Attention Rahul: Targeting frustrated leaders won't save a dying Cong

In 2008, while speaking on Manmohan Singh’s trust motion in Parliament, Amethi MP Rahul Gandhi had referred to his interaction with Kalawati, a dalit and a widow with nine children whose husband was among the thousands of farmers who had committed suicide in Vidarbha. At that time, Kalawati needed his help. Today, Rahul Gandhi - shortened to RaGa as a counter response to Narendra Modi’s NaMo - needs the help of Kalawati but of a different sort. In this case, it is the one which musicologists know as Raga Kalawati. Those who believe in music therapy believe listening to or practicising Raga Kalawati, among some other ragas, helps to deal with tension, stress, and other similar ailments. And there is little doubt that the Amethi MP as well as the Congress and its leadership is threatening to crack under the stresses, strains and pressures brought about by its devastating defeats, including in the Lok Sabha polls, which has left the party with only 44 seats in a House of 543 elected members. [caption id=“attachment_1700067” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Rahul Gandhi: PTI[/caption] Other than listening to Kalawati, the other and much tougher option for Rahul is to introspect, act and re-set the 129-year old party so that it can face the crisis at hand. But this doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s been more than three months since the Lok Sabha results and more than eight months since the wipeout in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, but a formal stock taking is yet to take place. There has been no follow-up on the Antony committee report which absolved the leadership of all blame while analyzing the defeat and suggesting measures for revival. Tired of waiting for some action, its seniors have begun to hit out at the leadership. New vs Old Guard What has intensified the crisis is the siege from within, as the young and the new battle it out with the tried and trusted old guard ahead of the organizational polls as Sonia Gandhi completes her five-year term as Congress president next year. The conflict has been brewing ever since Rahul graduated from a general secretary to vice president in January 2013 and led the party to a series of electoral disasters. And if the track record holds, he will also be the main campaigner for the forthcoming polls in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and J&K where the party is fighting with its back to the wall. Not surprisingly, the murmurs against the Congress vice president have been growing louder. Senior leaders ranging from Janardhan Dwivedi to Jairam Ramesh and Digvijaya Singh, once considered close to the Amethi MP, have been taking potshots at Rahul for his uninspiring leadership and his penchant to vanish from the political scene like the morning mist. Comments like setting a ‘retirement’ age, ‘Rahul is not a ruler by temperament’,  he should be ‘seen and heard more’ or ‘Priyanka is charismatic but Rahul is our leader’ smack of a vote of no-confidence against the Amethi MP whose rise in the party has been inversely proportional to its downfall. Rahul himself has downplayed the open criticism and infighting. Quizzed about it, he told reporters in Amethi that “there are multiple voices in the Congress party and all those voices will bring a solution to it. There are always these types of tension and we will deal with them.’’ The big question is how? Orchestrated counter Instead of taking concrete steps like painful soul-searching over the party’s near decimation, Rahul and Sonia have, through their trusted aides, chosen to shoot from young shoulders by dispatching a team of juniors to deal with the growing revolt. Lesser leaders who ridiculed the Amethi MP as a ‘joker’ were expelled. The party initially chose to ignore the thinly veiled attacks on him by seniors until Rahul’s latest blue-eyed boy Madhusudan Mistry slammed them for criticizing the leadership when they themselves were part of the decision-making process. Taking their cue from Mistry and another Rahul confidante C P Joshi, 14 secretaries openly demanded that the seniors desist from making public statements that embarrass the party. On Wednesday, four of the 14 signatories handed a letter to general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi for circulation, emphasizing that any concern should be expressed in ‘a very dignified manner and at an appropriate place within the party forum’. They called for ‘some introspection’ and urged leaders to “work tirelessly towards improving or in fact reversing the recent political scenario. Our aim should be to make this party stronger.” On Thursday, Dwivedi circulated the letter to all officebearers at the central and state levels, and in a separate note to all 42 secretaries, including the 14, advised them to also follow what they were preaching since they had disclosed the contents of their letter to the media. Twist in the Tale The tussle between the old vs new was heavy on irony on several counts. One, in a role reversal, the juniors—not without sanction from the top—sought to impose disciple on their seniors. Two, Dwivedi, who is supposed to enforce discipline, is now counted among its violators by suggesting an age-bar in politics or, in the middle of the 2014 elections, demanding an end to caste based reservations or recalling how the late Rajiv Gandhi had in 1990 appreciated his daughter Priyanka’s ‘political understanding’. Three, as the man who would issue gag orders on others until recently, Dwivedi literally had to serve one on himself. Four, the letter writers who wanted seniors to voice their opinion in party forums did not hesitate to publicly speak about their letter, prompting Dwivedi to tick them off for it. And finally, in a mockery of the situation prevailing in the organisation, the advisory urged all to express their views at a party forum when there was none available as the top leadership has so far failed to call a meeting to discuss the crisis. Sonia at fault Clearly, the ’tension’ Rahul spoke about has not been resolved. Congress watchers see the letter episode as a temporary truce that could explode and rend the party apart at any day, specially as Rahul’s powers are unlikely to be circumscribed and there is no sign of Priyanka stepping forward to helm or revive the party. Sonia’s failure to formally brainstorm on the crisis has only increased the sense of helplessness and hopelessness among workers and fuelled apprehensions among veterans that instead of spearheading a fightback, the leadership, in an attempt to shield Rahul, has buried its head in the sand, hoping that the crisis would automatically dissolve and disappear. Rahul’s stormtroopers The Amethi MP was right in acknowledging that “there are always these kind of tensions”.  But the same perhaps cannot be said about his assertion that the Congress will be able to deal with it. It is rare though not unusual in the party which swears by hierarchy and expects its second rung to behave like children, (who are to be seen but not heard), to use them to orchestrate a campaign. It happened during the AICC session in Hyderabad in 2006 when the youngsters demanded a greater role for Rahul or in January 2013 at Jaipur where he was anointed vice president but not declared PM candidate perhaps because of the strong anti-incumbency building up against the party. A backward glance would show that Indira Gandhi also allowed her son and heir apparent Sanjay to nurture a youth brigade to act as his stormtroopers, thereby spawning an old vs new faceoff. In fact, many of the current stalwarts are products of that era. After Sanjay’s death in 1980, Rajiv Gandhi stepped in and inducted his own set of leaders whose emergence spelled the decline of many old timers. The wheel threatens to turn again. Because of her age and health, Sonia appears determined to pass on her mantle to Rahul whose hold on the party has been growing despite his organizational and electoral failures. At the same time, he has been building his own team to effect a generational change in the party. Only in this case, the task could be more difficult. For one, despite his controversies, Sanjay was seen to be a ‘doer’ and a leader who made his presence felt. Rajiv, in contrast, was a fresh faced and sincere newcomer who, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, rode on a sympathy wave to win a massive mandate. Rahul, too, raised hopes when he joined politics in 2004 with the distinct advantage of age,freshness and the Gandhi name. But he squandered it in the 10 years he has been around. He is now seen as a half baked leader: his attempt to democratize the Youth Congress injected money power into its elections; he missed the opportunity to gain experience in governance by refusing to join the UPA government; he rarely attended or spoke in Parliament; and he damaged his image, appeal and credibility by failing to identify himself in time with the youths backing the Anna Hazare movement or protesting against the gangrape of a Delhi paramedic. He also appeared immature in the manner in which he attempted to redeem himself by rubbishing the controversial ordinance to protect convicted lawmakers. In the event, the youngster who was hailed as Prince Charming with the magic wand in 2004 had by 2014 been turned into a False Prophet who could connect neither with his workers nor with the voters, leaving him open to attack by his own colleagues and rivals. Merely fielding his juniors as stormtroopers to fight off the latest onslaughts is not going to get him anywhere. He will have to walk the fire himself and start from scratch. The choice now lies with him—whether to fall back on healing techniques like Raga Kalawati or to step forward to fight off the challenge instead of shooting from the shoulders of his secretaries.