With Rahul at helm, young Turks hope for party reorganisation

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 11

On the eve of the formal installation of Rahul Gandhi as Congress president this Saturday, members of his youth brigade are hoping for the party’s reorganisation and ideological repositioning.

They are convinced of “complete emptiness” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charge that Gandhi is a dynast who has become party chief on entitlement rather than merit.

Speaking to The Tribune, Congress young Turks voiced a collective sentiment and asked, “Will any dynast take 10 years to make this kind of power transition?”

“When someone comes in as party chief uncontested, it speaks volumes about consensus within the party. Inner party consensus about a leader is the strength of the Congress, not its weakness. We have many potential leaders but there was only one who had everyone’s trust and that was Rahul Gandhi,” says Sushmita Deb, Lok Sabha MP from Silchar, and Mahila Congress chief.

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Sangrur MLA and ex-MP Vijayinder Singla, another Gandhi confidante who recently featured in Himachal Pradesh’s ticket screening panel, says dynasts don’t take years to transit from lower to higher positions and don’t slog their way up. 

“Rahul Gandhi has worked his way up, reformed the party wherever he could and wait for his time to come. He became AICC general secretary in charge of Youth Congress and NSUI in 2007 and democratised both. He introduced elections opening the Youth Congress to anyone and everyone. Even after that, he struggled to work on ground holding padyatras to espouse the causes of people. A dynast need not have done all that. Everyone knows Rahul Gandhi could have become Congress chief any time after 2007 but he was never after power and always wanted to serve the organisation,” said Singla speaking of how Gandhi had introduced a culture of ethics to Congress by discouraging flashiness and ostentation among leaders. Ethics was one of the pillars (rest being elections, membership performance and programmes) Gandhi introduced in Youth Congress when he came in.

Congress deputy whip in Lok Sabha and MP Deepender Hooda, another member of Gandhi’s youth brigade, counters the BJP’s dynast charge saying Gandhi sought the mandate of the party and got it. “This is called democracy, not dynasty,” he said, adding that Gandhi’s principal challenge is to connect the Congress with the masses. “We were a mass movement and must return to the masses,” Hooda noted.

The younger Congress leadership also feels strongly about the need for Gandhi to reposition the party ideologically. Sushmita Deb says, “Rahul Gandhi needs to make a leader-centric Congress ideology by revisiting its strengths. The Congress gave the Constitution of India and brought in concepts of secularism, socialism and unity. Our cadres must understand that the Congress, whether in power or out of it, stands for something larger and more fundamental than just political power. That is our ideology.”

Announcement of Rahul Gandhi’s election as Congress chief will happen on Monday after 3.30 pm as the deadline for the withdrawal of nominations ends. His formal coronation, however, is planned for Saturday, December 16, on the eve of declaration of election results in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, Gandhi’s first litmus test post assumption of party presidency.