They were viable as leaders because they could lead the party to electoral victory; the present lot of Gandhis have led the party to defeat after defeat
The BJP has trounced the Congress and its allies in Maharashtra. The Opposition alliance’s survival in Jharkhand in no way lessens the severity of this setback.
The course on which the Congress is set under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership is best described as assisted suicide, with the party’s 54-year-old youth icon playing the role of the physician administering the lethal dose of medication, and the fawning coterie around him serving as handmaidens in the task of finishing off India’s oldest political party.
Consecutive defeats
But does the Congress really want to go quietly into the good night? Why are no Congressmen raging against the dying of their party, which they and a whole lot of others see as the nation’s bulwark against sectarian and authoritarian politics?
The party submitted itself into wagging acquiescence to the Gandhi family because the Gandhis used to lead them to electoral victory. The present lot of Gandhis, in contrast, have led the party to defeat after defeat after defeat. After each defeat, the coterie gets busy finding scapegoats and inventing excuses.
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Priyanka Gandhi won in Wayanad not because of any Gandhi magic, but because Kerala has still not succumbed fully to the false charms of Hindutva. If being Gandhi, per se, had electoral viability, the brother and sister would have contested from Uttar Pradesh, not fled to the safe haven of Kerala.
What does the Congress stand for under Rahul? Anything but the force and agent of democracy, which alone can redeem India from the thrall of sectarian politics that attacks India’s national unity and undermines its tradition, with its quintessential ability to accept, and not merely tolerate diversity and difference.
Indian mysticism
That civilizational genius stems from Hinduism’s multiplicity of gods and its justification of polytheism in the philosophy of ‘Advaita’, which holds everything animate and inanimate, including gods and god deniers, to be manifestations of the self-same metaphysical entity, ‘Atman’.
Different forms of divinity, and different pursuits of spiritual fulfilment are, in this worldview, equally valid, like different rivers flowing along their distinct courses but merging into the self-same ocean, to use Vivekananda’s simile.
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It was on the basis the precept that Atman is the one and only reality and the difference in how it is perceived is illusory that social reform movements, such as the one led by Sree Narayana Guru in Kerala, held the institution and practice of caste to be invalid.
A colonial import
Whether one subscribes to this variety of metaphysics or not, there is no disputing that the refusal to accept deviance, implicit in Advaita, in any of the world’s many different forms of spirituality is conducive to peaceful coexistence of different faiths and multiple cultures. This social temper allowed the subcontinent to absorb and subsume different cultural intrusions in the wake of invasions and dynastic rule initiated by outsiders who settled down and made India their home.
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Instead of seeing this malleability as strength, some in India, in awe of Europe’s emergence as the centre of economic and military power, which could colonise much of the world, thought strength lay in reshaping India in the mould of rigid European nationalism. That called for homogeneity of language, religion and culture within the boundaries of a nation. The seemingly nation-proud cry, Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan stems from this colonised understanding of modernity that sees aping the European nation-state as the only path to national strength.
India’s democratic challenge
The democratic challenge in India is twofold, at least, going beyond defeating a Khattar here or a Fadnavis there or even Modi at the Centre. The challenge is to reverse the ongoing corruption of India’s civilisational genius of acceptance of diversity and to build a unified nation that together wages battle to end poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.
Do the Gandhis show any sign of appreciating the challenge and what it entails? The nation can be unified only on the basis of democracy. Democracy goes far beyond voting to elect representatives once in five years. Democracy should make people free, circumscribed only by the need to avoid exercise of their freedom harming others. Tens of millions of Indians suffer caste oppression and discrimination.
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Tribal people see their homes and their livelihoods uprooted in the name of development and progress, without being given alternate homes and livelihoods. Equality before the law is a joke, given the huge inequality in social power and income. Poverty and ignorance deprive the young of nutrition and mental stimulation, stunting brains, besides bodies, across generations.
Democracy and development
Democracy does not come about by brandishing copies of the Constitution at public rallies. It comes about by organising the people to enforce existing rights and expand them.
Development comes about not from doling out dollops of education and healthcare to passive recipients, but by empowering people to demand the provision of quality healthcare and education.
You do not end poverty by welfare payments but by enabling broad-based, participatory economic growth. You do not end caste oppression by mouthing a catechism on the caste census, but by rigorous enforcement of the law to achieve the constitutional ideal of equality, by organising people to enforce the law, by empowering deprived classes to join the mainstream of participatory growth, by urbanising life and living, to break the traditional correlation between caste and occupation, and by fighting the ideology of Brahmanism supported by cant and ritual.
Rahul refuses to learn
What does Rahul do? He reinforces cant and ritual by parading himself as a janeyu-dhari (sacred-thread-wearing) Brahman. His conception of organising people is to ask his acolytes to mobilise a crowd for a rally.
His understanding of the economy is limited to criticising, day in and day out, successful businessmen, attributing their success solely to their proximity to the government.
He refuses to learn from his father’s mistake in pandering to Muslim fundamentalism and then trying to contain the backlash by pandering to majority communalism.
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By ceding space to the Sangh Parivar to speak out against injustices flowing from the hegemony of illiberal clerics on the life and conduct of the Muslim community, the Congress both keeps Muslims out of the democratic mainstream and antagonises those who oppose pandering to vote banks.
The first step the Congress needs to take to end its relentless drift to political irrelevance is to dump the unproductive dynasty repressing the rise of a democratic leadership within the party, which could carry out reimagining its politics and rejuvenating its organisation.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
