Learning From Mistakes

But this is only the beginning of the Congress' discomfiture. Gradually, more and more party members are realising that by supporting Laloo Yadav Pvt Ltd, the party has betrayed its own dream of returning to power on it own and giving the country an effective government. By this one action the high command has destroyed what was left of the party in Bihar and endangered the comeback it had begun to make in Uttar Pradesh. The two states account for 140 out of the Lok Sabha's 545 members. Any party that writes them off has to win 273 out of the remaining 405 seats.

That's a tall order, when the Congress no longer has a significant presence in Tamil Nadu (40 seats), has to share power in Kerala (18), and has been reduced to insignificance by the split with the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal (42). Every Congressman therefore knows that staging a comeback in Bihar and UP was essential for a Congress comeback. This was true in its heyday in the '50s and '60s; it is even more true today. One sign of the growing pessimism in the party is the welcome a large section accorded to former prime minister Narasimha Rao on his return from the US, where he had gone for medical treatment. One should not read too much into a single outburst of emotion, but it does suggest that, one God having failed, some members of the party at least are on the lookout for another.

The Congress has two options. It can recognise its mistake, and back away from it. In which case not too much damage will have been done. Or it can compound its mistake and commit many more. Those who engineered the turnaround on Bihar are determined to make it do the latter. Their decision to bring in the ace broker of dubious deals, Subramanian Swamy, to set up a tea-time meeting between Sonia and Jayalalitha is a case in point. Their intention is clearly to find out what it will take-in terms of cabinet seats promised, corruption cases withdrawn, elected governments overthrown and tribunal awards implemented or gerrymandered - to make Jayalalitha forsake the bjp alliance and throw in her lot with the Congress. It does not seem to have occurred to these master-manipulators that the entire country is watching with bated breath and praying that the Congress will not regress all the way back to the days of opportunistic alliances and unscrupulous dismissals that Sonia had dragged it away from in 1998.

Were saner counsel to prevail, the party's leaders would realise that both the alarm at the bjp's resurgence which made them lose patience in February, and the panic that is pushing them into looking for ways to dislodge the bjp now, are uncalled for. If the Congress only concedes its error and returns to its strategy of appealing to the people on the basis of a principled stand against opportunistic coalitions and a responsible support on matters of policy, little will have been lost. In December, the party is almost certain to win the elections in either Karnataka or Andhra-maybe both. In March, it will walk away with the elections in Maharashtra and should do a lot better in Gujarat than it has of late. These victories will come irrespective of how well the bjp does at the Centre and will make the Congress a serious contender in the next elections.

The Congress can use the time before the next election profitably to build a campaign against corruption and criminality in politics, and to reorient its cadre towards genuine service to the people. The party has already taken several steps to weed out criminal elements from it ranks. It has also taken advantage of the controversy over the dismissal of Admiral Bhagwat to raise the issue of corruption in defence contracts. But an even more important reform would be the reorientation of its cadres towards serving the people of the country. That this has not happened so far is partly an accident of history. As the party that brought India to independence, the Congress asked people for their vote as a reward for the services it had already rendered to the country. It did not therefore occur to the members to institutionalise a system for identifying peoples' problems and acting as a catalyst in getting them resolved. Later, as bogus memberships paid for by local financiers destroyed the mass base of the party, and still later as the task of fund-raising turned the Congress from a cadre-based party into a caucus-based one, its parasitical nature got steadily reinforced. Today Sonia has a chance to reverse the trend. In the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (rgf) she had developed an organisation that was able to reach down to the poorest people in the country and identify their needs. The people in their turn responded to the foundation as they have never responded to a political party. Reshaping the party with the help of lessons learned from the experience of the rgf is the most important task that its leaders face.

This can only be done while the party is out of power.