Why Rahul met 4 forgotten Gujarat Congress veterans and what they told him

During his two-day visit to Gujarat earlier this month, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi invited four party veterans, nonagenarians Balubhai Patel, Lalji Patel and Yogendra Makwana, and 86-year-old Ramnikben Pandya, for a tête-à-tête, away from the media’s gaze.

The invitations surprised many given that the four veterans had either distanced themselves from the party or were made politically irrelevant by the current crop of leaders comprising the Gujarat Congress. Yogendra, once chief of the party’s Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes department in Gujarat, had, in fact, quit the Congress back in 2008.

Reason behind Rahul's meeting

What ostensibly prompted Rahul to call his four forgotten party seniors for a conversation was the past that these leaders shared. All of them had been associated in one capacity or the other with the 1961 AICC Session held in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar. Thus, while the invitation for a dialogue with Rahul may have been a surprise, the agenda for the discussion wasn’t as 64 years after the Bhavnagar Session, the Congress is once again getting ready to host an AICC Session in the state – this time in Ahmedabad – next month.

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While the two-day session scheduled for April 8 and 9 is expected to set the party’s political and organisational agenda at a national level, it is also meant to be a clarion call for the Congress’s revival in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where Assembly polls are due in late 2027.

Rahul’s discussions with the quartet – co-travellers of the party’s glory days of the 1960s, the setbacks in the wake of the Gujarat Navnirman Andolan of the 1970s, the resurgence of the 1980s and its continuing decimation in the state since the 1990s – didn’t just revolve around the nostalgia of the 1961 Bhavnagar Session. Instead, it focused primarily on the more relevant issue of how the Congress lost its plot in the home ground of its two towering historical personalities – Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel.

Free-wheeling discussion

As per the four veterans, the discussion was free-wheeling; perhaps even giving Rahul a more candid account of the party’s affairs than he had bargained for. The Federal reached out to the four veterans to piece together what advice they had for Rahul and the feedback they gave the former party chief, who, buoyed by the momentary uptick in the Congress’ electoral fortunes in last June’s General Elections, declared during a discussion in the Lok Sabha that the Congress will defeat the BJP in the 2027 Gujarat polls.

Recalling the 1961 AICC Session, Balubhai, 92, who had helped set up the makeshift township in Bhavnagar which hosted the conclave – the area, now called Krishna Nagar, later developed into a key landmark in the city – told Rahul how Congress leaders and workers at the time worked together to make the session a success. Outsourcing such conclaves to event management companies or organising them at plush hotels, as is now the norm, was not an option then.

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In charge of the Sabarkantha district’s Congress Seva Dal unit at the time of the Bhavnagar Session, Balubhai said party leaders and workers alike practically “built a city”, including kitchens, toilets and sanitation facilities, to host the thousands of delegates that came from across the country. Balubhai, who is now largely confined to his home in Ahmedabad due to his old age but honoured Rahul’s invite for the meeting at the party headquarters, Rajiv Bhawan, said he pointedly told Rahul that the discipline and commitment Congress members had back in his day had vanished today.

Harsh reality check for Rahul

“Today, you cannot ask a Patel worker to make toilets for an upcoming AICC session. If the leadership delegates such tasks to workers, there will complaints but back then we had no problem because our leaders led by example,” the party veteran told The Federal, recalling how “Jawaharbhai (then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru) sat with us on the floor and seeing him, Morarjibhai (Desai) and other leaders also climbed down from the stage to join us.”

The objective behind Balubhai sharing his recollections of the Bhavnagar Session with Rahul, Nehru’s great-grandson, was to contrast the current leadership’s attitude towards party workers against that of the icons who led the Congress in the past. “Back then, leaders cared for workers and listened to us and our every small need. Be it installing toilets, spinning khadi or setting up the dining area, leaders joined us in everything and these gestures bonded the worker with the leadership. Today, leaders only give pep talks. Rahul Gandhi needs to understand this. When was the last time he or any leader from Congress met the workers at their house or visited district offices,” Balubhai said, asserting that he communicated this lament to Rahul too.

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For Rahul, arguably used to flattering feedback from sycophants of the Nehru-Gandhi family who populate the high offices of the party in both Gujarat and Delhi, the conversation must have come as a harsh reality check; liberally peppered as it was with unvarnished home truths not just about the failures of the party’s Gujarat leadership but also his own. To his credit, though, the Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition not only heard the veterans out but also urged them to attend the upcoming AICC Session.

Rahul urged to 'lead by example'

If Balubhai urged Rahul to “lead by example”, 90-year-old Lalji, who served as the Gujarat Congress chief in 1976 rued about the party’s insatiable appetite for inaction.

“The Congress goes through review meetings and introspection (after every poll setback) but there is never any action. AK Antony was given the job of preparing reports about the party’s poll losses multiple times (the last after the Congress secured its worst-ever tally of 44 seats in the Lok Sabha in the 2014 polls) but no one knows what his report said or what action was taken on it. Congress workers mockingly call the Antony committees ‘antheen’ (endless) committees,” Lalji told The Federal. The former GPCC chief reportedly also told Rahul that though the Bharat Jodo Yatra had traversed through South Gujarat, the Congress could derive no electoral benefit from it in the polls that followed.

Once a close aide of Madhavsinh Solanki, the last Congress leader to serve a full term as Gujarat Chief Minister back in the 1980s and widely credited with creating the party’s since eviscerated KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) vote bank, Lalji pointed out how Gujarat Congress leaders today have abandoned party workers.

“Today workers tell me how they are harassed by BJP workers. Our leaders know about this but what have they done anything to help workers? In our day, we could have never imagined leaving workers to fend for themselves; that’s how we built a loyal cadre in the 1960s and we were able to rebuild the party after the Navnirman Andolan in the 1980s,” Lalji added.

When Yogendra 'confronted' Indira Gandhi

He also shared an interesting anecdote to demonstrate how leaders and workers during his time were seen as one and not as rivals competing for credit or laurels. “Not many know that the KHAM theory was originally conceived by Congress’ grassroots leaders Jinabhai Darji and Sanat Mehta at Gela-Somnath in Surendranagar during a district-level meeting but they never complained about Madhavsinh Solanki getting credit for the theory. Instead, the duo distanced themselves from the party after Madhavbhai’s exit from active politics,” Lalji recalled.

Lalji is also not convinced about Rahul’s recipe for reviving the Congress in Gujarat; something he ostensibly shared with the latter during their meeting. During his Ahmedabad visit, Rahul had at a convention of party workers alluded to the presence of “BJP’s B-Team” within the Gujarat Congress and said the party needed to get rid of some 30-40 such saboteurs. Lalji believes that while Rahul may not be off the mark in his estimation, his candour could backfire when intra-party rivals in the faction-ridden Gujarat Congress “tear each other down” accusing one another of “involvement with the BJP”.

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Yogendra, Lalji’s long-time co-traveller in the party, shed more light on the problems that ail the Congress in Gujarat. He recalled how back in 1967, as a fairly junior party worker, he had “confronted Indira Gandhi at the AICC headquarters” in Delhi to tell her of casteism creeping into the Congress. “It was before the Gujarat Assembly elections and most tickets were being given to people from forward castes. She (Indira) made me sit down, offered me water and tea and asked me to speak my mind. Later, she made me the in-charge of the state elections. Today, if you speak this frankly to the party leadership, they will throw you out,” Makwana said, recalling how the same fate almost befell him in 2008 when the Congress’s central leadership gave him a dressing down for publicly criticising the functioning of the Gujarat Congress.

Will Rahul take quartet's feedback seriously?

Ramnikben, now 86 and retired from active politics also shared the sentiments of Makwana. A former three-term Mayor of Bhavnagar and the only woman in this quartet of disillusioned leaders who still swear ideological fealty to the Congress, believes the Congress’ central leadership has failed to nurture promising leaders and, instead, confined them to their own constituencies.

“The party still has a Dalit leader in Jignesh Mevani and tribal leaders in Arjun Rathwa and Anant Patel but they have not been utilised and given freedom to expand their influence beyond their constituencies. It is the responsibility of the party leadership to assign responsibilities as per calibre instead of playing favorites. Rahul Gandhi has made strong statements but the problem is the top leadership remains indecisive. When you are completely decimated, you need change from the ground up but the authorization to do so has to come from the top leaders, who have to lead by example,” Ramnikben said, adding this was also her message to Rahul.

With the Ahmedabad AICC Session just weeks away, the four party veterans have given Rahul enough food for thought. The question that remains, though, is whether he had an appetite for it.