What Rahul Gandhi can learn about Congress leadership from his family

The Congress today is in the middle of a crisis that makes the post-Emergency isolation of Indira Gandhi in the late 1970s, and Rajiv Gandhi’s diminished political standing in the face of the Bofors gun kickback allegations in the mid-1980s, seem like minor hiccups

The Congress lost elections under three of its most important leaders—Indira, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi; their policies were critiqued, and their decisions put under a scanner. But never did their peers and party persons consider them “unfit” to lead the party.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi greets his supporters during an election rally ahead of the third phase of assembly elections at Chaygaon in Kamrup in Assam. (ANI)

This story—of faith in the leadership, especially if that leadership belonged to the Nehru-Gandhi family—has since ended. Or so it appears.

The Congress today is in the middle of a crisis that makes the post-Emergency isolation of Indira Gandhi in the late 1970s, and Rajiv Gandhi’s diminished political standing in the face of the Bofors gun kickback allegations in the mid-1980s, seem like minor hiccups. The party’s electoral slide in the aftermath of the pulverising 2014 defeat has been steep with scant signs of an early recovery.

Voices within have risen over the Nehru-Gandhi family’s force-multiplier utility, the public lure that was their USP. If the outcome of ongoing elections to five state legislatures, notably Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, brings no happy tidings, the rising dissent could well transform into revolt. Whether Rahul Gandhi contests organisational polls, scheduled for the summer, a defeated lead campaigner in popular elections will be a lame-duck party president. “Unfit to lead the party” is actually the phrase certain Congress functionaries use in private conversations.

The sentiment is a mix of pique and pragmatism. Since Indira Gandhi’s days, the family’s hold over the Congress has been directly proportional to their hold on the electorate. Her scions inherited the mantle on the promise of restoring or sustaining the party in power. And in turn, they commanded the loyalty of the party. This fundamental contract, in some senses, between the family and the party is today under strain. The family’s ability to get votes is in doubt, and thus, the loyalty of elements in the party to the family is becoming tenuous.

But this is not the first time that a leader is grappling with a power transition, and perhaps it is by returning to history—of his own family and party—that Rahul Gandhi can determine the future.

How Indira Gandhi ousted the old guard

Indira Gandhi earned her spurs not merely as the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru. The name helped, but she fought and won against Morarji Desai to be elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party after Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in 1966. That was in the run-up to the general elections a year later, in which she bypassed the powerful syndicate comprising Desai, K Kamaraj, S Nijalingappa, Atulya Ghosh and N Sanjeeva Reddy, for a direct connect with the people.

Widely perceived as a watershed moment in Indian politics, the 1967 polls were the last time when elections were simultaneously held to the state assemblies and the Lok Sabha. The Congress retained power at the Centre with reduced numbers but was voted out in nine states. It even lost its majority in Uttar Pradesh with Charan Singh leading a set of defectors to put together a non-Congress coalition.

With Desai, the syndicate’s beachhead in the government, challenging her political and policy moves as the deputy Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi hit back at the old guard in the 1969 presidential polls, necessitated by the demise of the incumbent Zakir Hussain. Unwilling to back VV Giri, the vice-President who, ex officio, became the acting president, the syndicate put up then Lok Sabha speaker Sanjeeva Reddy for the top constitutional office.

Indira Gandhi smelt a conspiracy and read the syndicate’s move as a precursor to her ouster as the PM, more so because her proposal to field Dalit heavyweight, Jagjivan Ram, as the head of State was voted down by the old-guard-controlled Congress parliamentary board. How she outmanoeuvred the powerful syndicate by lending her weight to Giri’s independent candidature against the official party nominee is now history.

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Reddy’s defeat in the presidential election became the reason, eventually, for the party’s 1969 split. Indira Gandhi’s resultant minority Congress (Requisionists) government survived with the support of the Left and the DMK. But it was the failure of the Jana Sangh-Swatantra Party-Socialist amalgam of the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal dispensations in states, the 1971 elections with the Garibi Hatao slogan to counter the Indira Hatao plank of the Opposition, and the Bangladesh war that established her credentials as the paramount leader of her party and the country.

Indira Gandhi had won. But the concomitant centralisation of decision-making, which began under her but continued even after her demise, disempowered the party’s regional faces. Its crippling effect has been evident in recent decades in the party’s diminishing federal appeal.

How, and why, Sonia Gandhi worked with the veterans

But, perhaps, more instructive for Rahul Gandhi are parallels closer in history. Unlike her mother-in-law, who directly took on the old guard, Sonia Gandhi worked with the veterans.

Her willingness to be an attentive listener to party elders fetched her acceptability, besides the image of being a consensus builder. As the late Pranab Mukherjee once recalled to this writer: “She had her way when she wanted because, on other occasions, she went by the advice she got.”

It was perhaps for this reason that Sonia Gandhi could install Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister in 2004, bypassing veterans such as Mukherjee, Arjun Singh and ND Tiwari.

Sonia Gandhi did face a challenge. The Sharad Pawar-led rebellion against her, on the grounds of her foreign origin, was marked by a split. But this was effectively obliterated with the party’s return to power under her stewardship from 2004-14, in which Pawar was an important and powerful minister, even though the two parties retained independent identities.

But the fact that Sonia Gandhi, largely, had a cordial relationship with party veterans makes one wonder whether she had learnt from her husband, Rajiv Gandhi’s run-in with the old guard, notably Kamalapati Tripathi.

Under Rajiv, the confrontation

Indira Gandhi had made Tripathi, a veteran UP leader, the Congress working president in 1983. But Tripathi’s “a-letter-a-day” pushback on the state of the party, targeted Rajiv Gandhi and was deeply embarrassing for the young Prime Minister.

Others who had joined the internal party debate at the time included Communist-turned-Congressman, Chimanbhai Patel, and a former socialist from Maharashtra, Vasant Sathe, who rose to prominence in the Congress after the 1979 split led by Karnataka’s Devaraj Urs over Sanjay Gandhi’s re-emergence. The notes they penned to one another and Tripathi’s own letters to Rajiv covered a gamut of issues—downsides of the Punjab and Assam accords; the leadership’s handling of la affaire VP Singh; centralised nomination of leaders of state legislature parties; the lateral entry of civil servants in the party; marginalisation of time-tested leaders such as Mukherjee, Gundu Rao and AP Sharma and patronage of leaders who deserted an out-of-power Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

Blindsided by Rajiv Gandhi who appointed Arjun Singh as party vice-President, Tripathi indeed was an angry octogenarian. But his communications are a study in political foresight. He detected early the organisational atrophy that has since spread far and wide.

The lesson inherent in Rajiv’s face-off with the widely venerated pandit from Varanasi was relevant for all times—don’t trifle around with party seniors in the twilight of their innings, given their vast ability to queer the pitch. The Tripathi papers stored at the Nehru Memorial Library have rare insights, and can still serve as a veritable ready reckoner on how to run the party organisation.

The institutional lesson for Rahul Gandhi

No matter who gets to hold the party’s reins in the promised organisational polls, the Congress’s institutional memory is relevant despite the vastly altered political landscape. It shouldn’t lie in disuse. The party, at once, needs both a major surgery and deep healing. Complacency, even in the event of a good showing in the state polls, would be unwise.

The ginger group—or G-23, as the letter writers came to be known, though whether all 23 remain a part of the group is uncertain—that had raised the red flag on organisational matters to Sonia Gandhi might lack the gravitas of Tripathi or those who constituted the syndicate Indira Gandhi decimated in the sixties. But they should be co-opted, rather than hounded. The template could be Indira Gandhi’s re-nomination of Chandrashekar, the party Young Turk who fiercely opposed monopoly-capital, to the Rajya Sabha in 1968. The episode has been vividly detailed by the present Rajya Sabha deputy chairperson Harivansh in his book Chandrashekhar: The last icon of ideological politics.

Indira Gandhi’s battle and victory against the Syndicate, the challenge to Rajiv Gandhi from the veterans, and Sonia Gandhi’s ability to work with party elders for consolidating and shepherding the Congress to power are disparate political experiences. But they are joined by a common story—of establishing leadership methods in the grand old party. Rahul Gandhi may want to heed these lessons.

Post script: The defiant notes one picks up these days within the Congress are reminiscent of what Indira Gandhi heard to her chagrin, in her years of oblivion, from Devaraj Urs and others who broke away from the Congress. She had the guile and the mass connect to disprove her detractors’ prophecies of her political irrelevance, without yielding to their demand to distance the party from her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi.

The current situation has similarities, the saving grace for the leadership being that the Congress chief ministers haven’t joined the dissidents in words or in action. But as the old adage goes, nothing is permanent in politics. The uncertainty is greater when the leadership’s connect with the masses is in doubt.