Family Ties

How the Gandhis kept a party but lost the

country
By HARTOSH SINGH BAL | 1 January 2014

S / AP PHOTO
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has long used personal appeal as a tool to
retain its control over the Congress party.
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What has become of our great organisation? Instead of a party that
fired the imagination of the masses throughout the length and
breadth of India, we have shrunk, losing touch with the toiling
millions.
Political parties are not giving adequate voice to the man on the
street. Its our job to do that I am going to put all my efforts in

transforming the organisation of the Congress party and give you

an organisation that you can be proud of and has your voice
embedded inside it.
I am not afraid to say that the Congress has become moribund. It
has scarcely a single leader with a modern mind Congress has
never succeeded in evolving into a modern political party.
HERES A SIMPLE GAME: match each quote to the correct name and
dateIndira Gandhi in the late 1960s, Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, and Rahul
Gandhi in 2013. The quotes belong to different eras of the Congress, but
they echo the same sense: that the party is an organisation with a logic of
its own, independent of the person leading it. On 8 December, when
Rahul Gandhi stood with his mother Sonia to articulate what he thought
were the lessons to be learnt from the Congresss failures in the recent
assembly polls, he was only indulging in rhetoric that traces back to his
grandmotherrhetoric that deflects individual responsibility by criticising
the state of the party.
This approach begins by denying the root of the problem. Like Indira and
Rajiv, Rahul doesnt appear to question the authority that allows him to
pass judgment on the party in the first place. Indira was speaking of a
party that had been presided over by her father for four years, and by her
for a year. When Rajiv Gandhi spoke as the new president of the party in
1985, his mother had been president for the preceding six years. At the
time of Rahuls post-election press conference, his mother had been party
president for 15 years.
This state of affairs dates back to 1969, when Indira Gandhi split the
Congress over the election of the Indian president. As prime minister, she
chose to back VV Giri over the partys candidate, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy,
who was supported by the party president, S Nijalingappa. Her aims then
were exactly those that Rahul says he is looking to reverse today: she
wanted to break the ability of the party organisation to function
independently of her, to break the hold of leaders who saw her not as an
unquestionable authority but as a nominee of the party who could be
appointed and removed as circumstances required. Predictably, Indiras
revolt broke up the party; while a great many legislators joined her,
Congress stalwarts such as Nijalingappa and K Kamraj, who had also been
party president, asserted their authority by expelling her.
Dividing the Congress was a step that even Indiras father, who also
battled for dominance of the party, had never conceived. After Jawaharlal
Nehru was forced to accept Purushottam Das Tandon as the party
president in 1950, Nehru fought Tandon within the party and eventually
secured his resignation in September 1951. In doing so, Nehru altered the
relationship between the party president and himself as prime minister
for the rest of Nehrus life, the Congress president was his explicit
nominee and was subservient to him. After his death, however, the party
organisation reasserted its strength.

The importance of men such as Kamraj and Nijalingappa at the time

showed that their authority had independent sources; like Nehrus, it lay
in the work they had done for the party during the Independence
movement. After Independence, the party built a relatively legitimate
authority structure that was anchored by local notablesthe landed, the
wealthy, the panchayat leaders, the heads of local cooperatives, and the
caste elites, the political scientist Atul Kohli writes in his book Democracy
and Discontent. Although Nehru may have been unchallenged as a
national leader, in their respective states of Madras and Mysore, Kamraj
and Nijalingappato choose just two examplesmattered as much as
Nehru did nationally.
Indira, perhaps because she lacked the power within the Congress that
her father had, chose to do away with the party. Despite their hold over
the party, the men she broke with were no match for her in the electoral
battle that followed in 1971. Given a choice between the old organisation
and the personality cult of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty combined with
Indiras populist approachwhich involved bank nationalisation, the
abolition of privy purses, and the slogan Garibi Hataovoters backed
Indira. It is a lesson the family has never forgotten. Whenever in trouble,
the Gandhis have tried to rework this approachwith diminishing returns.
The party that Indira Gandhi invented anew in 1969 was built around a
personality cult, but it sustained itself through her ability to triumph
electorally. The old system of organisational loyalty was now replaced by
a network of patronage in which people who paid obeisance to the
personality cult were rewarded by the benefits that come with a share in
political power. There was no longer any question of people being
attracted by the partys vision, because no such thing existed; it is easy
enough to define the term Nehruvian, but impossible to give a coherent
shape to what Indira espoused. If today what we call the Congress does
not have an organisation independent from the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and
its patronage, it is because Indira excised this possibility in 1969.
This model of politics soon began to show its weakness. The Congress was
first voted out of power in 1977, after the Emergency. Although Indira
returned to power in 1979, by the time Rajiv was defeated in the general
election of 1989 it had become clear that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty no
longer had the appeal necessary to repeat the triumph of 1971. After
Rajivs death in 1991, Narasimha Rao became the Congress president,
and the party managed to cobble together a coalition government under
him; it was the first time since 1969 that the party had been guided for
any meaningful length of time by someone who was not from the NehruGandhi dynasty. An electoral defeat five years later confined the party to
the opposition until 2004.
With each successive stint out of power, the partys ability to retain its
supporters dwindled. Even where the Congress could win elections, it was
not the same type of political force it was in the 1960s, Atul Kohli notes;
by the mid 1980s, the Congress system had almost vanished. This was
a natural corollary of the split in 1969: any network of patronage can
survive only if it can assure benefits in the near future. Although the party

won in 2004 and 2009, the victories were mostly exercises in coalition
building; they did not demonstrate any newfound electoral strength
among the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and could not reverse the partys
disintegration at the level that mattersin the states, where local
patronage is handed out.
Over the past two decades, the youngest Congress leaders with the kind
of grassroots support that made Kamraj and Nijalingappa electorally
formidable in their own right were Digvijaya Singh, Ashok Gehlot and YS
Rajasekhara Reddy. But their affiliations to the party dated back to the
Rajiv era or even earlier. In the 15 years Sonia has commanded the party,
no new leadership that can claim a support base of its own has emerged.
Anyone with that sort of political strength can do equally well or even
better outside the party, as Mamata Banerjee has shown. Instead, the
party has come to increasingly rely on the sons and daughters of former
leadersanother form of patronageand on mid-level managerial
entrants who join the party to share in power but bring no expertise that
can help it when it is not in power. The current surfeit of lawyers (such as
Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid and Ashwani Kumar) and heirs (such as
Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot) is clear evidence of the partys
failure to attract meaningful new leadership. Although it is often argued
that the presence of such men shuts out leaders who have greater
electoral strength, the truth is quite the reverse: the managerial class in
the party is not the cause of the problem, it is only a symptom.
In the absence of a defining vision, the patron-client system can no longer
sustain itself in states where the party has little or no chance of coming to
power again. In those places, the party is withering away. The electoral
defeat that begins this cycle in any given state may not reflect the partys
strength there. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, the partys first defeat was
caused not by a weakness in the party but by the rise of caste and
Hindutva politics. In Madhya Pradesh, it was caused by the failure of the
Digvijaya Singh administration. However, once it becomes clear that the
defeat is not easily reversible, the party organisation rapidly declines. This
has already taken place in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It is now being
replicated in states such as Gujarat andas the latest assembly election
results showin Madhya Pradesh and perhaps even Chhattisgarh.
It is against this background that the folly of Rahul Gandhis attempts at
reforming the party becomes most evident. He can only focus on longterm organisational restructuring if he can deliver electoral success in the
meantime, so that the possibility of patronage keeps the party together
until an alternate structure is put in place. Otherwise, there will be
nothing left to reform.
Although it is difficult to envisage what the partys new structure might
be, it doesnt really matter. In the recent assembly elections, Rahul, who
was in charge of ticket distribution and was the face of the campaign,
showed that he is no vote-getter; he cannot even hold an audience at a
rally. Without being able to deliver on this count, all his attempts at
reforming the Congress are meaningless.

This is already evident in Uttar Pradesh. The party was last in power there
in 1989. By the time Rahul started focusing on the state, in 2009, the
Congress was largely confined to the familys loyal boroughs of Amethi
and Rae Bareilly. Despite his best efforts, the party was unable to emerge
as a challenger at the local level in the assembly elections. Today, the
party in the state stands where it was before Rahul started working
thereboth electorally and organisationally. It is as if he had never done
any work at all.
In states where Rahul has not intervened, the results are much the same.
Since Digvijaya effectively lost the assembly elections in 2003, the partys
performance in Madhya Pradesh has shown almost no improvement,
despite the fact that it has a number of important leaders there, such as
Kamal Nath, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Arjun Singhs son Ajay Singh.
Without a government in the state, none of them have been in a position
to dispense patronage where it matters, locally. In the entire Hindi belt,
the Congress is left with a chance of keeping the organisation afloat only
in Rajasthanbut even there, the comprehensive defeat of the party does
not augur well.
The almost permanent decimation of the Congress in the Hindi belt is not
something that can be reversed by projecting people such as Jairam
Ramesh or Nandan Nilekani. These figures, however articulate they may
sound in Delhi and however useful they maybe in government, bring
nothing to the electoral prospects of the party. In the organisation that
Rahul Gandhi has the fantasy of shaping in the long term, they may play
crucial roles. But they contribute nothing to the process of getting there.
And it is this process that is proving to be Rahuls undoing. His diagnosis
of the partys ills, which seems to point to some failure of the organisation
independent of the Nehru-Gandhi family, is wrong. The electoral ability of
the party is only a reflection of the electoral ability of the familyand its
been that way ever since Indira.