Amitava Mukherjee
(Amitava Mukherjee is a senior journalist and
commentator. He can be reached at amitava mukherjee253@gmail.com)
Deft and mature political thinking demands that the politician, while dissecting the ills that has gripped his party, must try to go to the roots of the disease and point out the remedies fearlessly. No one will deny that the future of the Congress is becoming grim, grimmer and grimmest every day. We do not know whether Congress leaders will admit not only this particular point but also the near total absence of leadership that the party is now suffering from. Ruefully Mani Shankar Aiyar, himself a senior Congressman and a former Union minister, admits the first point but hedges on the second one in his recent article in the Indian Express.
But Mani Shankar Aiyar happens to be one of the few perceptive personalities in the Congress now. His opinions always provide foods for thought. Similar is the case with his above mentioned article which he wrote in the context of Sachin Pilot's rebellion in Rajasthan. Sachin is the son of Rajesh Pilot, a former Union minister of internal security, who could also rise above his political stature and leave behind other senior and more weighty Congress leaders in a race for ministership.
Pilot's rebellion has given the Congress the second shock- the first being Jyotiraditya Scindhia leaving the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and then joining the BJP. In Scindhia's case the Congress had reacted predictably- castigating the scion of the Gwalior Raj family publicly. But very few in the Congress admitted that it was too natural for Jyotiraditya to join the BJP. His grandmother Vijayaraje Schindhia was a towering figure of the Jan Sangh/BJP. His aunt Vasundhara Raje was till recently the BJP chief minister of Rajasthan. That Jyotiraditya's father Madhav Rao Schindhia was in the Congress and was a close buddy of Rajiv Gandhi does not make any case for the Congress to expect that his commitment to the 135-year-old party would be beyond question. His entry into the Congress became possible because the latter has lost its ideological mooring now.
Before the entry of Rajiv Gandhi into Congress politics, the party had a long tradition of ideological continuity. Even Indira Gandhi had maintained it willynilly. Just consider some of the names who represented the Congress at the Centre and in the states during Indira's time- Prakash Chandra Sethi, Shyama Charan Shukla and Vidya Charan Shukla in Madhya Pradesh, Jagannath Mishra in Bihar, Hiteswar Saikia in Assam, Siddhartha Shankar Roy and Pranab Mukherjee in West Bengal, Y.B. Chavan in Maharashtra, K. Karunakaran and A.K. Antony in Kerala, Nandini Satpathy and J.B. Patnaik in Orissa etc. Two common threads will be found in these personalities. They were experienced and had long years of political background. None of them was an upstart. Secondly all of them had a socialist orientation in their outlook. So ideology had played a part, howsoever debatable Indira's legacy in the Congress may be.
Ashok Gehlot, the incumbent Rajasthan Chief Minister, has summed up in his own way the rebellion of Sachin Pilot and what it portends for the Congress. "These youngsters did not go through the rigour; they didn't have to struggle. (They) became minister, state chief straightway…" But he stopped short of tracing the root of such a phenomenon. It started with Rajiv Gandhi's tenure when he sidelined many time-tested stalwarts of the Congress and built up his new team comprising Amitabh Bachhan, Arun Singh, Arun Nehru, Suman Dubey etc. The most glaring deficiency in all these people was that none of them was grinded in old Congress tradition which is anti-feudal and anti-capitalist.
Very correctly Mani Shankar Aiyar has opined that the incidents of present day dissidence in the Congress are not products of any ideology. Equally correctly, he has taken three names in his article- Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Ashok Mehta who had left the Congress at different periods of time. But here Mani Shankar has committed one grave mistake. In spite of admitting that their departure was occasioned by ideology, he should have never taken the name of Jayprakash in the same paragraph which begins with a reference to Sachin Pilot and Jyotiraditya Scindhia. JP (as Jayprakash is lovingly called) was too, too big a personality to whom the soul of India would always remain grateful for the concept of freedom and equality that it enjoys now. Another instance which brings to fore Mani Shankar's limitations is his search for a proper leadership in the Congress. He cannot find anyone in this role except Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi. "This is written into the party's DNA. Any one of them will do," he writes. But truth lies in the fact that if the Congress has to survive this DNA has to be destroyed and the party has to search for leaders from the rank and file of the party.
There is a time-tested adage - wisdom comes with experience and experience comes with age. Even if the Nehru-Gandhi family adheres to it now then even Congress will find it very difficult to bounce back because the DNA of family allegiance, as described by Mani Shankar Aiyr, will stand in its way.