Point of no return

Congress caught between the family and the hard place

The revolt in the Congress as represented by the letter written by 23 senior leaders to interim President Sonia Gandhi is by no means the first but it comes at a time when the 135-year-old party is at its lowest point in post-independence history, a performance roughly synchronous with Rahul Gandhi’s rise within the party to, first, vice-president-ship (in 2013) and then president-ship (2017). The unacknowledged fact is that Mr Gandhi, 50, lies at the heart of the rebels’ dilemma. He stepped down over a year ago, owning responsibility for the election debacle, and his mother, Sonia Gandhi, 73, took temporary charge. But the party high command’s pathological inability to look beyond the Nehru-Gandhi family has stalled attempts to find a successor. This indecision appears to have kept Mr Gandhi in contention for the post, since he continues on the Congress Working Committee (CWC). His many mis-steps since then — ill-advised tweets focused on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his inability to carry the party’s (relatively) young guard in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan — confirm misgivings that he may not really be up to the job. 

Many of those who have not signed may feel the same but consider it politically safer to align with Sonia Gandhi. They may not be wrong in their calculations because most of the signatories have no mass base and cannot win elections for the party (bar Bhupinder Singh Hooda, though he has, like Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot, only a partial base in his state, the Jat belt). At most, therefore, some of the other signatories can hold their own seats — such as former junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor. The ones with a mass base left earlier and formed regional parties in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. There is no reason to think that the same may not happen again in, say, Haryana and Punjab. Even among the earlier “leavers”, there is no one with national appeal. A good part of this deficiency is the fact that the Congress’ broad-church ideology has descended into an inchoate agenda in the absence of leadership, so the signatories have no platform to hold them together. 

So what are the options before the party? It could try collective leadership, and, as part of that, bring the earlier leavers together, but Sonia Gandhi could see through all this and throw a challenge to the signatories, to expose their political hollowness. The decision for her to continue as interim President till the next All India Congress Committee meets leaves the Nehru-Gandhi Congress and the signatories alike with a problem, and no solution other than the hope that organisational elections will do the trick. But in the Congress this has always sounded good only in theory. The 1992 Tirupati Congress session to elect a CWC is a case in point. When Arjun Singh, Sharad Pawar, and Rajesh Pilot emerged as unexpected challengers to then prime minister and party president Narasimha Rao, the election was declared null and void. The last CWC elections in 1998 saw Sonia Gandhi formally take charge. Since then, though the Election Commission had ordered the party to hold internal elections in 2017, the party is yet to do so.