#dnaEdit: Stuck in a rut

Most people inside the Congress party, including president Sonia Gandhi, vice president Rahul Gandhi, senior leaders, middle rung worthies and workers, behave as though they are living in a black hole. No information from outside goes in, no information from within goes out. This was indeed the tone of the party’s highest decision-making body, the Congress Working Committee (CWC), meeting on Tuesday. Mrs Gandhi’s criticism of Modi government’s ordinance raj seemed to be quite insignificant compared to the critical condition of the party organisation. Sonia did refer to it, talking of the need to change the style of leadership and devolve decision-making.

Her son, the party’s vice president remarked the problem for the Congress was not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but the Congress itself. 

The president and vice president, however, do not seem be able to take the next necessary step to set things right. Both the top leaders need to step aside, thereby compelling the party to elect others in their place. The Gandhis  could continue to play an active role in the affairs of the party, but the Congress’ mental block that they cannot have any other leader but the Nehru-Gandhis, desperately needs to be jettisoned. The organisational paralysis is entirely due to the dynasty dependency syndrome: that it is only the Nehru-Gandhis and them alone who can cut the Gordian knot.

The Congress can continue to live with its neo-socialist credo because that political space needs to be occupied. The north Indian socialist parties, comprising the Janata parivar, are intellectually incapable of playing that role.

The problem with the Congress is not so much its flexible ideology, which critics believe to be hypocritical — as it is the inability of the party to get leaders other than the Nehru-Gandhis to put shoulder to the wheel. The truth is Congress men and women have become lazy. They expect Sonia and Rahul Gandhi to win elections for them, and to play the umpire to the party’s internecine feuds. Factionalism is the breath of democratic politics, but the factions and their leaders must learn to resolve their differences. One way of doing so could be to elect a common leader from among themselves. They cannot insist on using the Nehru-Gandhis as a crutch because that is simply not a solution. The party has to learn to stand on its own feet. It’s not going to be easy. But it has to be done.

There has been no honest post-mortem of the defeat in the May 2014 Lok Sabha elections. What is at issue is not the defeat itself. After two terms and a decade in office, it was but natural that the party would lose. What is of real concern here is the magnitude of the defeat. Quite a few senior insiders in the party are emphatic that the National Advisory Council (NAC), which the BJP had described as the Super-Cabinet with Super-Prime Minister Sonia Gandhi at its head, is the real cause of the party’s electoral catastrophe.  It is at the insistence of the NAC that the UPA’s popular measures like the MGNREGA, the land acquisition law and food security were pushed through. Those in the Congress questioning the NAC’s credentials will have to assess their own failure to come up with policy innovations that could have helped the party. What is needed is a no-holds-barred internal debate where differences are not papered over. The stress test of the Congress would be whether it can withstand the airing of internal differences. That would be the first decisive step towards reviving the party.