The 'traitor' trait in the Congress

Paul Brass's research on the Congress factions in Uttar Pradesh in the 1960s and 1970s holds true even today. Factions in the party are active and alive, and not merely in UP

Paul Brass, who died in May this year at 85, was a legend for scholars of Indian politics. He was best-known for his extensive work on Charan Singh. But his research of the Congress revealed how factions came to grow in the party — and how the Congress resolved the differences. He analysed not just the destructive potential of factions for the party, but also the way they helped to recruit new caste and interest groups into it. An external threat retarded the development of factions (the independence struggle, for instance, subsumed factions and rivalries); the tendency of a leader