaign run by Mr Gandhi that is at the heart of the Congress party's problem of who should lead it in the Lok Sabha. The question the party must face today is whether Mr Gandhi is up to that task. In his 10 years in the Lok Sabha, Mr Gandhi could not make a mark either with his debating skills or through necessary interventions in discussion within the House. On the few occasions he did speak, he sounded callow, showing his lack of experience in administration and governance. Nor has he appointed a single strong state leader to head the party's state units. And now a meaningless and counterproductive debate has been revived over whether his sister, Priyanka Gandhi, should be brought in to lead the party's revival. That clearly is no answer, as it merely perpetuates the dynastic principle; nor do her brief appearances in the 2014 election campaign give any indication of a political mind that is superior to her brother's, or gifted with new ideas that could bail the party out of its current morass. The Congress party must acknowledge that the responsibility for electoral failure, on top of the inability to strengthen the organisation, should rest primarily with Mr Gandhi, and not with the party's advertising agency or his advisers. It can only begin rebuilding after accepting that fact.