Accountability new buzzword in Cong camp

Rasheed Kidwai
Senior Journalist & Author

Abig change is taking place within the Congress organisation, indicating that regardless of the outcome of the General Election, the Grand Old Party will not be the same again.

Being true to his words spoken as the vice president of the party at Jaipur in January 2014, Rahul Gandhi has started acting as a ‘judge for all’, enforcing accountability at all levels of the party hierarchy. In Maharashtra, for instance, he has given former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan charge of the Pune Lok Sabha seat, while Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil and Balasaheb Thorat have been entrusted with the Aurangabad and Shirdi parliamentary seats, respectively. The task before Chavan-Patil-Thorat is to ensure that Congress nominees from these three seats win by a comfortable margin.

Rahul has also succeeded in pushing many high and mighty into the electoral fray, a feat that was not achieved by predecessor Sonia Gandhi. Digvijaya Singh (Bhopal), Sushilkumar Shinde (Solapur), Paresh Dhanani (Amreli), Salman Khurshid (Farrukhabad), Meira Kumar (Sasaram) and Pawan Kumar Bansal (Chandigarh) are examples of senior leaders directed by the Congress president to prove their mettle in the electoral fray. There are indications that Jyotiraditya Scindia may be asked to contest from Gwalior instead of Guna. Gwalior, considered a pocket borough of the Scindia family, is currently held by the BJP.

The manifesto preparations have been exceptional; Rahul is said to have consulted a number of apolitical persons, many having domain expertise. This was refreshing as in the past, some in-house wordsmiths like Pranab Mukherjee, Jairam Ramesh and Mani Shankar Aiyar used to recycle and repackage old party documents with new catch phrases and wordplay. The 2019 manifesto has been an accomplishment of sorts, drawing attention from all and earning praise from critics and foes too.

Rahul’s move to contest from Wayanad has rattled the Left, which was increasingly placing itself as an informal guru to the Congress president. The informal influence of Sitaram Yechury on 10 Janpath and 12 Tughlaq Crescent had assumed legendary proportions in Congress circles. There was no dearth of middle-rung Congress leaders lamenting the Yechury factor in the Congress’ thinking. In a single stroke, Rahul has put an end to this lethal whisper campaign.

A lot has been written about Wayanad being the tri-junction of three states — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — and Rahul’s reported move to ‘flee’ from Amethi. His presence is set to influence the party’s fortunes in these three states as the BJP is short of a towering leader from any of these states. During campaigning, Rahul is set to make full use of the ‘Somalia’ reference made by PM Narendra Modi in May 2016. Modi had said at an Assembly election rally in Kerala that the infant mortality rate among the Scheduled Tribe community in Kerala was worse than Somalia’s. Many Malayali Twitter users had responded with hashtag #PoMoneModi (Go Off Modi), while terming his remarks as ‘baseless’. Two years later, when tragedy struck Kerala, flood relief to the coastal state was the bare minimum. Importantly, the Prime Minister was not proactive in taking the characteristic lead in relief and rehabilitation work.

The Amethi story is complex. Given the caste considerations, it will not be easy to defeat Rahul when he is backed by the BSP-SP combine. The transfer of BSP-SP voters to the BJP will neither be easy nor automatic regardless of Rahul’s own personal standing among the voters. It must be remembered that these voters did not shift to the BJP when the ‘Modi tsunami’ had hit Uttar Pradesh in 2014. 

The AICC chief has some surprise in store for PM Modi in Varanasi. A search is on for a joint Opposition candidate from the temple town. In Rahul’s scheme of things, if Modi is forced to spend a few days in his parliamentary constituency, the combined Opposition will gain from the absence of the BJP’s star campaigner in other parts of the country.

Unlike 2014, there have not been significant desertions from the party except for a lowly Tom Vaddakan. Rahul’s handling of disquiet within the Congress has been firm yet accommodating. Some of his close associates like Jitin Prasada, Priya Dutt and Milind Deora were upset. Rahul acted swiftly and prevented them from switching sides or sitting at home during the crucial polls. At another level, he has been on the lookout to bring home the likes of Shatrughan Sinha, Manish Khanduri and others from the BJP ranks. His choice of actress Urmila Matondkar generated a lot of interest as film actors entering politics often indicate which way the wind is blowing. Sinha has been a good weathercock and a politician among politicians. 

If Rahul translates his January 2014 Jaipur plenary speech into action, a numbers of ‘rootless wonders’ who have been banking on loyalty and sycophancy to grab posts will be the worst losers.

For Rahul, such a course will fulfil an unfinished agenda he has inherited from Rajiv Gandhi. During the Congress centennial in 1985, 41-year-old Rajiv, his ‘Mr Clean’ image still unscathed in popular perception, had hit out at party power brokers before a gathering at Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium. “Brokers of power and influence who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy,” he had said, “thrive by invoking slogans of caste and religion and by enmeshing the living body of the Congress.” Rajiv had appointed Arjun Singh as the vice president to cleanse the Congress, but the move didn’t bring about the changes he wanted.

The present-day Congress, too, doesn’t lack leaders who want a Rahul-led party to taste every electoral success but wish he would fail in his efforts to cleanse the party. They don’t want him to act as a ‘judge for all’ but as an advocate of identity politics, promoting ‘talent’ only with the tags of caste, sub-caste and religion attached.