The growing disillusionment of the Congress with Ms Sonia Gandhi’s uninspiring leadership and the inner party centralism sponsored by her coterie is a classic instance of mistaking the symptom for the disease. Congress has been rootless for far longer than it has been headless, and it is surprising that the party has not woken up to this fact even in its present crisis. In one sense, Ms Gandhi is merely incidental to the malaise gripping the party, and it would be unfair to apportion all blame to her in the absence of meaningful introspection from other leaders with claims to intellectual eminence and grassroots support.
So far, there is no evidence that such an exercise is being undertaken in the party, which is why the present piecemeal approach to issues is threatening to tear it apart. Whether it is the question of joining Mamata Banerjee’s Mahajot against the Left Front in West Bengal, or enunciating a clear policy towards economic reforms, or an unambiguous nuclear doctrine, Congress is buffeted by each gust of wind. The bizarre espousal of dalit rights by equating the Constitutional review with an assault on the “Ambedkar-drafted constitution” has further exposed its cluelessness. In one sense, Ms Gandhi’s foreign origins are truly symptomatic of the party’s utter irrelevance on the political landscape. An honest gaze inward would reveal that the fault lies as much in the party as in its chieftain.
Readers of this column would recall that from the time Signora Gandhi first burst upon the national scene as star campaigner of a besieged Congress, I have written about the yawning absence of a clear ideology in the party. Indeed, there has been a stubborn resistance to acknowledging the ideological nullity, and the party has resorted to dynastic appeal and sheer gimmickry to paper the void.
The crux of the matter is the extent to which Congress wishes to adhere to Marxist ideology, and not its pro-Left bias on account of Signora Gandhi’s psychological dependence on the Communist Party of India (Marxist). My point is that there has long been a split in the core ideology of Congress, which has over time led to the failure of the one-party dominance model painstakingly constructed by social scientists even as its shortcomings manifested themselves starkly across the political firmament. The rise of other political parties in the States and at the national level, meanwhile, has ruled out a successful repetition of the jugglery of form versus content, which once enabled Congress to romp home at the polls. It is now Signora Gandhi’s responsibility to reinvent Congress and tell the people what it stands for.
Broadly, as I have argued previously, the Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru had the form of the Congress of Mahatma Gandhi (with its emphasis on dharma, ahimsa, panchayati raj and a vibrant entrepreneurial class), but was consciously Marxist in substance and orientation. Nehru’s stress on “scientific temper” and condemnation of “superstition” (the generic term under which he clubbed India’s spiritual traditions) was nothing but a crude attempt to cut off the emerging modern nation from its civilizational ethos. He survived in the electoral arena only by converting the minority communities into a faithful votebank on the one hand, and compromising with state stalwarts on the other, to ensure the requisite votes from the majority community.
The 1967 rout of Congress in north India showed that the strategy had lost credence. A hapless Indira Gandhi had to forge a more honest path by ceding public space to the Hindu ethos while simultaneously depending upon the Left for political survival. In appearance, Congress remained a secular party because its minority votebank was intact (barring 1977), but there can be no doubting that its theme turned increasingly Hindu, though much was camouflaged under the populism that marked this period (bank nationalization, abolition of privy purses, anti-business hysteria). Today’s cut-throat battle over the genuine sources and approaches to recording Indian history is, ironically, a legacy of Indira Gandhi’s dependence upon the Left and Left intellectuals.
With hindsight, there can be little doubt that the Congress turned rootless in 1984 itself, even as its landslide victory gave it a false sense of complacency as the “natural party of governance”, and encouraged it to continue the paradox of structure versus substance. Rajiv Gandhi’s incapacity to understand the country or the people, and his absolute insensitivity to the fundamental civilizational issues that were crystallizing during his reign, dealt the once mighty Congress a lethal blow.
Congress got a unique second chance under Mr PV Narasimha Rao, who was canny enough to realize that only a gargantuan de-construction exercise could bring it out of its morass. He began by amputating its Marxist underpinnings through massive economic reforms that set an irreversible trend and released the productive classes from the debilitating stranglehold of the license -permit raj. Today, if forums such as CII, ASSOCHAM and FICCI look like partners in the nation-building enterprise, rather than organisations of rich mendicants, the tribute goes to Mr Rao. What is more, realizing that Congress would not allow him to fruitfully contribute to the crystallization of a new national sentiment rooted in the civilizational ethos, Mr Rao stoically refrained from a meddling that might have made matters worse. A man of his erudition must have been painfully aware that the Babri Masjid Action Committee had ceded the case when it walked out of the state-sponsored negotiations with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The rest is history.
A mature Congress could have utilized Mr Rao’s consensual, non-confrontational leadership to carve out a powerful niche in the emerging new national consciousness. It could have sought to prevent, rather than mindlessly aggravate, the sterile confrontation that inhibited the mutual adjustment of communities, a possibility once very much on the cards. Unfortunately, the party remained intoxicated with the vision of form fractured from content, and needlessly humiliated and hounded Mr Rao for showing cognizance of the growing national sentiment. It also believed, mistakenly as it turns out, that the presence of the Signora at the helm of affairs would automatically invest the party with meaning in the eyes of the electorate.
Ms Sonia Gandhi’s tragedy is that she is the classic outsider. She has little cognition of the party she presides over and no empathy with the society she craves to rule. Understandably, she is unequal to the task of healing the schizophrenia that has characterized its post-Independence persona. Having no roots here, she cannot possibly understand the dimensional shift that has taken place in the matter of the nation’s civilisational ethos. Nor can she comprehend the significance of the nuclear explosions in the overall framework of national self-assertion and security requirements. Little wonder she cannot expound her views and tell us clearly what exactly she told US President Bill Clinton during his recent visit to this country.
While the Signora’s known circle of friends and associates should incline her towards economic liberalization, she has to fall in line with her left-leaning coterie, in the absence of a larger personal vision. As for the Mahajot in West Bengal, she can no more permit Congress
to join an anti-Left line-up than she can antagonize Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar. So while she has no natural affinity with Jawaharlal Nehru, she has inherited his anti-Hindu Marxist heirs without his ability to do business with “majority communalism” (sic). Perhaps that is why Congressmen deride her as a headless wonder!
The Pioneer, 25 April 2000