The Congress is 137, and in a hurry to turn into a fossil, led by the nose into old age. Some liquefied high fliers in the party, sensing atrophy in the bones, have already flown the coop. Others haven’t, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the party, if not for the family, which in turn couldn’t be playing a more potent role in the disintegration. The grapevine is tingling with talk that siblings Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will be the pallbearers for the Congress. Not that euthanasia wasn’t known in 1947 but, where Mahatma Gandhi was all for ending the party of the freedom struggle, Jawaharlal Nehru couldn’t bring himself to commit hara-kiri. But those were golden days for the Congress. Now, decades later, Nehru’s great-grandson and great-granddaughter are presiding over a Congress that Nehru wouldn’t recognise if it came knocking on his door in Valhalla, the Norse center for the afterlife. Nehru was no Viking, but then the Norse are among the most democratic. And the Congress has been in the doldrums for quite many years.
Things have gone from bad to worse in the last year after the demise of political advisor to Sonia Gandhi, Ahmed Patel. And the enigmatic Rahul Gandhi, much to the consternation of senior Congress leaders, hasn’t been a successful formula. Kapil Sibal guessed it right. He wouldn’t be given a Rajya Sabha ticket this time by Sonia Gandhi and his family. Not that Ghulam Nabi Azad got lucky. The Gandhi family, especially Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, isn’t the recipient of bouquets post the selection of the party’s Rajya Sabha candidates. The list has the usual suspects. The old established family loyalists were rewarded with Rajya Sabha seats earlier, too. Like Rajiv Shukla and Mukul Wasnik. And current favourite Randeep Surjewala. That these Congress leaders figure in the list is not the issue. The anger is that they would be contesting from outside of their states, like former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made a habit of, contesting from Assam and Rajasthan. This time, among the out-of-state beneficiaries are Rajiv Shukla and Surjewala. And the anger is boiling over in Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, where these leaders have been foisted on the locals. Those who made the list include P. Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, Ajay Maken, Randeep Surjewala, Rajeev Shukla, Mukul Wasnik and Vivek Tankha. The names betray the hand of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi. If Chidambaram, Ramesh, Shukla and Wasnik are Sonia’s favorites, the names of Maken, Surjewala and Tankha have a definite Rahul tinge to them.
Among the more well-regarded Congress leaders who haven’t made the list includes the party’s national spokesperson Pawan Khera, somebody who spent hours every day defending the party and family, morning to evening. Khera wondered if something was lacking in his ‘devotion’ to the party and family. But Khera is not leaving the Congress like Sibal. The reason the Gandhi family can get away with unpopular decisions within the party is that Congressmen like Pawan Khera wouldn’t fit in any other mold. They wouldn’t fit in with any other party. Congress is like a second skin to them. Even to a celebrity like Nagma, minus the Congress tag, she wouldn’t breathe easy. In the rush of new stars hitting all the filmy woods in the country, Nagma wouldn’t be even among the least luminous. Congress is turning out to be a party of the frustrated, by the frustrated, for the frustrated.
