The Nation: Congress; The Queen has failed long live the dynasty

Despite her party's worst ever performance Sonia is in charge and Priyanka the lone hope.

The Congress may have for the first time more years (115) than members (112) in the Lok Sabha, but the party's loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has little to do with such ticklish numbers. It is true that Congress President Sonia Gandhi has accepted responsibility for the party getting a bleeding nose at the elections. "As the president of the party I have no hesitation in acknowledging that the prime responsibility for our poor performance rests with me." But you've entered the show quite late if you expect the lead cast to own responsibility and then exit from the play.

HIGH AND LOW

Congress tolerates losers from the dynasty but punishes others

INDIRA GANDHI
In the post-Emergency election of 1977, Congress strength was halved but she retained control after a nominal split in the party.

RAJIV GANDHI
Faced with corruption charges before the 1989 election, he lost power. However, a desperate party clung to him without a protest.

P.V. NARASIMHA RAO
After the 1996 poll debacle, the party was up in arms against him. He would have been sacked had he not resigned.

SITARAM KESRI
Under him the party managed to retain its earlier tally. Yet Congressmen bayed for his blood till he was forcibly removed from office.

It never happens like that in the Congress. The party has seen bigger falls in the past with the dynasty in the cockpit. Like under Indira Gandhi, when its strength came down from 352 in 1971 to 154 in 1977. There was a minor revolt in 1978 as a result, but it took Indira very little effort to keep her flock together. Under Rajiv Gandhi, the 1989 disaster was equally shattering with the party strength dropping from 415 to 197. There wasn't a murmur of protest. But failure invariably led to the exit of past presidents like P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri. For the dynasty, the rules are different.

However, though the Congress under Sonia has lost 20 per cent of seats, its impact has been magnified by the high expectation of the Congress performance created before the elections. While the party's high-profile leaders like Kapil Sibal and Kamal Nath were boasting of crossing the 200 mark, even astute leaders like Pranab Mukherjee guesstimated that his party would get 177 seats and would notch up a figure of 250 with the allies and the Left Front. Shankersinh Vaghela, a new entrant but endowed with the experience of having seen the Congress from outside, says, "I was under the impression that we'd get between 150 and 160 seats. I didn't expect the Congress to sink below 120."

The party has absorbed the shock without a finger being raised at the president. On October 13, when Sonia gave the responsibility-owning address before the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) in the Central Hall of Parliament, she had already been unanimously elected chairperson of the CPP. A couple of days earlier, Congress Working Committee (CWC) member Rajesh Pilot, a closet dissident, had been making noises about forcing an election for the post of the leader of the opposition, which mercifully, the Congress still is. But after Sonia assumed the CPP leadership again, the talk of a contest for any post fizzled out. "There is no question of contesting against Soniaji," Pilot said. Madhavrao Scindia, party heavyweight aspiring for the post of leader of the opposition, also agreed to "leave it to the president".

After insulating the party against revolt, Sonia promptly put her well-known committee system at work. She set up a seven-member "introspection committee" to fix responsibility for the poll reverses. Its members are: CWC member A.K. Antony and Lok Sabha members Mani Shankar Aiyar (Tamil Nadu), Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi (West Bengal), P.M. Sayeed (Lakshadweep), K.A. Sangtam (Nagaland), K.P. Singh Deo (Orissa) and Santosh Chowdhary (Punjab). With the committee scheduled to submit its report by November 30, the party president has gained enough time for the possible glare of criticism within the party to be subdued. The first formal meeting of the CWC too has been postponed to October 23 to allow the dust to settle down. The dust has in fact been kicked up by a gaggle of MPs knocking at the door of the top committee. "There are about 10 members of the CWC," says Dasmunshi, "who have misguided, misinformed and misled the president. They should be changed."

But was Sonia merely "misguided"? In private discussions, many Congressmen agree Sonia hasn't quite been able to recharge the party's drained batteries. But there is unanimity about her daughter Priyanka Vadra, who has clearly electrified the party. As long as Sonia holds the Priyanka card, nobody in the Congress will write the dynasty off.

Last week, party MPs made a beeline to 10 Janpath with the request that Priyanka be fielded in one of the two seats that Sonia is statutorily required to surrender. The clamour for Priyanka's induction will get louder if Sonia surrenders Amethi. For Priyanka, the campaign at Amethi was the real show-stopper. She spoke the Avadhi dialect with spontaneous ease, showed unusual warmth in contacts with the people, and in dealing with local officials, displayed the unmistakable body language of the natural "boss".

However, the MPs who advocated Priyanka's induction had to return disappointed as Sonia told them that Priyanka wasn't ready yet to join politics. Even her son Rahul, as she apparently hastened to add, had not made up his mind. Though Sonia has given her son considerable exposure during the campaign, the boy, with his wooden expression and laboured Hindi, didn't quite capture partymen's imagination. Congressmen are rooting for the daughter not the son. It's not that Sonia is averse to the idea of Priyanka taking the plunge, but as she told a contingent of Lok Sabha members from Assam, "What can I do if she refuses?"

There isn't much that Sonia really can do because Priyanka is known to be as unmouldable as her late uncle Sanjay. Before the elections, an Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (upcc) leader had called on Priyanka at her Lodhi Estate residence to persuade her to not only campaign in the state but also to contest from Lucknow or any seat of her choice in the state. She patiently heard them out and promised to get back to UPCC chief Salman Khursheed after giving it a thought. However, as the delegation was about to leave, a member let off that they'd already met the Congress president with a request to convince her. Priyanka was livid. She shook her head and said, "Nobody can force me to do something unless I want to do it."

Congress leaders know that Priyanka has, by participating in the poll campaign, got the taste of public adulation. That's a heady elixir of politics which, once tasted, cannot be turned down. "She cannot lead the life of a private person all her life. One day she has to join the Congress," says Santosh Mohan Dev, MP from Silchar.

While Priyanka is still a hope for the future, Congressmen want Sonia to learn from her mistakes. They say that she had erred on issues such as:
� Bihar: After the Dalit carnage, she said Chief Minister Rabri Devi should own "moral responsibility", but within a fortnight Sonia commandeered her party to vote in the Lok Sabha against the dissolution of the Rashtriya Janata Dal Government in the state. Even Sonia-loyalists believe that for tactical gain she committed a strategic blunder.
� Tea Party: Many senior leaders have now told the Congress president that she should have consulted a larger circle of party leaders before attending Subramanian Swamy's tea party in AIADMK chief J. Jayalalitha's honour. "If Soniaji hadn't attended that party there would have been no election this year," a senior leader says remorsefully.
� Bansi Lal: Partymen feel that Sonia succumbed to persuasions by former Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal's 1975 Emergency cronies and decided to bail out the state government. She compounded the problem by changing her mind subsequently and withdrawing support.
� Jat problem: Accusing fingers are now pointed in the party at K. Natwar Singh, chief of the AICC Foreign Affairs Cell, for having incited the Jats in Rajasthan to embarrass Ashok Gehlot, the state's Congress chief minister. It eventually backfired on the party.

Given these negative marks, if the party has still stuck through with Sonia, it is because of the Congress' decades-long inability to find an acceptable leader outside the dynasty. If CWC member Scindia throws his hat into the ring, his bare head is likely to be the target of Pilot, Kamal Nath and others of that generation. And the sudden rise in N.D. Tiwari's fortunes following his electoral victory has made veterans like Jitendra Prasada and Arjun Singh sit up and take a closer look.

Beyond the tina (there is no alternative) factor, however, there are some more things on Sonia's credit side. For example, the militant approach she adopted after the budget session of the previous Lok Sabha to its dissolution, the Kargil conflict and the elections. While many outside the party thought she was unduly acrimonious, Congressmen think otherwise. "In this Lok Sabha Sonia will fight like a tigress," says Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh. Even Sonia's first speech at the CPP is loaded with pre-election invectives against the BJP-led Government as if the poll did not mean turning a new chapter.

Is Sonia still the millennium hope of the badly decimated Congress party? Perhaps not, but nobody in the Congress expects another election to come too soon. And, with no elections round the corner, the troubling questions of Sonia's foreign origin and competence will not be debated in public. As the fin de siecle despair sets in on the defeated party, Priyanka remains its only hope of a tryst with destiny. Regardless of whether she's ready and whether the Gandhi charisma will get another chance in the swing-door world of coalition politics.

	METRO TODAY \| DAILY NEWS \| ASTROLOGY \| ARCHIVES \| INDIA TODAY \| HOME