Columns: The Usual Suspects

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India Today, June 7, 1999
June 7, 1999

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Modelled After Amma

Congress emerges as the national chapter of AIADMK

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is not necessary to be a fawning 10 Janpath groupie to argue that a political party has an unfettered right to choose a leader of its preference. Equally, it is not necessary to be a rabid trishul-waving xenophobe to suggest that after last week's AICC, the Congress is fast resembling a national chapter of the aiadmk.

The analogy is not needlessly cruel. Poor M. Thambi Durai invited taunts for prostrating himself before the supreme leader Puratchi Thalaivi J. Jayalalitha and the hapless R.K. Kumar was mocked was routing his resignation from the A.B. Vajpayee government through Chennai's Poes Garden. By that judgmental yardstick, how should we look upon the endless stream of Congress functionaries who prostrated themselves before the dynastic deity during the nine-day tamasha at Delhi's Akbar Road? Or the three Congress chief ministers whose so-called resignation letters never reached the Raj Bhavans but landed up dutifully at 10 Janpath? From frenzied genuflection to attempted self-immolations, the culture of the AIADMK is taking over the Congress. "Indira is India," said D.K. Barooah in celebration of the Emergency; "Rajiv Gandhi is diamond," screamed Kalpnath Rai at the height of the Bofors controversy. Now K. Natwar Singh wants to do one better: "She (Sonia) married history and has a historical role to play." Added Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit: "The poor have come to regard her as the personification of Indira Gandhi."

It doesn't stop at obsequious followers. For the AIADMK, the last word is always Amma. Even the slightest hint of disloyalty invites ruthless punishment from a party whose campaign theme centres on the high emotional pitch of a perennially wronged woman. Can Congressmen look the electorate in the eye and say their party is different?

"No longer," said the determined Sonia, "shall we tolerate the negative forces which seek to target the dignity of a woman through calumny and falsehood." Maharashtra's Ranjit Deshmukh was booed when he referred in his AICC speech to "Sharad Rao ji"; he got back the audience by calling his erstwhile mentor a gaddar (traitor). "Those who want to be with me must do so completely with their minds and hearts," the supreme leader said in her Talkatora Stadium declamation, "and those who have even the smallest of doubts must travel separately on their own." To drive home the point, Sonia met AICC members in small groups to get them to individually affirm their loyalty to her.

A 114-year-old party that once accommodated stalwarts as disparate as Rajaji, Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru in the same Working Committee cannot countenance a suggestion that says that the prime minister of India should be unequivocally Indian. It's not a retreat; it's an audacious redefinition of all the assumptions governing the Congress. In the three decades since the split of 1969, though the mental range of the party has been steadily shrinking it still retained some character. Now, Sonia wants to replace the anarchy of an umbrella coalition with the robotic rigour of a politburo. It's a daring initiative whose success is yet to be measured. But as she proceeds to overwhelm a laid-back country with steely emotion, Sonia should recall history. Even Mussolini, Goebbels once remarked with prophetic exasperation, "would never be able to make anything but Italians out of the Italians".

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