An iron law of democracy
If Mrs Sonia Gandhi was half as concerned about the future of the Congress as she is about the future of Rahul Gandhi, Congress might have been far more capable of fulfilling her dream of making him Prime Minister of India. After all, the Congress is corrigible.
This paradox will be lost on those Congresspersons who have become so subservient to dynasty that nothing matters other than ritual hallelujahs before a prince who has aged, or at least middle-aged, without having matured politically. Rahul Gandhi’s interventions are a step-up from the extra-Constitutional authority formula. His preferred style is beyond anything known in democracy: press conference dictatorship. A privileged individual is more important in the current dispensation than the complex edifice of constitutional government in which any decision has to be nudged and nurtured carefully through numerous checks and balances, not the least of them being president of India.
The funniest sight at the press conference where Rahul Gandhi tore apart the little that remained of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s credibility was Ajay Maken’s face. Maken was chosen by Rahul Gandhi to head the party’s communication in the crucial months before a general election. He had summoned media to defend the Congress government’s ordinance offering reprieve to convicted politicians. You could see Maken’s little heart doing a crazy dance in his mouth as his leader in this lifetime and beyond dismissed a decision taken by Mrs Sonia Gandhi, through the core committee, and Dr Singh, through Cabinet, as complete nonsense.
It is such instances that revive the Indians’ deep and abiding faith in the medicinal qualities of laughter. A political party can always win an election against mellifluous oratory. But it is impossible to win an election against jokes.
Nothing sums up the current mockery of government better than the latest joke doing the internet and conversational rounds: Dr Singh went to America, and even America’s government shut down.
For three years at least this UPA government has been imploding. It is now exploding, and its fragments are scattered across the news. Each Cabinet meeting ends with the grinding sound of Congress crumbling just a little more. The Telengana decision was a crash rather than a crumble: contrast this with the smooth manner in which Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chattisgarh were created. The UPA has disintegrated visibly after the ordinance flip-flop and Telengana chaos.
The compulsion behind both decisions was not conviction, but electoral manoeuvre impelled by desperation. The flip side of the ordinance was a wish to protect party MPs like Rashid Masood and allies like Lalu Yadav; the flop side was Rahul Gandhi’s attempt to establish popular credit at favourable interest rates.
A party can survive without government. A government cannot be effective without a party. That is an iron law of democracy. The party limits damage in adversity and maximises gains during prosperity. The mistake Mrs Sonia Gandhi made was to hand over party management to an heir who did not realise that it was a blood-and-sweat job, not a private sector project fuelled by computer printouts. In a state as crucial as Uttar Pradesh, therefore, the party has simply withered under a hand-picked state president, Nirmal Khatri, whose visits to Lucknow are such an occasional event that they necessitate a press release.
The decay has come at a time of radical change in the electorate. The most important demographic mobilization in UP, to continue with a persuasive example, is not going to be by Brahmins, Muslims or Dalits in the next general elections, but what might be called the New Minority: youth. Some 2.3 crore, or 17.6 per cent of the state’s electorate, will vote for the first time. This is higher than the number of Brahmins or Muslims or Dalits in UP. The young are searching for the politics of addition, a surplus of hope, not the cynicism of fracture on lines of caste and creed. True, all the young will not vote alike, but then neither does any other group.
It is not BJP which is dividing the Congress, as Mrs Gandhi claimed during her recent public meeting in Karnataka; indeed the BJP is the only thing that unites Congress from Caucus Singh at one end to Quibble Khan at the other. The Congress is in disarray because it has lost direction.
UPA worked well as long as its leadership was an isosceles triangle. Mrs Gandhi was pre-eminent; Dr Singh and Pranab Mukherjee were equal sides who kept government and party stable, with Mukherjee given the vital charge of perception management. When Dr Singh began to wilt, Mukherjee should have replaced him. Instead, he went into comfort zone, and the Congress into a spin. We now have a hapless Mrs Gandhi, an indifferent prime minister and Rahul Gandhi rushing in and out, when he feels like, through blank space on the third side.
Mobashar Jawed Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Guardian. He has also served as Editorial Director of India Today.
