Grand old implosion

Scindia's departure highlights Congress' fatal flaw

Jyotiraditya Scindia, 49, has offered the Congress Party’s leadership a rude wake-up call. His departure, however, should not have come as a surprise. Mr Scindia has been openly expressing his dissent with decisions of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) — and approval of several of Narendra Modi government’s policies for quite some time. Instead of leveraging Rahul Gandhi’s resignation as party president after the debacle of 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the ageing leadership of the Congress tamely voted for his 73-year-old mother to take interim charge. The fact that the party started haemorrhaging young leaders seems not to have worried its stalwarts. Ajoy Kumar, 57, chief of the Jharkhand unit of the party was among the first to quit after Sonia Gandhi’s anointment in August last year and join the Aam Aadmi Party. Then Pradyot Deb Barman, 41, a kinsman of Mr Scindia, stepped down as chief of the party’s Tripura unit and then resigned from the party following differences with the high command.  In September came the departure of Ashok Tanwar, 44, former Youth Congress president, chief of the Haryana party unit ahead of the Assembly elections, citing the party’s “existential crisis, not because of its political opponents, but because of serious internal contradictions”.

 
Mr Scindia, whose political lineage invested him with greater heft in the party than his record as a politician, had signalled his unhappiness soon after the Congress won a slender majority in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections in November 2018. Having lost his Guna Lok Sabha seat to a former associate who joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, he was clumsily sidelined by the old guard of Digvijay Singh and Chief Minister Kamal Nath. The latter was unwilling to accommodate him in the state Cabinet as deputy chief minister, and the two Rajya Sabha seats from the state were reportedly being kept open for Mr Singh and, incredibly, Ms Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka Gandhi, 48. An upper house seat and a Union Cabinet berth are allegedly on offer from the Bharatiya Janata Party now that Mr Scindia has commandeered enough members of the legislative Assembly to possibly bring down the state government.

 
This mass discontent from the younger guard also reflects the Congress leadership’s ideological bankruptcy. The party has been slow to frame strong, credible responses to Mr Modi’s majoritarian populism. It has allowed itself to be wrong-footed — on Article 370, and the controversies associated with the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It is significant that many younger leaders have supported the NRC (Mr Deb Barman, Jitin Prasada, 46) or the reading down of Article 370 (Mr Scindia, Deepinder Hooda, 42). The congratulatory Twitter exchange between former Mumbai Congress chief Milind Deora, 43, and Mr Modi on the “Howdy Modi” event in Texas underlines the prime minister’s allure to younger politicians. The fact that the CWC made no serious attempt to communicate with any of these younger leaders (Mr Gandhi could not find time to meet Mr Scindia even once over the past few months) raises the suspicion that the party is focused on holding them back primarily to prevent a threat to Mr Gandhi whose competence as a politician has not been proved as yet. He and his sister now remain the youngest members in the CWC, the average age of which stands at 70 years. In the process, the party is well on track to destroying itself — that too, at a critical time for Indian democracy.