Congress churn needs to revive spirit of Panchmarhi

Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi pay tribute to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on his 25th death anniversary at his memorial in New Delhi on June 4. (Photo: PTI)

With barely three years to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, there cannot be a riper occasion for the Indian National Congress (INC), the major party of the Indian Independence movement, knitting a bewildering variety of people, ideas, cultures and faiths with a singularity of purpose, to grapple with a re-evaluation of its core. And back to the basics does imply a leadership crisis has to be overcome too.

Rewind to September 1998, to the famous “brainstorming session” of the All-India Congress Committee at Panchmarhi in Madhya Pradesh, where the party’s momentous resolution that later paved way for a new experiment in power-sharing at the Centre with like-minded parties (the nucleus of the UPA experiment so to say), ended with these words: The Congress “under the leadership of Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, commits itself to becoming again the party of the brightest and the best, a party of principles and ideology, a party of ethics in politics, and thereby entitled to primacy in the country’s polity as the party which mirrors the hopes and aspirations of the millions of downtrodden and dispossessed of this country.”

Those were grave days in the post-Rajiv Gandhi assassination phase of the Indian polity. The BJP, thanks to the Ram Janma Bhoomi Movement, was already on the ascendant despite the political genius of a P.V. Narasimha Rao as PM initiating bold economic reforms through a renowned economist-turned-finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. Thus, the spirit of the Panchmarhi resolution not only formalised a reluctant Sonia Gandhi to play the “Queen Mother’s” role in assuming the Congress leadership mantle. It had also played a substantial part in bringing back breakaway Congressmen to an agreed template, despite her “Italian origins issue” triggering the birth of the Nationalist Congress Party led by Sharad Pawar. The Panchmarhi resolution was also seen as reaffirming the political values binding the Gandhi-Nehru legacy, not just alluding to the party’s first family.

Almost 18 years hence, a fresh churning in the Congress thus comes as no surprise, though the focus this time is Rahul Gandhi-centric. As the logic of two Dr Manmohan Singh-led UPA regimes have played themselves out fully, amid Sonia Gandhi being the UPA chairperson, a novel power-sharing arrangement in itself which in some ways took forward the spirit of the Panchmarhi declaration, regional variants of the Congress and certain other stronger regional parties halting the progress of the BJP in several states, particularly in the South, in the last five years, has renewed hopes for a Congress leadership makeover is the evening of Ms Sonia Gandhi’s leadership.

This is the new stage setting for the “grand old party” to rejuvenate itself, as the leadership of the Gandhi-Nehru family has been central to its identity in post-Independent India.

At least three parties which came out of the Congress on different issues in the recent past, have not only survived but have become the ruling party in their respective states, either on their own or with allies. They include the All-India Trinamul Congress led by Mamata Banerjee, the NCP, and in J&K the Peoples Democratic Party founded by late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

While the Trinamul Congress made history by ending over three decades of Left rule in West Bengal and won the state Assembly polls for a second time consecutively in the just completed 2016 elections, the NCP remained in power in Maharashtra for 15 years continuously with the Congress. And the PDP, which first got chief minister’s post in J&K and shared power with the Sonia Gandhi-led party, is currently sharing power with the BJP.

Interestingly, all these three parties came into existence around the same time, post the Congress’ Panchmarhi declaration. Ms Banerjee formed the TMC on June 1, 1998, while the NCP was formed on May 25, 1999, and the PDP too was founded in the same year.

Slightly earlier to fructify was the Tamil Maanila Congress launched by the late Congress veteran G.K. Moopnar in 1996, which could have been a key player in Tamil Nadu had Mr Moopnar gone the whole hog with actor Rajinikanth then.

Thus, P. Chidambaram who is still remembered for the “dream budget” he had presented as finance minister and a TMC MP in the United Front government headed by H.D. Deve Gowda, found his fulfilment only in the UPA regimes after TMC had merged with Congress in Tamil Nadu in the larger interest of unification of secular forces, to stem the growing influence of the BJP with other regional allies like the AIADMK first and the DMK later.

Senior Congress leaders, including the party chief ministers, concede that the party’s debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections was due to the Narendra Modi wave. But they are finding it difficult to explain how the so called “wave” did not influence the polls in over half-a-dozen key states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Orissa, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Punjab.

The message, in the post-2014 Lok Sabha polls context, is loud and clear that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar cannot damage credible, regional faces, either through polarising tactics or by the so-called development plank.

Earlier, the Congress loyalists used to ridicule breakaway factions by predicting that they cannot survive for long. Now, they are urging them to return to the parent party to check “communal and fascist” forces.

The current leadership of the Congress thinks that the dynasty of Gandhi-Nehru family will continue to deliver as it has a pan-Indian appeal, despite the series of political setbacks since 1989 that really began with the Bofors’ gun deal expose in the media.

It is true that the Congress did not come to power on its own majority at the Centre since the 1984 Lok Sabha polls. If it remained in power through ‘defections’ and crisis management during 1991-1996 under the helm of late Mr Narasimha Rao, the party’s willingness to accept coalition formations, precisely in the post-Panchmarhi phase, enabled it to come to power at the Centre through pre-poll alliances in 2004 and 2009 respectively, under the banner of the UPA.

Congress thus has retained the relevance of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty as structuring its leadership in a key sense, even after the recent electoral defeats. But, as India’s political theatre has repeatedly shown, it seems just about the right time to revisit the spirit of the Panchmarhi declaration for the Congress leadership to reinvent itself, for all the scepticism over Rahul Gandhi’s ability to deliver and the perceptions he evokes as leading India’s grand old party.

It also means that the terms of engagement between the Congress high command and its state units should change, giving more powers to develop leadership at the State-level, just as Congress had regional satraps in the 1950s’ and 1960s’, ranging from Kamaraj, Nijalingappa, Devaraj Urs, S K Patil, Y.B. Chavan, Brahamananda Reddy to K Karunakaran and so on.

If the pure and simple dynastic mode does not work, if the latest developments in the Pradesh Congress in Assam, Chhattisgarh and Meghalaya are any indication, then the party has to take a call on how the locus of power in a relatively younger Gandhi-Nehru family would be co-extensive with new state leaders as the economy gets more and more liberalised, to help keep the Congress as the broadest possible, progressive and implicit coalition of all regional, factional groups and class interests going under one umbrella.