Why history matters

Despite the loose use of the term dynasty for the Nehrus, it was only as late as 1975 that anything like lineage actually took shape in India’s oldest political party. A close look at the past will however indicate why and when this tradition took root and why the party finds it ever so difficult to move beyond the shadow of family based power.

There is little doubt that 1975 was a turning point in the fortunes of the Congress party and its links to the Nehru family. Until then no senior member of the family had ever groomed his or her scion for succession. It was Mahatma Gandhi, and not Motilal Nehru, who handpicked Jawaharlal as successor. Having served as General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee at the age of 34, Jawaharlal became President of the party at the Lahore session. When Gandhiji said, “he will speak my language”, he was referring to their larger sense of shared values.

There is as yet little evidence of any grooming for succession as opposed to critical political role by Premier Nehru of his daughter. In fact after the Kamaraj Plan the one man who stood out in his cabinet was the minister without portfolio, Lal Bahadur Shastri. Indira Gandhi was already part of the three-member screening panel for the Lok Sabha candidates in the 1962 general elections but though a key leader, there was no serious thought of her as his successor.

Such a transition took place under the highly controlled conditions of the Emergency. It was then that the younger son, Sanjay was hailed by Illustrated Weekly as ‘The Man who gets things done’. All India Radio dubbed him first as a youth leader and then as a Congress leader. Indira Gandhi admitted in the Guwahati session that the Youth Congress had ‘stolen our thunder’.

This shift was deeper in the rank and file that came to see the family as a harbinger of both continuity and change. The death of Sanjay in an air crash led almost without a murmur to the induction of a scrupulously professional and apolitical elder son into the party. By the time he, in turn, led his party to only its second defeat in a general election since Independence, there was no doubt at all that the party had undergone a basic transformation.

VP Singh was the last leader to lead a serious rebellion against the family. He failed to break the party but his brief spell in office changed the rules of the game. One shift of the goal post came via his alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP emerged, for the first time in the history of Hindutva as major political force, undercutting the Congress’ ace playing card of a country in danger from without. More directly, the Mandal platform broke up the delicate web of social alliances that had propped up the Congress for decades in the Ganga basin.

The world in which Sonia Gandhi took charge of the Congress was radically different from the one in which her mother-in-law or husband operated. Today, the Congress has to reckon with a far more splintered polity. It has, via alliances with the regional parties, been able to capture power at the head of a coalition. But as the retreat on the Women’s Bill shows it is a central player subject to more checks and balances than ever before in the past.
Rahul Gandhi’s own unease with the past sits with his tacit acceptance of the central role of this family in determining the future of the party and at one remove the country. The former is clear enough in his bid to bring elements of open competition in state Youth Congress elections, as in Tamil Nadu most recently. This is the first bid to remake the youth wing since Sanjay’s more aggressive attempt in the mid-1970s.

It has been combined with outreach programmes which takes him to urban slums and tribal hamlets. This indicates a realisation that the fate of his party rests more on its ability to reconnect with the underclass than on any single other factor.
Yet, the acceptance of the centrality of the family was underlined last year not so much by Rahul as by his sister, Priyanka. It was
she who took on Narendra Modi’s taunt of

Congress as a century-old outfit, with the one liner, “Kya main aapko budhiya lagti hoon?” She and her party by reckoning could take him on.

It is now more than twenty years that a member of the family was prime minister. The Sonia Gandhi period — it is premature to label it an era — has already lasted for 12 years. Strange as it may sound it is as critic and as much as co-architect that Rahul Gandhi has to fashion a role for himself.