Title: Rootless Congress
cries 'headless'
Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: April 25, 2000
The growing disillusionment
of the Congress with 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, Sonia 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, Sonia 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
re-invent 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 P.V. 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 organizations 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.
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 civilizational 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 President Clinton in 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
Laloo 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!
