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 to aspire to become “the boss” led to the development of factions. He describes the attributes of a factional Congress leader: Loyalty to his followers under any and all circumstances. Brass notes that in the Congress a factional leader is not expected to be an ascetic. “The leader is expected to try and advance himself in every way possible. The only condition that his supporters will insist upon, is that when the leader advances himself, he must take his followers with him,” he says.

Brass’s research is based on Congress factions in Uttar Pradesh in the 1960s and 1970s. But his insights into the way the party works are valid even today, and not merely in UP.

Take the current state of play in the Congress in Rajasthan.

Ashok Gehlot elected to stay chief minister of Rajasthan instead of becoming Congress president. The faction he heads rose as one man and threatened to resign when it seemed that he would be uprooted from Rajasthan. Mr Gehlot’s strong point is his command over his flock. He is not an especially gifted orator, but leverages his connection as a man of the masses. In a rare public confession he once described his beginnings in politics: His father was a municipal chairman and gave him money to sell fertiliser in Pipar, a small town near Jodhpur. Instead, the young Gehlot sold his stock and joined politics. His mentor was Parasram Maderna, a Jat leader who initially thought Mr Gehlot was too blunt to succeed, but gave him a nomination nevertheless. The first election he contested and won was in the aftermath of the Emergency in the middle of the Janata Party wave. He has never left the Congress and his greatest factional rival, C P Joshi, conceded defeat in 2008, without losing face. “I was a follower of Ashok Gehlot. Now I am his collaborator. For each person he has to decide at some point … The earlier relationship between us was of leader-follower and now it is of leader-collaborator.”

But then came Sachin Pilot. After the Gujjar agitation for reservations in jobs and education in 2007-08 — when the Vasundhara Raje-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government was in power and more than 50 people died in police firing — the community settled down when the Gehlot government gave them 5 per cent reservation under the Most Backward Caste (MBC) category. However, although he made no caste claims, Mr Pilot, a Gujjar, ensured that not a single BJP Gujjar candidate was elected across the state in the 2018 Assembly elections, when he was president of the state unit of the party. Mr Pilot and his faction reckon he was the one that brought the Congress to power. This group resents Mr Gehlot’s tendency to become “the boss” and is in no mood to retreat like C P Joshi did.

When Mr Pilot saw his chances of advancement in the Congress were dim, in 2020 he tried another route. Congress Spokesperson R S Surjewala summed it up when he said: “We’ve seen Sachin Pilot’s statement that he won’t join the BJP. I’d like to tell him that if you don’t want that, then leave the security cover of the BJP’s Haryana government, stop all conversations with them and come back to your home in Jaipur.” A meeting of the Congress Legislature Party left no doubt who had the upper hand. Of the 107 Congress MLAs in a house of 200, 100 backed Mr Gehlot. To close party colleagues, Mr Gehlot said

Mr Pilot was a “gaddar” (traitor) for trying to split the party. He repeated this publicly to Srinivasan Jain earlier this week.

But now, Mr Pilot is getting impatient. He has highlighted the fact that when it was time for Mr Gehlot to choose between chief ministership and the Congress presidentship, a large number of MLAs refused to turn up to elect his successor: A flagrant act of indiscipline, for which no punishment was ever meted out. And the latest threat of instability is the renewed call for a Gujjar agitation — certainly not at the behest of Mr Pilot, but one that calls out the Gehlot regime.

What would Paul Brass have made of all this? Maybe that factions in the Congress are active and alive; and their existence, paradoxically, weakens the party, but also strengthens it as factional leaders rope in new groups to strengthen themselves. Mr Pilot has so far resisted the temptation to be known as a caste leader. But if pushed into a corner, will he consolidate a community to consolidate himself?