March 23, 1998

Conflicting ambitions within the party made Sonia Gandhi's takeover easy. Her next task will be to win back former friends and split the BJP alliance. 

By Sumit Mitra and Harish Gupta

Sonia Gandhi's ability to attract votes may be a subject for debate but there is little doubt about the dexterity with which she has won back for the Gandhi family a misplaced heirloom -- the Congress party. Her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, regarded as the shrewdest practitioner of realpolitik in modern India, had mastered the art of keeping the party under her thumb. It was a costly exercise though, as she had to split the Congress twice in the process, in 1969 and in 1978. However, her bahu, a true daughter of the land of Machiavelli, has grabbed the party without slicing it. Any transition, of course, leaves bruised egos such as that of Sitaram Kesri, the Congress president who won't easily accept the prefix 'ex' to his designation. In any case, beyond the melodrama that marked the succession process last week, the cast of the post-poll Congress has only one name: Sonia.

The 52-year-old widow of Rajiv Gandhi is no stranger to power in the Congress. She had been pulling the strings in the party from behind the high walls of 10 Janpath since the former Congress president's assassination in 1991, having the final word in all crucial decisions -- the choice of P.V. Narasimha Rao as the prime minister that year, Rao's replacement by Kesri as Congress president in 1996 and the withdrawal of Congress support in 1997 to the two United Front (UF) ministries led by H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral. As the second withdrawal of support led to the 1998 general elections, she came out of her cordon of silence to talk directly to the nation, holding 138 rallies in all corners of the country, being seen and heard by 12 million people and dominating hours of air-time on television channels. In all those six weeks, she spoke over the shoulders of the party, holding no position other than that of an ordinary Congress member, but criticising its leadership much in the same way that an absentee landlady would give a tongue-lashing to incompetent managers of her estate.

The talk show -- as later events have proved -- was a prelude to her taking charge of the party. The change of guard was necessary for Sonia, as she thought that the existing leadership lacked the "mass appeal" necessary to turn the party into a fighting instrument against the bjp combine. The Gandhi family has always been restless when made to sit in the Opposition, itching to recapture power at the earliest opportunity through parliamentary and extra-parliamentary subterfuge. In 1980 as much as in 1991, the party returned to power as Indira and Rajiv engineered splits in the enemy camp.

While Sonia could well have inherited the family expertise, she also has pressing personal problems at hand. With the Congress pushed into the Opposition and Congress-UF relations touching their nadir, there may be fewer defenders of the family's reputation in the 12th Lok Sabha in the face of corruption charges hurled at it. Such a risk is looming on the horizon, with a CBI team currently in London to pursue investigations into the onward track of the Bofors slush funds allegedly stashed away in some bank accounts in the Channel Islands. However, Sonia wouldn't have found the takeover quite easy if the party under Kesri were less disunited. At least the octogenarian Kesri wouldn't have given up without a fight if he had fewer self-serving colleagues. Last week, when Arjun Singh, a self-proclaimed Sonia loyalist defeated twice at the hustings, together with M.L. Fotedar, yet another political has-been, approached Kesri with a draft resignation letter, the Congress president was miffed to the point of showing them the door. A tested vassal of the Gandhi family, Kesri had earlier sensed his being unwanted and had even declared that he'd step down at a requisitioned meeting of the All India Congress Committee (AICC). But he hated being hustled. "I am no rubber-stamp president," he told India Today when asked on which date he proposed to convene the AICC session.

The words had more fury than power. His partymen, instead of backing him up, began jockeying for positions in the new dispensation. A new president means a new set of Congress Working Committee (CWC) members as nine of the 20 members of the committee are nominated by the president, the others being elected by the AICC. The president also has the prerogative to replace the AICC, while the CWC, on being recast, can "superintend, direct and control" all Pradesh Congress Committees (Article 19-f-III of the party constitution). What is most important, the new set-up was seen to create a new leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP). In a hung Lok Sabha, the CPP leader holds the key to the table being turned on the BJP alliance and therefore has the aura of the prime-minister-in-waiting. Since there is no shortage of aspirants to CPP leadership, Sonia had a gilt-edged opportunity to become the final arbiter.

Earlier, the CWC had invited her to "guide" the CPP in "electing" its leader -- a classic contradiction in terms. The takeover was therefore facilitated by the conflicting ambitions of Sharad Pawar, the Maharashtra strong man, K. Karunakaran, old patriarch from Kerala, and K. Vijayabhaskara Reddy, under whose charge the Congress could retain its impressive tally of 22 seats in Andhra Pradesh. From Pawar's camp, there were rumours flying thick and fast about how Karunakaran had manipulated RSS support in winning his seat of Thiruvananthapuram. On the other hand, Karunakaran's bungalow on Krishna Menon Marg was teeming with supporters who'd brandish a "complete list" of Maharashtra Congress members of the Lok Sabha -- 13 out of 33 -- opposed to Pawar's appointment as CPP leader. Reddy, on his part, kept a relatively low profile though his supporters had assiduously dug up Pawar's past record of "perfidy" regarding the Gandhi family. In the good old days, Indira Gandhi thrived on managing chaos in the party. Sonia took a leaf out of her mother-in-law's book.

However, in the months ahead, there is more to this crisis management than meets the eye. To make a comeback attempt in the present Lok Sabha, the Congress must not only regain the confidence of the UF partners but also win back some of the BJP's allies -- notably J. Jayalalitha's aiadmk and Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress. The initial prospects of such new alliances are bleak. The two ladies among the BJP's alliance partners are currently hostile to the Congress in general, and Sonia in particular. About Sonia, Jayalalitha has wondered whether Italy could ever accept an Indian as its prime minister. And, commenting on Sonia replacing Kesri in the Congress, Mamata's pithy one-liner is: "The operation is successful but the patient is dead."

The new boss of the Congress is therefore in desperate search of a team of deputies who can win over former friends and compatriots, and can gently push the wedge between the bjp and its allies. Pawar is the front-runner in the game. Last week, he spent his days on an unending bridge-building mission. Mamata had backed him when Pawar took the Congress to the verge of a split in the wake of its withdrawal of support to the Gujral government. And Pawar claims to have impeccable personal relations with Jayalalitha. Says P.C. Chacko, MP from Kerala and a Pawar loyalist: "In December last, he (Pawar) wanted to negotiate an electoral understanding with Jayalalitha, but Kesriji sent Vijayabhaskara Reddy to her instead. It was a disaster."

However, in the inevitable rounds of "front politics" in the present Lok Sabha, Sonia is not left with many aces. The defeat of Arjun Singh at Hoshangabad has deprived her of a coalition expert whom she trusts.The fall of N.D. Tiwari at Nainital limits her option of playing the Muslim card in Uttar Pradesh. The humiliation of R.K. Dhawan in New Delhi nips in the bud a potential backroom player. The disgrace heaped on Pranab Mukherjee by Congressmen for having alienated Mamata makes the old battlehorse dangerous to ride, for some time at least. And that curbs Sonia's ability to approach the Left leadership of West Bengal with whom Mukherjee sat in a coalition in the '60s. Worse still, with Kesri's exit from the top perch, the party loses a vital link with the vast and politically assertive Mandalite groups of the Hindi heartland. To the leaders of these social groups -- such as Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav -- Kesri has been the most credible interface with the Congress, being an OBC himself and a former welfare minister. There is already a sign of worry in Laloo Yadav's RJD, a pre-poll ally of the Congress now inching towards the UF.

In the post-Emergency years, Indira Gandhi clawed her way back to power from her unchallenged stronghold in the south. In 1998, the latest mantle-bearer of the party doesn't have a toehold in most states. In politics, as in the gaming hall, people bargain from a position of strength. So far, the Congress under Sonia cannot enter the game by putting the chips on the table. The party is nonetheless celebrating the opening advantage of having her to talk. As the billboards hailed yesteryear's screen siren Greta Garbo's transition from silence to sound in 1930 with the cry: Garbo Talks.

Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd