Blunder the Congress Committed!

 

 

 

 

Blunder the Congress Committed!

The Indian National Congress is facing its worst crisis post Rajiv Gandhi period. The party’s repeated electoral losses and the defections are a serious challenge not only to its leadership, but also raises question about its relevance as a national opposition party. It is imploding from within, in the face of BJP’s machinations.   

During the Lok Sabha elections in 2004, the Party fielded many youngsters- Jyotraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada,Sandeep Dikshit, Deepender Hooda (all dynasts),to name a few- coinciding with Rahul Gandh’s debut as a Lok Sabha member. It was an experiment of creating a generation of young leaders who came to be identified as ‘Team Rahul’, considered the future of the Congress. The first time MPs- Scindia, Pilot, Deora and Prasada- were inducted into the Manmohan Singh’s Council of Ministers, besides others, while Rahul Gandhi himself opted not to join the Government. They enjoyed very privileged and enviable positions both in the government and the party, much to the disdain of several senior leaders who were not so fortunate.   

However, with the rise of Narendra Modi and the ascendancy of BJP to power, the Congress electoral fortunes nosedived in 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, even losing the status of  opposition party and the post of Leader of Opposition in the Lower House of Parliament.  Having tasted the power at so young age, these young ‘Turks’ were not in a position to reconcile to the loss of power and adapt to the new role of opposition.  So Scindia, who was a close confidant of Rahul and occupied important positions in the party, could not digest when he himself suffered a humiliating defeat in 2019 Lok Sabha  election in Guna- his constituency since 2002- by a BJP candidate- his old aide and a trusted lieutenant  Krishna Pal Singh. And swallowing the pride  and the pretense of secular credential and his bitter criticism of Narendra Modi and Shivraj Singh Chouvan, he ditched Kamal Nath, defected to the BJP, along with some two dozen MLAs loyal to him; thereby toppling his own party government in Madhya Pradesh in 2020.  

And now, at a time when the Congress leadership is busy untangling a political feud between Amarinder Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu in Punjab, on one hand, and the firefighting between the loyalists of Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in  Rajasthan, on the other, Jitin Prasada, another close aide of Rahul, had defected to the BJP.  Prasada, like Scindia, had enjoyed important positions both in the UPA government and the party.  He contested and lost the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019, this time losing his deposit, and also the UP Assembly election in 2017. As the Congress In-charge of the election campaign in West Bengal recently, he had the distinction of winning zero seats for the party. The ungrateful young ‘Turks’, opportunistic and ambitious are leaving the party, when it is facing the existential crisis, for greener pastures. These young leaders betrayed the party which gave them so much in a short span. Their unprincipled defections are unnatural and unheard in democratic countries. The leaders of Labour Party and Conservative Party in the UK and of Democratic and Republican Parties in the US do not cross over to the other side, because of commitment to their party ideology.

The Congress committed a blunder of elevating the first time MPs overnight to the positions of power. The party leadership misjudged them. How committed were they to the party’s philosophy and its core ideology? They haven’t come from the grassroots, working hard their way up. Elevating them, simply because they belonged to the famous political families,without testing their conviction and commitment to the party’s ideology was a big mistake.  For any party to survive its leaders and the rank and file need to be deeply committed to its core ideology. The Congress core ideology is governed by the values and the ideals of Gandhi and Nehru--the co-architects of the freedom movement. It is an ideology committed to secularism, pluralism , constitutional democracy and an all inclusive India. The people in the Congress are not committed to these ideals. That explains the defections. The defections in Karnataka, MP, Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand that led to the collapse of the Congress governments, and the party’s failure to form the governments in Goa, Manipur and Meghalaya should be seen in this context i.e. lack of commitment to the party’s ideology on the part of the defectors.  All else is secondary. A Nehruvian or a Gandhian, that a Congressman is expected to be, would never defect to the saffron party. The reason why the BJP leaders rarely defect, despite its leadership engineering defections from rival parties; toppling opposition governments; admitting the defectors into the party and giving them Tickets to contest elections,while denying the Tickets to its own deserving candidates, is their unwavering commitment to the right wing ideology of the Sangh Parivar.

And reacting to the defection of Prasada, Kapil Sibal, a veteran Congress leader, remarked: “It is one thing to raise concern about issues within the Congress but, crossing the ideological barrier to join the BJP is nothing but opportunism…nothing justifies compromising with the BJP ideology which the Congress has been fighting against,” he quipped, “but due to BJP, this ‘Prasada’ politics has started, prompting many to cross over, in search of their bit of ‘Prasada’ of opportunistic politics.” Another veteran leader of the Party Veerappa Moily was more forthright: “the party needs to undergo a major surgery and not depend just on legacy…the top leadership must give primacy to ideological commitment while giving responsibility to leaders...one cannot make people leaders when they do not deserve.” It is imperative that not only should the people chosen for leadership positions have commitment to the party ideology, but also unimpeachable integrity.

Similarly, the debate in the Congress ‘Old guards Vs Young leaders’ is misplaced. The seniors have spent a lifetime in building the party and stood by it through and thick, unlike the young leaders, who reaped the fruits of power, are now deserting the party when it needs their service the most. They are impatient, allowing their personal ambitions to run riot. It is for everybody to see how these young leaders, perceived to be loyal to the ‘family’, have ditched the party at a critical time.  

The party should learn from this and nip in the bud the feud in the party units in Punjab and Rajasthan. The young leaders should not be pampered to antagonize and alienate the veteran leaders Amarinder Singh and Ashok Gehlot, who were responsible for the party returning to power in their states. Navjot Singh Sidhu and Sachin Pilot, relatively new to the party, should be told to be patient, bid time, and not create rift in the party units and encourage groupism. They should not be seen as the power brokers. The party leadership should be more assertive to stamp out factionalism. If Sidhu and Pilot want to leave the party, let them leave.  Like Mukul Roy, who now returned to the TMC, the party defectors who joined the BJP, will soon realize that they have no future in that party and have lost everything that they had. 

Rahul and Priyanka should avoid piecemeal approach to the national issues. They must pursue the issues they highlight to their logical conclusion. The party’s rank and file looks to them to rescue and revive the party.  They need the aggressive killer instinct of Mamata Banerjee and the bold decisive uncompromising attitude of their grandmother Indira Gandhi to lift the morale of the party workers and to take on a formidable political adversary. And Rahul Gandhi must realize that his soft  peddling- the Gandhian approach of winning the enemy ‘with love’- will not fetch electoral dividends for the party, entrusted with playing yet another historical role of an effective national opposition and  providing a tolerant and all inclusive alternative to the present divisive ruling dispensation.