If It's Good, Beat It Down

So, everything is hunky-dory again in the Congress in Delhi. Sheila Dixit remains the chief minister; Ram Babu Sharma remains the pradesh committee chief; a coordination committee of five has been set up to guide policy. In it, the casting vote will, by the nature of its composition, remain with party general secretary Ashok Gehlot. That means it will rest with Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Is this really true? Was it all a storm in a teacup? Wrong! The crisis is only beginning. Let us stand back and see precisely what central party intervention has actually achieved. First, Sheila Dixit has been humiliated. Second, her power to control her party has been destroyed. Third, her capacity to govern has been gravely weakened.

"Oh, but you are only revealing your class bias when you support Sheila Dixit," Congress rank and filers may retort. "Sheila Dixit did not win the election, the Congress party did. Individuals are irrelevant. She has been disciplined because she showed high-handedness and disrespect to her colleagues. The party will be the better for it."

Even a cursory glance shows that this is not what happened. The meeting of the executive committee of the Delhi Pradesh Congress was held on Tuesday, April 19. At that meeting, no fewer than 30 persons spoke, who were all Congressmen but not all members of the executive committee. The speakers ignored the agenda and launched an all-out attack on the chief minister. Sharma, who was chairing the meeting, not only allowed the non-members to speak but also ignored their utter disregard for the agenda. Sheila Dixit realised that she had been, to use American slang, sandbagged. Her only choices were to sit and bear the humiliation, to reply and be put on the defensive, or to get up and walk out. She did the last of the three.

In doing so, she fell into Sharma's trap. Now he had the excuse he needed to accuse her of high-handedness and insensitivity to the rank and file, and to go rushing to Sonia Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi and Gehlot have followed a process for dispute resolution that dates back to the days of Indira Gandhi as prime minister. Little do they realise, however, that this process, and the power structure that it builds and reinforces, lies at the base of the steady attrition of Congress dominance in the past 25 years.

Let us agree straightaway that Sheila Dixit should not have allowed her anger and hurt to get the better of her. Instead, she should have gritted her teeth and sat out the criticism that was being heaped upon her. Had she done so, she would not have allowed her rival to outmanoeuvre her. But once her action forced the high command to choose between backing her and backing the pcc chief, Sonia Gandhi should have realised that backing Sheila Dixit was by far the lesser evil.

The messy government-by-committee compromise that the high command evolved is in the worst interests of the party. By clipping Sheila Dixit's wings, it offends the most basic principle of parliamentary democracy. People vote for specific candidates. They vote at most for a parliamentary party. They do not vote for the transfer of power to unelected party managers who pull strings from behind. They vote for transparency, not for backroom deals. When they begin to suspect the latter, and even more, when they see a decision-making structure being put in place that virtually guarantees the latter, they rapidly lose faith in the party they had voted for.

In this case, the damage that the Congress has inflicted upon itself is even greater. For Sheila Dixit is no ordinary chief minister. She is the one who not merely beat back the anti-incumbency swing in vote that humbled the party in three other states in December 2003, but actually increased its share of the vote.This is almost the only time that the Congress has been able to perform this feat since the early '70s. A succession of opinion polls held before the elections showed that a significant proportion of the voters credited Sheila Dixit with the good governance they had enjoyed and voted for her. At the very least, therefore, they will regard the decision to clip her wings as undemocratic. After all, it was she whom they had voted for, not Sharma or even Gehlot.

Had this been an isolated example, one could have treated it as an aberration. But the Congress has now institutionalised conflict between the party in legislature and the organisational wing outside it. To take just the past three years, Captain Amarinder Singh, the chief minister of Punjab, faced the same revolt within his rank and file that Sheila Dixit did. The high command papered over it with a similar messy compromise, forcing him to share power with his arch-rival, whom they made his deputy chief minister. And only 16 months ago, the high command came within inches of removing Sheila Dixit only days after she had led the Congress to its landmark second victory to propitiate scores of rank and filers who had their eyes set on ministerial berths. People noticed the implied contempt for democracy within the party, but forgave it because nothing happened. This time they may not be so forgiving.

There is one last question that bothers us ordinary folk that the high command would do well to take note of. Why is it that the maximum number of revolts take place against chief ministers who are honest and have a distaste for corruption and fraud? Both Amarinder Singh and Sheila Dixit fall into this category. We, of course, know the answer. We had hoped that a Congress under Sonia Gandhi would know it too.