Congress cannot be held hostage by rentiers

Congress will continue to decline until it can shed its enervating dependence on the Gandhis

Political parties are institutions fundamental to electoral democracies, where multiple such organisations compete against each other to win elections and form governments. Political parties, therefore, have a life and a responsibility of their own, separate from the "leaders" who temporarily head it.

A normative line does separate the incumbent leader, successful or a failure, from the party as an institution. This applies as much to the position of Sonia Gandhi and her offspring, Rahul and Priyanka, as it does to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi-Amit Shah and to the Trinamool Congress vis-à-vis Mamata Banerjee and to DMK vis-à-vis M K Stalin and to Samajwadi Party vis-à-vis Akhilesh Yadav or any of the regional and smaller parties where the line separating the leader and the party does not exist.

Leaders of political parties are accountable to the party and are expected to function with a modicum of responsibility. The Congress is an institution, like all political parties, and its 137-year life span has given it a place and an aura that makes it distinctly different from political parties that emerged later, some as recently as 2012, when the Aam Aadmi Party was established or 1998, when the Trinamool Congress was established after Mamata Banerjee broke away from the Congress over differences in strategy.

It is not a captive of the present Gandhi family, Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul, regardless of their lineage, which can be traced back to Motilal Nehru, to Jawaharlal Nehru and then Indira Gandhi. The trio is merely stewards, not proprietors of the party.

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It is astonishing that Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and Priyanka behave like arrogant rentiers and can get away with it, for they continue to hold power and exercise authority, even when they, formally, have no authority and no legitimacy to exercise power within the crumbling structure of the Congress.

Knowing that the leadership of the family is being challenged internally and lampooned by rivals, it is strange how the Gandhi family has insulated itself from the constant criticism and continues to manipulate and manoeuvre the decimated establishment. The dodges that it employs to remain in control of the party are straight out of B Grade family melodramas of the 1930s; Rahul Gandhi's declaration that he "humbly accepts the people's verdict," and even then continues to behave as though he owned the party; Sonia Gandhi's reported offer to resign, even when she manipulates the Congress Working Committee, packed with her handpicked loyalists, to kowtow.

Responsible leaders resign. It is the responsibility of failed leaders in party politics to accept responsibility and relinquish office. Autocrats do not resign, even when their plans go wrong. Autocrats make their critics either disappear or gag them. Rentiers masquerading as leaders offer to resign, as Sonia Gandhi reportedly did, only to ensure that she can graciously concede to the request from loyalists to continue as a leader.

Having manoeuvred to remain in control, in an act that was as irresponsible as it was shameful, Sonia Gandhi instructed the state Congress presidents of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, Manipur and Uttarakhand to resign, which they did. If Sonia Gandhi was a political leader and not the matriarch, and the Congress was a political party and not a piece of Gandhi property, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra should have been asked to resign as a general secretary because she was definitely in charge of the election in Uttar Pradesh. Since Rahul Gandhi does not hold any office in the party but meddles in everything, the only resignation he can formally offer is from the party, which will not happen.

Then there is the docility of even the disgruntled individuals and the long meeting of the Congress Working Committee, which was a performance, a classic piece of theatre, all sound and fury that adds up to nothing. It raises the question, what then is the Congress party today?

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In its present state, the credentials of the central or national Congress leadership is problematic. It does not mean that Congress leaders like Ashok Gehlot or Bhupesh Baghel or D K Shivakumar, or Prithviraj Chavan and the galaxy of leaders from Maharashtra are not leaders of the Congress as a political institution. They are. The Congress in these states, and in states where it is the principal opposition, is both a venerable political institution and a competent election fighting machine.

The inability of the central leadership of the Congress to function as a political institution implies that the people who head it are either irresponsible or shy away from responsibility because they are incapable of handling responsibility. It is a pity because the Congress was built brick by brick, evolved and changed under the leadership of a very large number of India's educated elite over the course of 137 years. There were stalwarts who built the Congress in the states, and there were stalwarts who built the party at the top.

The same cannot be said of the central leadership (sic!) of the Congress and the high command. Legitimacy as leaders is not derived from lineage. Leadership is earned. As a yardstick, it is an easy way to measure why Akhilesh Yadav is a leader and heads a political institution, despite his lineage. By the same measure Tejashwi Yadav in Bihar, M K Stalin in Tamil Nadu, and Naveen Patnaik have earned their positions as party leaders. All of them have shouldered the responsibility as office bearers of their respective parties.

Despite its incompetence, the persistence with which the BJP insists that the Congress is its principal rival points to a strategic construction of a narrative around a failed enterprise. The narrative implies that the regional and smaller parties are "fragments" that can never come together without the Congress as a centripetal force, stabilising a collective of disparate and competing elements.

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The logic of the argument is flawed, hopelessly so. The smaller and regional parties do not usually compete against each other because regional parties have a footprint confined to their own turf. The ambition of some regional parties to spread beyond the natural borders of their original turf is probably a risky political exploit that will benefit the BJP and hurt the idea of a collective of opposition parties united against the BJP.

By selling a narrative that disdainfully describes regional parties as "fragments", the Congress, as well as the BJP, have worked together to craft a tale of inferiority, in which the two big "national" parties are the anchors of all past stable and successful alliances and the smaller and regional political institutions are colliding fragments that can only offer unstable governments should they succeed in outnumbering the other side in a future election. The fact of the matter is that the smaller and regional parties, as the last phase of state elections revealed, are efficient fighting machines.

The Aam Aadmi Party, on a shoestring budget and a skeleton organisation compared to the wealth and human resources of the BJP and the Congress and even the Akali Dal, managed to win against all three decisively. The Samajwadi Party fought against the BJP and emerged as the principal challenger, and it fought against the Congress that fantasised that it was staging a revival in Uttar Pradesh. By the same logic, the Shiv Sena fought a fierce battle to win enough seats in Maharashtra to reject the BJP and form a government with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.

The time has probably come when regional and smaller parties need to stop looking at the political battleground through the lens of either the BJP or the Congress. Instead of spreading thinly over the vast political battleground, these parties probably ought to concentrate their energies and improve efficiency. If regional and smaller parties did indeed engage in bipolar fights against the BJP, it would be tough for Narendra Modi to swing the next election in favour of his party across India.

It is the Congress, under the illusion that it is a "national" party with a "leadership" with a venerable lineage that is being propped up as the spoiler by the BJP to save itself from a contest that it is uncomfortable against a host of opposition parties, each different, but hostile to it. Until the Congress can shed its enervating dependence on the Gandhis and function as a political institution in an electoral democracy that is responsible to its organisation and not a family and can hold its leaders to account for their failures, it will continue to decline till one day it becomes a "signboard" on a wall marking its historical presence.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Kolkata)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.