32 5 august 2019the ship for the BJP. In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress sank with-
out a trace in the state polls and, in Telangana, the party suffered
a political meltdown. The desertions from the rocky JD(S)-Con-
gress coalition and the ensuing drama in Karnataka ended this
week finally with the HD Kumaraswamy government losing
the trust vote, even as Gandhi vacationed on foreign shores. The
Congress was headless.
Gandhi’s quitting ended the worst-kept secret in the Congress:
there was a severe leadership crisis in India’s grand old party even
as the 2019 electoral landslide for the BJP threw it into complete
disarray. With the meltdown of the Nehru-Gandhi family super
glue that kept the Congress together for decades as a multi-inter-
est platform, no single leader was capable of stepping into the
vacuum created by Gandhi’s exit. Urgently patch-worked, over
and over since the 1990s, to stall imminent crumbling, the Con-
gress now faces the threat of being made redundant. The party
had, after all, splintered in PV Narasimha Rao’s time, led by re-
gional leaders such as Sharad Pawar, ND Tiwari and Arjun Singh,
as well as GK Moopanar in the south. In January 1998, Mamata
Banerjee formed the All-India Trinamool Congress in West Ben-
gal. Many of them had risen to powerful positions on account of
their perceived proximity to the Nehru-Gandhi family.
The recent developments have also exposed the second worst
secret: Rahul Gandhi was a moody and reluctant party president
at best, needing constant hand-holding by his mother Sonia Gan-
dhi. Sonia Gandhi herself appears to have been afflicted with a
compelling vision of her son as a future prime minister, following
in the footsteps of his father, grandmother and great-grandfather.
Also, she has remained the driving force behind his survival this
long as president, fuelled by the desperation of a party leadership
that is aware that without the family, the Congress would fall
apart.
Increasingly, Rahul Gandhi is being seen as out-of-depth,
with even people who are charitable acknowledging that he is
inconsistent. Gandhi has himself admitted in private to a stub-
born streak that would not allow him to change his decision
once his mind was made up, as on the recent occasion. He is a
reluctant politician and his frequent trips abroad, besides the way
he winked in Parliament even as he professed love for the Prime
Minister, had further diminished him.
Rahul Gandhi, at 49, has been singularly clueless about the
radical changes on the ground that have impacted the Congress’
political fortunes. In a nation dominated by youth below 35, a
new generation is not enamoured of the idea of dynastic leader-
ship. To them, Rahul Gandhi smacks of someone who has ben-
efitted from his pedigree with nothing to boast of as his personal
achievement. Two of the party’s worst-ever performances have
been on his watch, in 2014 and 2019. The party has lost power in
state after state. After his resignation, things have taken a turn for
the worse even in the few key states where it has been in power,
including Karnataka, Punjab and Rajasthan. In Madhya Pradesh,
where it won by a slim majority, a daily threat hangs over Kamal
Nath’s government.
That disconnect between the family leadership model, pur-
veyed by the Nehru-Gandhis and their loyalists, and the New In-
dia has only served to highlight how much voters today despise,
and refuse to subscribe to, such entitlement. That leaves the Con-
gress in a dilemma that it will find extremely difficult to extricate
itself from: the leader seen as the only one who can keep the party
together has been unable to perform that role with any degree of
efficiency, but the leadership refuses to think beyond the family
when it comes to the political rejuvenation of the party. Paralysed
by this dilemma, there is now a very real risk of the party sinking
deeper into the morass of uncertainty.
Rahul Gandhi’s tweets on his resignation, made after his
announcement at the Congress Working Committee meeting,
served to emphasise his political immaturity. It partly pinned the
blame for the Congress’ devastating show in the 2019 General
Election on his own colleagues, claiming that they had not given
him total support in the ideological battle against the BJP and its
leader Narendra Modi. In his battle against the BJP, he maintained,
he had often stood alone but was proud to battle on nonetheless.
The Congress had consequently lost badly and, as party chief,
he took the blame and had resigned. But now, he maintained, so
should others. Sources in the Congress say that he virtually ex-
tracted resignations from Jyotiraditya Scindia and Milind Deora
as they refused to follow suit.
This was defeatist to the core—a victim card being played
overtly and a victimisation syndrome being showcased that was
pinned on a thinly veiled reference to his campaign on the Rafale
fighter deal and his imagined charge of the Prime Minister’s in-
volvement in it. Fuelled by the slogan ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ the
campaign received the cold shoulder from leaders within his own
party. It was a campaign that directly pitted Gandhi against Modi
in the popularity stakes and sought to take the latter down by a
direct assault on his personal integrity, which still notched up
the highest ratings.
Aside from Gandhi himself and his data analytics team, mostCover
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