Vinod Sharma
At age 140, the Congress’s health card isn’t a good read. The party has two chains of command, one de jure another de facto. The reference here is to Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, whose writ carries greater weight and runs faster than that of the elected party president.
The dichotomy is not an issue in the party where the Gandhi family enjoys a special status. They indeed are a dynasty but not in the sense the Bharatiya Janata Party would have one understand. They are a democratic dynasty– the likes of which abound in South Asia– who win and lose elections in their pursuit of power. The worrisome part is that the Congress is losing more elections than its wining against an ascendant BJP since 2014.
Pragmatic electoral tie ups together with Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra before the 2024 polls captured popular imagination, increasing the party’s tally in the Lok Sabha to nearly a 100. The question today is whether that was a flash in the pan, the Congress looking abysmally under-prepared to keep up the momentum?
Dual power-centres in Delhi and in states have proved to be the recipe for intra-party chaos. The dreary conclusion is inescapable, what with the party’s quixotic losses in Haryana and Maharashtra. It mercifully won Jharkhand in tandem with Hemant Soren’s JMM. But so shaky now is the coalition that many fear it might fall apart before the upcoming Bihar polls.
What’s ailing the Congress-JMM alliance despite cordial inter-personal relations between the Gandhis and Sorens? A blunt answer to that would be— organisational atrophy and extra-curricular pursuits of political managers assigned to the mineral rich state.
The purpose here isn’t to besmirch images. The objective is to underscore the perfunctory selection of leaders for sensitive tasks involving coalition partners. The mess some of them make tells about the quality of human resource and political advice available to the Kharge-Rahul duo.
The blame for several such appointments, with or without the express clearance of the big two, lies at the door steps of Rahul’s major domo, KC Venugopal. As AICC general secretary (organisation), he’s the emperor, so to speak, of all that he surveys. His job profile or political clout is no different from that of the late Ahmed Patel in the Sonia Gandhi era.
Venugopal lacks, however, the understated ways of Patel who remained in the background while serving Sonia. He did at times pull ranks, but with the explicit knowledge and authority of the party chief. Those days, a word from Patel was perceived to be a word from Sonia.
The arrangement worked perfectly; Patel, the plenipotentiary, doing the difficult, dirty job of seeking resignations or delivering marching orders to ministers, state presidents and party functionaries. He also quelled dissidence; his persuasive ways giving the sulking leaders a sense of belonging that kept them from leaving the party.
Bar sundry exceptions, no such fire-fighting happens these days in the Congress. How else does one explain Shashi Tharoor’s incremental distancing from the party? The alienation, ironically, is attributed to Venugopal who has a serious clash of ambition in Kerala with the charismatic Thiruvananthapuram MP.
While Patel preferred low visibility, Venugopal’s gawkily obtrusive. He tends to be a master of all traits, even conducting media briefings and figuring in photo frames with the Gandhi family members. Quite irritating at times is his forced omnipresence.
In 2009, when Sonia’s office was not informed about the participation of an Indian army contingent in France’s Bastille Day parade, Patel was assigned to politely convey to Dr Manmohan Singh that the government he headed was that of the Congress. The message wasn’t a reprimand. It was a reminder.
Patel did not arrive from nowhere. Sonia drafted him on her team on the strength of his stint in Rajiv Gandhi’s inner circle. He was an experienced hand, not a neophyte.
In a reshuffle she carried out in 2002, four years after joining active politics in 1998, she appointed Ambika Soni and Patel as her political secretaries. The decision fetched a lot of flak. This writer too questioned the need for two political secretaries when the Congress president had an entire working committee for advice and guidance.
At a later meeting, she recalled my comment to clarify that she had done so to abviate a single power centre in her secretariat. With Venugopal seeking to control the behemoth that’s the Congress, one’s compelled to ask why Rahul hasn’t gained from Sonia’s experience? His trusted lieutenant’s understanding of the Congress’s myriad political tiers is no better than his own. He plays favourites and dares often to act beyond his remit.
I was shocked beyond belief on being told the other day that the entry to the new AICC headquarters at Kotla Marg — named Indira Bhawan– was graded and hugely restricted, not just for the Press (which one can understand, given the shenanigans of a section of the electronic media) but also party workers. There are different entry passes for different floors, signifying party hierarchy.
The arrangement barricades the janata from the party that takes pride in having led a mass movement to win freedom from the British. Gone are the days when party workers could roam around at the AICC headquarters at 24, Akbar Road, often bumping into and managing to have a word with senior office bearers. Now leaders are hardly seen at Akbar Road and workers at the new complex—the keys to which are with Manish Chatrath, the designated in-charge of the Kotla Marg complex.
Party veterans agree that the AICC complex cannot be like a cantonment. The state of affairs, chuckled a leader, is proof that God exists: “How else does one explain a functional anarchy that’s the Congress?”
(The author is a veteran journalist and former political editor of The Hindustan Times)
