Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Life should be large, not long; for, long age is a curse. Who knew it better than the Greek mythological character, Tithonus? He got the boon of immortality from Lord Zeus but forgot to ask for eternal youth. So, Tithonus grew older and older, and withered, but did not die. His body shrunk so much that he turned into a cicada, a small insect known to produce noise louder than its tiny body would suggest.
The 137-year-old Indian National Congress (INC) has become India’s political cicada. It is not dying, but not living healthy either, except breathing in some pockets here and there. It has lost its will to rejuvenate itself and rule and its reigning triumvirate Nehru-Gandhis—Sonia, Rahul, and Priyanka—reminds us of the last of the Mughals in the first half of the 19th century.
“Emperor” Shah Alam II’s depleted power was aptly described in a Persian couplet: Sultanate-Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam (“The Empire of Shah Alam is from Delhi to Palam”). Palam was a suburb of Delhi.
But INC ‘Acting’ President Sonia Gandhi’s “empire” is even shorter: all of 15,181 square meters of a New Delhi bungalow, famously known as 10, Janpath!
That does not, however, mean the three Nehru-Gandhi dynasts are any less imperious. Fearing ouster and implosion, they are not ready to share ‘absolute power’ with any outsider, even if he tried to rejuvenate the Grand Old Party (GOP) back into political reckoning.
Political strategist Prashant Kishor learned it the harder way, for a second time in a year, that although vanquished, the GOP is full of airs.
But the Family is not the only one to blame. There are other minor factotums spawned by regional satraps of the same Party, and others who once were part of the Congress Pariwar. As parts of the disintegrated INC, they now have their own fiefs and families to protect. The INC, however, provides them a reason and an umbrella to play their own power games under it. They do not want to help repair this umbrella as they fear for their own existence.
Apart from the Family, the INC is burdened with its Old Guard, the way the Communist Parties in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were weighed down by nonagenarian leaders a couple of decades ago.
The INC’s Old Guard is the problem, not the cure. They are loyal rent-seekers, mostly in their 70s and basking in the faded glory of the Family. They gang up to control the Party but successfully confuse the Family that it controls the INC. They would rather die with their shoes on than let the Party revive on its feet.
But the ruling BJP is in no hurry to see a rejuvenation of its chief rival. In fact, beyond wordy duels, it is not doing anything that could ‘glorify’ the Nehru-Gandhis and bring them back on the national political center stage.
The BJP had learned its lesson well from the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai who, in the late 1970s, had cautioned his Home Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh against arresting Indira Gandhi as that would make her a public heroine again. It was the first step in her political rehabilitation. The Jatt leader, however, paved the way for Indira’s return to power in the 1980s.
Like Desai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also from Gujarat, but he has no Charan Singh as Home Minister!