Hands on approach

Hands on approach

Rahul will have to face electoral bullets if he becomes the Congress president again.

It can now be said that Congress matriarch Sonia Gandhi has done everything she could to protect son Rahul. Whether that can stem the prospects of the party from dwindling further is another story. The Saturday meeting of the Congress Working Committee was unique. It witnessed, for the first time in recent memory, a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family forced to take note of growing dissent in the party organisation and handle it differently from the past when disciplinary action was the standard remedy. How times have changed. The dissidents make a large, powerful group and throwing them out would mean ejecting the entire second rung leadership. The Family runs the show thanks to irrational allegiance to the leadership that stills dissent beyond a point. Sonia Gandhi did not confront the dissidents. She reasoned with them. She explained to them that their main grouse – lack of a full-time president – was groundless as she was a “full-time” and “hands-on” president. She thus shielded them from her son who left the presidency after the 2019 election debacle and has since been reluctant to be anointed again. She then sought patience from them to await the next president. Probably, him again. They wanted an elected president and they will get one, she told them, backing her word with a time-bound organisational election schedule. What she has managed to do in the process is show exemplary shrewdness in steering the dawdling ship in the rough seas by keeping intact all hands on the oars.

From her point of view, son ahul’s high point after becoming Congress president in December 2017 was the party forming four State Governments, including one in a coalition, after the assembly elections in 2018. He quit the following year. Rahul was not president when Congress was whipped in West Bengal. He would not be there either when the Congress fights in Uttar Pradesh. The Presidential elections would pass him by too. Sonia obliquely told them that Rahul’s was not a case of power without responsibility because she was the “hands-on” power. If the dissidents had an issue, they would have to deal with her, not Rahul. As much as the dissidents would have wanted an elected leader to take responsibility for failures, they were unable to tell her that to her face. And by the time they thought of doing so, Sonia Gandhi came up with aretort cloaked in reasonableness. However, Rahul, if he is president again, will have to bite the electoral bullet in December 2022 in Gujarat and four key States in 2023. So, the 2019-2022 breather does not help him before taking on Narendra Modi in 2024. Sonia realises the ultimate irony of the Congress: The dynasty may demand a Gandhi to be president but the legacy of the party demands striving for the Prime Minister’s post and nothing else. There is the minor issue of the two demands converging somewhere.