The Week India – July 21, 2019

JULY 21, 2019 • THE WEEK 43

Baru is an economist and a writer. He was adviser to former prime minister Manmohan Singh.

IVORY TOWER

SANJAYA BARU

IVORY TOWER

SANJAYA BARU

ILLUSTRATION BHASKARAN

I

n his fictionalised autobiography, The Insider,

former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao

has a provincial leader of the Indian National

Congress describing Indira Gandhi’s takeover of

the Congress as the party becoming a proprietor-

ship. The Congress, to be sure, was never really a

‘party’. It was what its name suggests, a ‘congress’.

The dictionary defines the word congress to mean

a gathering, a platform, a meeting of minds. That

was what the Indian National Congress was before

1947 and that is how Gandhiji wanted it left to

remain. Several parties grew out of the Congress,

while the Congress itself evolved into a ‘system’

of political mobilisation, or-

ganisation and governance, as

political scientist Rajni Kothari

famously put it.

Till 1969, the Congress tried

hard to function like a party.

Once Indira Gandhi staged her

coup and then, in 1975, her

younger son stepped in to take

charge, the party had indeed

become a proprietorship. It

then began to call itself Con-

gress (I) for Congress (Indira).

By the same token, in 1998, we saw the creation

of a Congress (S). In between, in 1992, Narasimha

Rao tried to reinvent the pre-Indira Congress by

conducting organisational elections in the run-up

to the All India Congress Committee gathering at

Tirupati. He legitimised his ‘nominated’ status as

party president by getting himself properly elect-

ed. Next year, a dissident group rebelling against

Rao’s leadership called itself Congress (Tiwari).

For all these reasons, I have always believed

the correct name for the party that made Sonia

Gandhi its president in 1998 should be Congress

(Sonia).

It is precisely because the party has been a

proprietorship that the change of guard after an

ignominious defeat is proving so difficult. In any

normal political party, the incumbent leader

would quit when defeated and a new round of

organisational elections would have been held to

elect a new leader. Not so in a proprietorship. The

owner has to nominate the successor. As an aside,

the proprietorship metaphor was made more ap-

posite by the fact that many properties of the Sonia

Congress became trust properties, including the

Jawahar Bhavan on New Delhi’s Rajendra Prasad

Marg that was originally constructed to house the

Congress headquarters and became home to the

Rajiv Gandhi Trust and Foundation, with all such

trusts governed by the family and its loyalists.

How then does one reconvert a proprietorship

into a party? That is the dilemma facing the Sonia

Congress. Should the Con-

gress’s next president be nomi-

nated by the present proprietors

or should a popularly elected

leader take charge? In politics,

power is never inherited. It is

acquired. Both Indira Gandhi

and Narendra Modi acquired

power through their political

actions. While both may have

been initially nominated to

their national leadership roles,

Indira by K. Kamaraj and Modi

by Rajnath Singh, the fact is that both Indira and

Modi acquired power by asserting their leadership

over all others. Whoever succeeds Rahul Gandhi

as Congress president will have to do likewise.

In politics, opportunities to assert leadership do

not arise often and certainly do not come twice.

A good opportunity was lost when Adhir Ranjan

Chowdhury was nominated leader of the Con-

gress in the Lok Sabha. If at that time someone

like Shashi Tharoor had demanded an election to

that post, he would have launched a new phase

in the evolution of the party. Even if Tharoor did

not offer himself as a candidate for leadership of

his party in Lok Sabha, he could easily have stood

up and demanded an election for the post. What

is the use of preaching democratic values to the

nation and the world when one’s own party does

not value them?

From proprietorship to party