Congress, rudderless as ever

The irony of Rahul Gandhi donning the revolutionary mantle with two left-wing activists, Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mavani, when his very political existence rests on the feudal notion of dynasty can be overlooked if such forays into radical politics were systemic rather than symbolic.

Exactly how this positioning goes with his “ janau-dhaari Brahmin” avatar or occasionally hopping temples can be gauged easily from the serial defeats that the Congress has faced in recent elections. It comes as no surprise that the structural changes Gandhi has effected in the Congress’s Punjab unit started unravelling at the precise moment when he was rolling down the red carpet for the two radicals before the communist martyr Bhagat Singh’s statue.

Arguably, showing the door to an increasingly unpopular erstwhile Patiala royal, Captain (retd.) Amarinder Singh, and replacing him with a son-of-the-soil Dalit face like Charanjit Singh Channi was meant to fit into the egalitarian politics that the Gandhi scion is at pains to adopt. But that hardly explains the anointment of Navjot Singh Sidhu as the party unit chief in a State that is in the grip of an almost year-long peasants’ movement against corporatisation of agriculture.

Convenient choice

Sidhu, besides being unreliable and capricious, exudes a sense of entitlement. He was a convenient choice in the Congress’s ugly power tussle simply because he was seen as a powerful voice against the “75:25 nexus” between Amarinder Singh and the Badal family that rules the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). During his stint as Chief Minister, Singh, who had once been with the Akali Dal, is perceived to have been soft towards the Badals in the allegations of corruption, the drug problem as also the case of police firing against protestors who were agitating on the issue of desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib.

The alleged desecration of Sikh religious scriptures in 2015 during the SAD-BJP rule had sparked outrage in the community. Singh was seen to have literally exonerated the Badals by saying that “Badal did not himself go and tear up the Guru Granth Sahib”.

But if the idea was to adopt a more radical line and align with the agitation on the streets, it is inexplicable why the claims of seasoned leaders, someone like Pratap Singh Bajwa whose impassioned speech against the farm laws in the Rajya Sabha had been a talking point at the beginning of the movement, were ignored. The choice of a confirmed party-hopper like Sidhu has, as Amarinder Singh gleefully exclaimed in his “I told you so” tweet, predictably blown up on the Gandhis’ face.

Sidhu has smeared all decisions taken by Channi as CM as “anti-Punjab” and can be entirely expected to jump ship, especially when the Congress’s chief rival, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), is desperately looking for a CM face.

Besides the organisational and structural problems — the confusion arising out of Gandhi’s amateurish refusal to either take over as Congress President or cede ground to someone else (in other words, assume authority with accountability) — the more serious issue is his positioning on issues of political economy. For the Congress, which has followed a pro-reforms, growth-oriented outlook, with an eye on distributive justice and social security programmes, Gandhi’s economic views, often expressed through sudden, terse observations, reflect a definite leftward incline. What is problematic is that this is clearly at variance with the line that his party elders articulate.

Take, for instance, Gandhi’s characterisation of the asset monetisation pipeline as the “total sell-out of the national capital” and that the “PM has sold everything”. Gandhi questioned the measure itself while former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, sitting right next to him, restricted himself to the modalities of the scheme.

“This exercise has been designed without any ex ante criteria. The Government should have spelt out what its criteria were and what its goals were. You don’t embark upon such a big exercise without setting out the criteria and what your goals are,” Chidambaram explained.

While divergence can be explained as part of the internal democracy and “various streams flourish under the Congress umbrella” argument, the question is whether acute contradictions can be sustained. As the goings-on in Punjab signify, Gandhi is clearly deciding on organisational and policy matters. If the Congress wants to be taken seriously, Gandhi’s position needs to be spelt out. He should convene a national session to deliberate on the party’s vision and sort out the organisational chaos.

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