The Slave Dynasty

And with even Sonia Gandhi’s vote-gathering potential in grave doubt then, would they not have gunned for her eventually? Just see how Congress workers treated P.V. Narasimha Rao in the wake of the 1996 loss of power and his replacement Sitaram Kesri after the party’s second consecutive defeat in the 1998 elections. If you think dynasty is sacrosanct for the Congress people, just go back a little further in time to the Congress split after the defeat of 1977, when even the formidable Indira Gandhi was left with a rump party which she then single-handedly brought back to power in 1980. Dynasty is feted only if it gets votes and brings power.

Since the grand old party structure of the Congress corroded and split in the late 1960s, all political parties gradually became vote- and power-grabbing mobs. Sometimes they built themselves around a charismatic individual or dynasty, as with the Congress or umpteen regional parties, and sometimes they built themselves around a cadre base, idealistic during the early years but starting to rot with acquisition of power, as with the BJP or the Communists.

When four parties with separate ideological and organisational cores, evolved over a period of time, merged with each other and formed the Janata Party to defeat Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and replace her from power, they failed to create a single organisational structure for the new party in the years that it was in power. All the subsequent splinters of this party formed around personalities, except for the BJP.  Through the years, these splinters re-merged, re-formed and re-split around personalities like Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram, Chandra Shekhar, V.P. Singh, Devi Lal, Ramakrishna Hegde, Biju Patnaik, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Prasad Yadav, H.D. Deve Gowda and Nitish Kumar, but never evolving an institutionalised organisational structure with proper elections. The Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu and the socialist parties of the north have evolutionary pasts rooted in ideology and political movements, but they have degenerated to single-person or family outfits.

Though the Hindutvawadis have had an ideological glue, the BJP, like its earlier incarnation, the Jan Sangh, has been hamstrung by an accountability, not to political and democratic processes, but to an extra-party controller and handler like the RSS, which has also been used by factions to settle scores with each other. This was never as evident as in the current crisis, when TV cameras mercilessly recorded the continuous to-and-fro traffic of leaders between the BJP and RSS headquarters. The so-called collective or consensual decision-making in the BJP is forged through over-the-shoulder “help” from the RSS. Smaller Hindutva parties like the Shiv Sena and the Hindu Mahasabha have been personality-dependent mobs.

The sad fact is that our parties—except perhaps the Communists in a nominal sense—are not exactly political institutions born of and sustained by political processes, as they should be. Moreover, democracy hardly touches intra-party processes. The Congress evolved through a long and testing history of debate and once boasted of an enviable pantheon of great leaders. This should have offered the least common denominator for our post-’47 politics. But it betrayed its past when it began to be plagued by bogus memberships and farcical organisational elections. Later, the charismatic leadership of Indira Gandhi completely overthrew its democratic pretensions. It still follows the organisational culture of nominations and decrees.

In its last organisational “elections”, the AICC members from the states supposedly “authorised” their state committee leaders to elect the party president, who was also “authorised” to nominate other office-bearers. In these conditions, Rahul Gandhi promises to hold Youth Congress elections under the supervision of former Election Commission officials J.M. Lyngdoh, T.S. Krishnamurthy and K.J. Rao. It will be watched with interest whether the exercise proves cosmetic or becomes a harbinger of change in the Congress and sets an example for others.