I am conscious of the fact that the last thing the Congress president needs at present is more gratuitous advice. However, since it is my job to offer gratuitous advice, I present my two paisas’ worth.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the party. It is a formidable, pan-Indian, non-communal, non-casteist (although it occasionally kneels at both altars), centre-left, caring formation. The difficulty is that there are at least half-a-dozen urgent things that should be done—and are not being done. The blame for that inexplicable inactivity has to be put squarely where it belongs: with Sonia Gandhi. It is one buck she cannot pass or share.
Why she doesn’t mend the things that are crying out to be mended is possibly the biggest mystery of contemporary Indian politics. The state of Maharashtra, where Congress prospects are bright, is in terrible shape, yet the sore is being allowed to fester. By the time it is repaired, it will be too late. The conventional wisdom is that Sonia Gandhi is the prisoner of her ‘coterie’. They have her ear and they tell her things which will consolidate their proximity to her. Or they tell her things they think she wants to hear. To me that arrangement is perfectly acceptable. The leader of every political party on our planet has a few aides who provide counsel and policy options. Mrs Gandhi would be daft and less than human if she did not listen to them. The President of the United States, George Bush, listens to his coterie. Tony Blair was a puppet in the hands of Alastair Campbell.
Thus, the conventional wisdom that Sonia should put all her inner circle in front of a firing squad is ridiculous. She has listened to them in the past and she should listen to them in the future. Which makes the advice problem a bit more complicated but not unsolvable. A ‘chalak’ leader listens to her coterie, and this is crucial, also has her own channels of information. She does not rely entirely on a single-source information network. Sonia should be in a position to challenge her coterie and probe them with searching counter-questions. If Mr Ahmed Patel tells her that S.M. Krishna should not contest elections in Karnataka (I’m just making this up), she should weigh what Mr Patel is saying against her own independent feedback on the Krishna issue. A leader becomes a prisoner of his/her coterie when he/she does not have ‘private information’ collected from a variety of sources—sources which may have been specifically commissioned.
That channel of independent communication is closed at 10, Janpath. My advice is that it should be swiftly opened.