The Indian National Congress, long helmed by the Gandhi family, has been in a steady decline since its disastrous showing in the 2014 general elections. This has extended to last month’s elections, which was capped by a stunning loss of the INC’s incumbent Chief Minister in Punjab to an upstart Aam Aadmi Party. Thus, over this stretch, the INC has gone from controlling half of India’s states to only Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The INC convened a post-mortem meeting of its Congress Working Committee on Sunday. Rather than question its disastrous leadership of the Gandhi triumvirate, the Committee unanimously reaffirmed its confidence in the family.
Such levels of sycophancy would seem to be out of place in the world’s largest democracy and more akin to the political climate of North Korea. Perhaps part of the problem can be attributed to the fact that the Congress Working Committee members haven’t been elected to their positions since 1997. One of the most prominent and accomplished members of the Committee, Shashi Tharoor, went out of his way to deflect criticism of Gandhi-family mismanagement of the 2022 elections.
Hence, the INC has become an entity that has completely lost touch with the average Indian voter. It’s a political party that doesn’t even seem to be concerned with winning. Rather, it’s beholden to a core tenet of the Gandhis as divinely-ordained monarchs. This belief is perpetuated by palace nobles like Tharoor, whom, it would appear, are so satiated by their privileged existence that they don’t even harbor the ruthless instinct to usurp sickly superiors that’s common in politics.
The Gandhi-family personality cult political party is reminiscent of the Clinton family in the United States. Bill and Hillary Clinton were the center-of-gravity of the Democratic Party for almost a quarter-century. Domestically, they served as one of the party’s bastions of political fundraising, while overseas they maintained extraordinary influence through the Clinton Global Initiative and Hillary’s (unelected) tenure as Secretary of State. The 2016 Wikileaks drop helped to reveal the extent to which the Clintons and underlings such as Huma Abedin ran Democratic Party operations from behind the scenes.
The Democratic Party unflinchingly continued to follow the Clintons into their historic 2016 defeat to Donald Trump, despite many warning signs from the masses. Notably, there was Hillary’s stunning loss in the Democratic Party presidential primaries to a completely unknown and inexperienced figure in Barack Obama, in 2008. This loss was attributed in large part to voter apathy for the status-quo that the Clinton family had come to represent (versus Obama’s platform of change) and Hillary’s completely out-of-touch campaign outreach.
The Democratic Party didn’t learn their lesson in 2016. Rather, the party went out of its way to ensure that Hillary won the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination, instead of the captivating upstart Bernie Sanders, as was later revealed in party-leadership emails leaked to Wikileaks. This, despite increasing criticism of her husband’s tenure and sexual improprieties by Democratic voters and Hillary’s extremely controversial tenure as Secretary of State, which consisted of geopolitical disasters (the collapses of Yemen, Libya and Syria) and actions like the Iran nuclear deal, which were widely disliked by American voters as a whole. This culminated in the Democratic Party losing the presidency to a completely unqualified and politically divisive figure, in Donald Trump.
Using the trendy example of Russia, one can see another catastrophic example of dynasty politics. Russia’s last raj, Nicholas II, was allowed by the yes-men in his court to drag the Russian Empire into two suicidal wars over the span of twelve years… This on top of many domestic political fumbles of his, such as Bloody Sunday, constant protests and acts of civil disobedience by the masses and genocidal violence against Jews. Nicholas II’s Kremlin nobles didn’t turn on him until it was too late, when the Empire was in the midst of an irreversible collapse.
The fact that the Gandhis have assembled around them a team that refuses to challenge them at all is of grave concern to India’s multipolar democracy. The non-Gandhi INC apparatchiks are either lacking in any leadership qualities or they’re too enamored with the Nehru-Gandhi brand to even think to either usurp the tottering leadership or flee the sinking ship. To reiterate, this isn’t an overreaction, based solely on the latest election results. Since 2014, the INC has been getting annihilated in local, state and federal elections. In many of these races, the triumphant BJP had little or no prior history of electoral success. With regards to the 2022 races specifically, the INC squandered the chance to cultivate an anti-insurgency platform based on the BJP’s bungling of COVID-19, the farm law protests and persistent unemployment. Subtly calling out the INC, Prem Shankar Jha writes that a successful political party needs to craft campaigns that aren’t predicated on, “loyalty to community leaders or in memory of the nation’s founding fathers.” At the rate the electoral results are going, the BJP will become the INC of Nehru/Indira/Rajiv yore, in that they will be able to run the country for decades.
Russell Whitehouse is Executive Editor at International Policy Digest. He’s also a Bollywood film critic and freelance policy essayist who’s written about topics such as US electoral politics, China, Myanmar and economics.