Comment

A long life is by itself a sign of vitality. The Congress can rightfully claim, therefore, that it has passed this crucial test of energy and dynamism in its 125th year. But it isn’t so much the proud assertion which is significant as the fact that the party has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to rejuvenate. So, apart from longevity, another ingredient of its political genes is a gift for self-renewal which has prevented it from lapsing into senility.

Right from 1900 when Lord Curzon wrote that the Congress was “tottering to its fall”, virtually all its writers of obituaries have been proved wrong. Whether it was the party’s revival in 1980 after the Janata interregnum, which was hailed as the second independence, or again after the last two general elections, when it seemingly rose from the ashes, the Congress has shown that more than any other party, it has the ability to lift itself up by the bootstraps, as it were.

In contrast, the BJP is spluttering out after a brief spell in the sun while the communists are on the brink of losing even their sole fortress, West Bengal. Before them, the socialists belied all promises despite the presence of stalwarts, such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Kripalani, Acharya Narendra Deva and Ram Manohar Lohia, in their ranks.

Yet, as these adversaries of the Congress seemed incapable of presenting a serious challenge, except when it gave them an opportunity by its own blunders, like the Emergency of 1975-77, the Grand Old Party of India forged ahead despite the occasional stumbles. As a result, even its most trenchant critics are bound to concede, especially after its successes in the 2004 and 2009 general elections, that the party has an inner strength lacking in the others.

Though it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what gives the Congress its extraordinary resilience, it is possible to identify a few factors. One of them is its distinctive weltanschauung derived from the days of its pioneers, which shuns a segregationist outlook. The party’s refusal to see the nation in terms of castes and communities enables it to reach out to all segments of society more effectively than any other party. This ability seems to prevail even in areas where it is organisationally weak, as in UP, where the political writers noted a curious and inexplicable yearning for the Congress before the last general election.

It will be fatuous to deny that this broad-ranging appeal is the sole result of the presence at the helm of the Congress’ first family, the Nehru-Gandhis. Cynics may scoff at the stranglehold of the dynasty, which was likened in Jawaharlal Nehru’s time to a banyan tree under which nothing grew. True, the silent acquiescence within the Congress to the possibility of Rahul Gandhi becoming the next prime minister means that no ambitious party man can even think of breaking through the glass ceiling.

At the same time, to the aam admi, and especially the minorities, the dynasty is a guarantor of social peace, which precludes the breaking of mosques and the burning of churches. There is little doubt that its pan-India appeal comes from the fact that the Nehru-Gandhis are no longer associated with either a region or a religion while their innate secularism is seen as an unbroken tradition going back not only to Motilal and Jawaharlal, but even to Mahatma Gandhi, who chose Jawaharlal as his political heir.

Even if the dynasty did occasionally deviate from its principles, as when Indira took to the dictatorial path or Rajiv bungled by rejecting the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case and unlocking the gates of the Babri Masjid, the Congress had the sense to recover its balance and regain the trust of the liberals and minorities. It even had the courage of conviction to shed the policies of socialism and non-alignment favoured by Nehru and embrace market-oriented policies and move closer to the US. Since neither the BJP nor the communists have the ability to reinvent themselves by such a drastic overhaul of their ideological positions, they remain stuck in their communal and proletarian grooves to the benefit of the Congress.

The dynasty’s other advantage is to act as a glue to hold the party together and assure it of political success because of its undeniable charisma, which remains undiminished from one generation to the next. When Nehru dreamt of “flying high up in the air” in his youth, he might have had a prescient vision, therefore, of what his family and party would achieve.