52 THE WEEK • AUGUST 4, 2019
POLITICS
CONGRESSA
s Priyanka Gandhi dug in her heels
at Mirzapur, insisting on meeting the
families of the ten adivasis killed over
a land dispute in Sonbhadra district in
Uttar Pradesh and declaring that she
was ready to go to jail for their cause, the Congress,
desperate for a turnaround in its fortunes, was
stirred into activity.
Comparisons were immediately drawn between
Priyanka’s detention and Indira Gandhi’s Belchi
moment of July 1977. Indira had arrived in Belchi
village of Bihar’s Patna district to meet the families
of 11 dalits who had been killed by an upper caste
gang. The powerful image of Indira arriving in the
flooded village atop an elephant marked her polit-
ical comeback after her post-Emergency electoral
decimation.
Priyanka was kept in detention at the Chunar
Fort in Mirzapur, and party leaders shared visuals
of the place not being provided with electricity or
water, eager to convey the hardship being endured
by their leader. When the local administration urged
Priyanka to furnish a bond of 0 50,000 for bail, she
refused. “Ek paisa nahin bharungi (I will not pay a
single paisa),” she said, amidst loud applause from
party workers.
Enthused by Priyanka’s combative stance, the
Congress got ready with plans to hold agitations
across the country to protest the Sonbhadra killings
and also the high-handedness of the Yogi Adit-
yanath regime in dealing with Priyanka’s visit. Pri-
yanka’s Sonbhadra sojourn contrasted sharply with
her brother Rahul Gandhi’s recent visit to Amethi,
which evoked a completely different mood. Rahul
did not heed the calls from Congress workers to take
back his resignation as Congress president, although
he promised them that he would carry on the fight
against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minis-
ter Yogi Adityanath and local MP Smriti Irani.
Nearly two months after Rahul made it clear that
he was quitting, there is little clarity on how and
when the Congress will zero in on his successor.
And, the leadership vacuum is not helping mattersLost in transition