As history shows, intra-party election can be make or break for Congress

It is now amply evident that the Congress will witness an actual election, the first in 22 years, to pick its new president. Yet, if history of the few real contests that the Congress has witnessed for its presidency in the 137 years of its existence is an indicator, there is as much a chance of the election revitalising the party as there is of it precipitating further acrimony within the ranks.

As things stand today, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot will face off in the contest against three-term Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor’s aides have collected a set of nomination papers for the election from Madhusudan Mistry, chairman of the Congress party’s central election authority (CEA). Congress leader Salman Soz, who is likely to be Tharoor’s campaign manager for the high-stakes election, has confirmed that the diplomat-turned-politician will file his nomination on September 30.

Gehlot is expected to collect the nomination papers on Monday (September 26) though it remains to be seen if he will continue to enjoy the support of the Gandhis after playing truant in their plans to replace him with Sachin Pilot as the Rajasthan CM.

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Unique electoral process

The window for filing nominations for the election will stay open till September 30, following which Mistry and his colleagues in the CEA will scrutinise the nomination forms. The final list of candidates contesting the poll will be published on October 8. The Electoral College comprising over 9,000 Congress delegates from across the country will vote for the new party chief on October 17.

It is unclear at the moment whether any other party leader would also throw his hat in the ring over the next few days. There has been speculation that the contumacious Manish Tewari, Congress MP from Punjab’s Anantpur Sahib and votary of intra-party reforms, is considering contesting the poll though he has neither confirmed nor denied such rumours. If Tewari does choose to contest, the party’s presidential poll will witness a three-cornered contest similar to the one in 1997 when Sitaram Kesri contested – and won a landslide victory – against then party stalwarts Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot.

That the Congress would witness a contest for choosing its new president and break from the established tradition of nominating a person to the post through consensus had been evident for some time. The refusal of the Gandhi family – Sonia, former party chief Rahul Gandhi and AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra – to claim the post for itself once again had made it so. As had the clamour by a section of party leaders – primarily the so-called G-23 of which Tewari and Tharoor are a part – for a “real election” instead of one that is stage-managed by the Gandhis towards a pre-determined result.

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This electoral process – unique to the Congress since all the other political parties, including the BJP, choose their chiefs through nomination or dynastic lineage – comes at a time when the 137-year-old Grand Old Party stands uneasily at a precipice.

The Congress’ crippling electoral atrophy has made its erstwhile citadels not just fair game for a viciously aggressive BJP but also for former regional allies and other parties such as Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP which are ambitiously eying an expansion. The challenges that the Congress faces from within aren’t any less daunting as its progressively worsening crisis of attrition, unbridled factional feuds and the potshots hurled by members at the leadership of the party’s first family, the Gandhis, clearly suggest.

The Congress is hoping that its ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra from Kanyakumari to Kashmir will help reverse at least some of the problems that the party presently faces and help revitalise the inertia-prone organisation well ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. That Rahul and not the likely successor of Sonia as Congress president is the yatra’s mascot may be a matter of another debate but it is clear that the party feels that electing a full-time chief now is a necessary component of any reinvigoration effort.

Past contests

However, the Congress’ dalliance with elections for picking its chief in the past and its internal rumblings of the present have made many within the party wonder just how the impending poll would make things any better for the crisis-ridden party.

In The Coalition Years, the final instalment of his three-part memoir, the late Pranab Mukherjee wrote: “I personally subscribe to the theory that certain offices should not be sought; rather they should be offered. I consider the Congress presidency to be one such office. The old practice of inviting an eminent person to preside over the annual session of Indian National Congress and that person holding office (as party president) till the next annual session was truly remarkable for any political organisation, including the Congress. Therefore, my efforts were always focused at having a unanimously chosen or consensus candidate for the office of the Congress president”.

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The context in which Mukherjee wrote about the need of a unanimously chosen Congress president, as opposed to one picked through an election between candidates, were the bitter experiences that the Congress had had in the past when it chose to follow the latter route rather than the former to name its chief. These electoral contests included those between Pattabhi Sitaramayya and Subhas Chandra Bose (1939), JB Kripalani and PD Tandon (1950) as well as the relatively more recent ones between Kesri, Pawar and Pilot (1997) and Sonia and Jitendra Prasada (2000).

Though the friction that each of these presidential elections triggered within the Congress varied in their reasons as also their intensity but the aftermath was almost always the same – it left the party weaker in the long term, divided the loyalties of party members into different camps and cabals and embarrassed the party publicly because the election made it almost incumbent on each candidate to criticise her/his rival through the course of the campaign.

Even the venerable Mahatma Gandhi, the pragmatic Jawaharlal Nehru and, decades later, the usually non-confrontationist Sonia could not escape these trappings.

The 1939 Congress presidential contest saw Gandhi vociferously backing Sitaramayya against Bose. What followed the election result – Sitaramayya lost despite Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel endorsing his candidature against Bose’s – is still described as one of the most unfortunate chapters in Congress history that, arguably, also triggered Bose’s exit from the Grand Old Party and his estrangement with the Mahatma.

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In his Nehru & Bose: Parallel Lives, author Rudrangshu Mukherjee describes the 1939 contest in great detail. “After the withdrawal of Azad (Maulana Azad was the unanimous choice of the Congress Working Committee for party president) from the race, Subhas issued a statement on 21 January. This produced a counterstatement from the Working Committee against Subhas’s candidature. This joint statement, as Vallabhbhai Patel told Jawaharlal, was issued at Gandhi’s insistence. Jawaharlal cabled his inability to sign the joint statement. He admitted that he would have preferred Subhas’s not standing but a joint statement raised ‘difficulties and questions of principle’. Gandhi expressed to Patel his disappointment at Jawaharlal’s refusal to sign and Patel conveyed this to Jawaharlal,” writes Rudrangshu Mukherjee before listing a barrage of charges that Subhas exchanged during the course of the campaign with the Congress leaders who opposed his election bid because of the Mahatma.

“The results showed that Subhas had polled 1,580 votes to Sitaramayya’s 1,377. The bulk of Subhas’s votes had come from Bengal, Mysore, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Madras. He had scored a clear victory. Gandhi’s reaction to Subhas’s win was uncharacteristically devoid of grace. In a public statement he said that since he had prevailed upon Sitaramayya not to withdraw from the contest, the latter’s defeat ‘was more mine than his’,” Rudrangshu writes. He then explains how, even after the election outcome, Gandhi, Patel and a majority of the Congress Working Committee members did everything in their power to hem in Bose from steering the Congress as per his vision, ultimately forcing him to resign the presidency within months of winning it.

When Nehru threatened to resign as PM

The 1950 election too had a perilous effect on the party. Kripalani, despite the backing of Nehru, lost to Tandon, and shortly thereafter quit the Congress to launch his own outfit, the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. Tandon and Nehru could not see eye to eye on most issues concerning both the party and the government. The differences, indeed, predated Tandon’s victory as even before he announced his candidature for the election Nehru had written to him asserting, “Unfortunately, you have become, to large numbers of people in India, some kind of symbol of this communalism and revivalist outlook.”

Nehru had even threatened to resign as Prime Minister should Tandon be elected but the latter, perhaps owing to the backing he enjoyed of Patel and some other stalwarts, went on to defeat Kripalani comfortably by over 300 votes. As was the case with Bose, Tandon too had to resign the presidency soon after his victory, paving way for Nehru to take command of the party between 1951 and 1955.

During Sonia’s November 2000 face-off against Prasada – the only instance in which a member of the Gandhi family had to face a challenger for the Congress president’s post – similar acrimony had played out. Prasada, like Tewari and Tharoor today, had alleged, among other things, that the election was rigged to ensure Sonia’s victory and that Sonia, who had first become a unanimously chosen party president after Kesri’s unceremonious ouster in 1998, had already become captive to a coterie. Sonia had hit back at Prasada with a somewhat dim-witted barb claiming that coteries had existed around the Congress president even when her husband, the late Rajiv Gandhi, and PV Narasimha Rao held the post.

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Sonia, of course, had won the election in a landslide with Prasada polling all of 94 votes against her 7,448 votes. A hardcore Congressman, Prasada did not quit the party despite being sidelined by Sonia and reportedly turned down repeated offers by Sharad Pawar and Tariq Anwar to join the NCP, a party that the two had founded a year earlier along with PA Sangma after being forced out of the Congress for attacking Sonia’s “foreign origin”. Prasada died of a cerebral haemorrhage in January 2001. Incidentally, his son, Jitin Prasada later became a close aide of Rahul Gandhi and a minister in the UPA government but quit the Congress earlier last year to join the BJP.

How the campaign will pan out

The present election for the party’s presidency is happening at a time when the Congress is, arguably, already a divided house and cannot afford further internal turmoil. On their part, the Gandhis as well as their key aides running the affairs of the party have made efforts to prevent the election from becoming an event of muckraking.

Before Gehlot stymied her efforts for a peaceful transition of power in Rajasthan, Sonia reportedly told Tharoor that the Gandhi family will not endorse any candidate in the interest of ensuring a fair election. Yet, the message seemingly did not percolate down to the party cadre. Congress spokesperson Gourav Vallabh jabbed Tharoor on Twitter, claiming that the “only major contribution” of the Thiruvananthapuram MP in the past eight years was to sign the letter sent by the G-23 to Sonia demanding various intra-party reforms when she was convalescing at a Delhi hospital.

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Jairam Ramesh, chief of the party’s communications department, had to step in urgently to ensure that Vallabh’s views weren’t echoed publicly by other Congress office bearers. Sources said Ramesh urged “all spokespersons and office bearers of Communications Department of AICC to refrain from making any comment of any kind on any colleague of ours contesting the elections for the post of Congress president… we all have our individual preferences but our job is to only highlight that the Congress is the only political party to have a democratic and transparent system in place for election to the post of its president.”

Though Ramesh’s intervention seems to have stopped the trading of charges among Tharoor and Gehlot supporters for now, it is unlikely to remain so when the actual campaign for the election begins after October 8.