A Pointless Death

To the uninitiated, the happenings at 24 Akbar Road, New Delhi, the Congress HQ, may look like high drama. To initiates, it is distilled tragedy. It is not simply that the Congress is dying: death can be grand when it comes in the defence of a noble cause or the pursuit of an exalted goal. It is the sheer, absurd, pointlessness of the Congress' death that makes it a tragedy. For the struggle tearing it apart is not over the substance of power but its shadow. The responsibility for its collective suicide rests with all of its senior members - those who schemed and manoeuvred, those who spoke out and those who chose to remain silent when a single wise word might have averted the tragedy. The members of the cwc are among the country's most seasoned politicians. They had to have known that once the bjp raised the issue, Sonia Gandhi's origins would become an electoral issue. Should they not have dealt with it quietly and in a civilised manner long ago?

Sonia's supporters are now accusing Pawar, Sangma and Anwar of speaking the bjp's language on the foreigner issue, and thus endorsing its attack on Sonia. That is not strictly correct. The bjp is questioning the right of a 'foreigner' to rule India. Pawar, Sangma and Anwar have questioned neither Sonia's legal nor her moral right to be prime minister. They have questioned the political wisdom of projecting her as the Congress' prime ministerial candidate in September-October. The anxiety they expressed is a genuine one, shared by many who have chosen to remain silent. Had the trio stopped there, they would have been on firm ground. But they went too far when they asked Sonia to commit herself to moving a constitutional amendment that would bar 'foreign-born' Indians from becoming the country's president or prime minister. Their reasons deserve a fair hearing, whatever their motives. Sangma no doubt had the good of the Congress at heart. Pawar, on the other hand, knew how deep the tradition of sycophancy ran in the party. He knew therefore that no matter what Sonia said now, if the Congress did emerge as the largest party after the election, nothing would stop the 'loyalists' from invoking that very success - and loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty - to steamroll her into the prime ministership.

Pawar would not have gone so far if he had not been convinced that the Congress would emerge the victor in the coming elections. Had this not been so, he would have been content with a simple disclaimer from Sonia of the kind she has made time and again. Such a disclaimer would have cost her nothing. She was already the president of the party. Her face was more familiar to the electorate than that of Vajpayee. She had held the party together, and against all expectations, enabled it to win three more seats than it had won in 1996. To the people at large, she was the leader of the party. An unambiguous disclaimer that she was not interested in being prime minister and would not stand for election in October would have raised her stature in the eyes of the public and quite possibly increased the Congress' share of the vote. Projecting her as the future prime minister and forcing the electorate to face the 'foreigner' issue could have had the opposite effect.But if Pawar, Sangma and Anwar made a mistake, the Gandhi loyalists compounded it by forcing a showdown. And they too did it for precisely the same reason - their conviction that power was already in their grasp.

This unanimity of belief among politicians who are in every other respect at daggers drawn with each other forces me to ask another question. Could they be right and I wrong? Could the battle after all be over the substance and not the shadow of power? Dispassionate political analysis suggests otherwise. The Congress' self-confidence is built on sand. According to its stalwarts, the results of the assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi show that there is a wave building up against the bjp. The Vajpayee government had admittedly begun to perform better between December and March, and the Congress did incur some unpopularity by bringing it down.

But public memory is short. By October, the goof-ups of March and April will be forgotten. The bjp has been effectively hamstrung. The road to victory is therefore free of obstacles. In reality, the Congress faced an uphill struggle even before the present power struggle in the party. In '98, Sonia prevented the party from disintegrating and infused some self-confidence in its cadres. But she did not prove much of a vote-getter. Even though she addressed over 200 rallies, the Congress' voteshare fell by almost 4 per cent. This year, to win more seats than the bjp alone, it had to raise its share of the vote to over 30 per cent. To do this it had to convince people that it had turned a new leaf, stage a comeback in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and bring the tmc and the Trinamul Congress back into the fold.

Above all, it had to wait for the people to get fed up with the bjp and swing the Congress' way. This had already happened in the north in November, and was likely to happen in parts of the south next winter. All that the party had to do was to be flexible and patient. It was neither. The tradition of sycophancy made it impossible for it to reach out to the splinter groups; it threw away Bihar and possibly Uttar Pradesh when it backed Laloo Yadav over the imposition of President's rule in Bihar, and it panicked at the first sign of renewed purpose in the bjp. Even before the Pawar fracas, it was going into the 1999 elections with the cards stacked against it. The way the loyalists have behaved has reminded people all over the country once again that behind its bravado, this party has just one selling point - the Nehru-Gandhi mystique. Today, that is almost certainly not enough to win an election.