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Congress caught in vicious cycle

Kamaluddin Ahmed, the former Pradesh Congress Committee chief for Andhra Pradesh, has left Sonia Gandhi's outfit and joined the BJP. Meira Kumar, daughter of the late Jagjivan Ram and a member of the Congress Working Committee in her own right, has resigned from the party and is about to campaign against Congress candidates in Bihar. Rajesh Khanna, a former member of Parliament from the New Delhi constituency, refused to be the party's candidate from the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat; he has also strongly criticised Deepa Mehta's controversial film Water.

I have just one question: what is happening to the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi?

I thought the party had hit rock-bottom after the results of the last general election came out -- it would have been difficult to sink any further having won just 112 seats out of 543 constituencies that went to the polls. P V Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri had lost the top job after poll defeats (actually the Congress won more seats when they were around), but Sonia Gandhi continued to rule the roost. There were two good reasons why nobody came out openly against the current party president.

First, there really isn't any viable alternative to Sonia Gandhi left in Congress ranks. Remember that over the past three years, several regional chieftains have left the party in a huff -- Mamata Bannerjee's Trinamul Congress, Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party, and G K Moopanar's Tamil Maanila Congress. A Madhavrao Scindia or a Rajesh Pilot may win his own seat, but it is beyond them to carry all of Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan for the Congress.

The second reason is that the Congress believed that it was re-establishing itself in the Gangetic belt.

In 1998, it had failed to win a single seat in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh; one year later it won ten. The last thing that Congressmen wanted was to give the impression that they themselves lacked confidence in their leader.

That was the situation when the results of the general election came out in October. So what has happened in a mere one hundred and twenty days to convince Congressmen that Sonia Gandhi cannot lead them back to power?

To begin with, the party is far more worried than it cares to admit about the potential fallout of the Bofors investigations. Congressmen at large are uncomfortably aware that there is now hard evidence about the identity of the mysterious 'Q'. There is also proof that Rajiv Gandhi gave special favours to certain people.

Revelations about leaders playing favourites, or even perhaps breaking the law, need not be fatal. To take two parallel cases, the Republican Party in the United States survived the fall of President Nixon and Germany's Christian Democrats aren't going to fade away just because ex-Chancellor Kohl is mired in a bribery scandal.

That said, neither the Republicans nor the Christian Democrats are so closely identified with a single family as the Congress is to the Nehru-Gandhi clan. Let us face it, what qualifications does Sonia Gandhi have other than the fact that she married Jawaharlal Nehru's grandson? And if scandal engulfs that grandson, and perhaps others in the family, what remains of Sonia Gandhi's claims to the party presidency?

But family matters aren't the sole reason to be unhappy with Sonia Gandhi. Her own acts of commission and omission are the second cause of concern. The fact is that she has proved to be a pitiable failure as Leader of the Opposition; for all practical purposes it is Mulayam Singh Yadav who sets the tone in the Lok Sabha. (It doesn't help that the Samajwadi Party boss and the Congress chief detest each other.) Sonia Gandhi has tried everything -- including raising the RSS bogey -- but nothing seems to work.

And so there is a slow erosion from the Congress ranks, which might just hasten if the next round of assembly elections goes against the party. But it is, I feel, a little too soon to write an obituary for the Congress. Given proper leadership, the Congress could easily revive itself.

But where is that leadership to come from? Sonia Gandhi obviously cannot provide it, either from lack of experience or from want of aptitude for the task. But anyone who tries to take over immediately falls prey to the jealousy of the rest. It is a classic vicious cycle -- the Nehru-Gandhi cannot lead the Congress to power, but the Congress has forgotten how to live without the family.

T V R Shenoy