Both political and legal machinery of GOP found wanting in the 137-year-old party’s hour of peril.
It is a tragicomedy of errors. Inefficacy and incapacity of Indian National Congress’ Sonia-Rahul-Priyanka incarnation, which has a titular head, veteran Mallikarjun Kharge, came in sharp relief on 24 March, when, as mandated by statute, the Lok Sabha Secretariat disqualified Rahul Gandhi. The inability of the party to resort to mass mobilisation and protest was all too apparent. As no CWC has been constituted even after a month after the 85th Plenary at Raipur, a motley group of senior leaders and favoured junior functionaries huddled at the AICC headquarters for over two hours that evening even as the party did not announce either a political action plan or showcase its legal roadmap. It was a rain soaked evening—the AICC office had a handful of workers loitering outside, outnumbered by media persons. The next day, when Rahul addressed the media, there were a few hundred party flagbearers in the AICC premises—but Rahul chose to drive away in a huff, without even acknowledging their greetings. Normally a political leader would have chosen to address the workers and use the nationwide TV coverage thereof to surcharge the party machinery. Congress workers in various parts of the country, especially in his constituency, Wayanad, held rallies—but the lack of a central focus of the protest was all too apparent and appalling.
Rahul’s disqualification was a fait accompli. After the Lily Thomas Supreme Court judgement of 2013 membership is disqualified the moment an MP or MLA is convicted for two or more years—the Secretariat has no discretion but to comply. As Parliament is in session, compliance had to be swift. When the Lily Thomas judgement came, the nation had an eminent thinker as Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who, despite being overshadowed by the Nehru-Gandhi family, ran a brittle UPA coalition for a decade. Though a political lightweight, in his wisdom Dr Singh had tried to defend the political class by bringing an ordinance which tried to give a three-month window for the affected politician to appeal and seek remedy. 32 MPs and MLAs preceded Rahul in falling victim of the Lily Thomas aftermath: Rahul reaped as he sowed. When the then minister Ajay Maken was briefing the media at the Press Club of India, Rahul, then vice president of the ruling party, barged in, described the “political line” underlying the ordinance as “complete nonsense” and tore up the paper, which contained the collective wisdom of the nation’s Council of Ministers. The day this happened PM Singh was abroad. Some accounts say that he came to the brink of offering his resignation to overcome this humiliation, but was restrained by his seasoned counsellors. Rahul’s this 2013 act of sheer arrogance, stemming perhaps from his perceived sense of entitlement, came to haunt him on 24 March 2013. In a press meet Rahul addressed on 25 March he was specifically asked about this incident, but he sidestepped and concentrated on insisting that he has been targeted as he had attacked PM Narendra Modi and the PM’s alleged “links” with Gautam Adani in his Lok Sabha speech a month earlier. (While he berated Adani, he was flanked by two Congress Chief Ministers whose states have substantial Adani investments.) The proceedings in Surat had been initiated on the basis of his speech in a 2019 poll campaign, when inter alia he asked why most wrongdoers had the surname Modi. (Defamation law provides for defamation of class, and a Gujarat MLA, Purnesh Modi, felt aggrieved.) In his judgement the Surat chief judicial magistrate cited the Supreme Court’s advice to Rahul on the Rafale matter in 2019: “It is unfortunate that without any verification certain remarks were made by the contemnor (Rahul Gandhi) against the Prime Minister. Mr Gandhi needs to be more careful in future.” Had Rahul chosen to be circumspect perhaps the 24 March 2023 narrative could have been different.
The lackadaisical manner of the Grand Old Party’s (GOP’s) political management was on display the moment the court in Surat pronounced its order. The fact that the judgement was due on 23 March was known—Congress’ legal eagles, who adorn the party’s sparse Rajya Sabha slots, had not done a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and were caught napping. Rhetoric rather than logic seems to be the leitmotif of GOP’s system: An alert entity would have kept a battery of lawyers stationed in the Surat Sessions Court to seek immediate remedial action by filing an appeal. Teams should have been positioned in the High Court in Ahmedabad and in the Supreme Court in New Delhi for swift petitioning. In the case of spokesman Pawan Khera, who was deplaned on his way to the Raipur plenary, the Supreme Court had been approached and relief obtained swiftly within hours. Apparently, Rahul at Surat was not as prepared as Khera. Politically, Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee ought to have mobilised workers from across the state and perhaps even from Maharashtra, which is not far from Surat (and is a state where Congress still has a skeletal presence) either to greet Rahul if he had been let off or to protest his conviction. Instead after being convicted and granted a month to appeal, Rahul went to a Surat restaurant for lunch and thereafter flew back to Delhi, where he was received by a potpourri of party MPs and even a representative of DMK. The absence of Congress workers at Palam airport showed that while angst was being expressed on Twitter, mass mobilisation was absent.
Comparisons are being made with Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi’s treatment in 1977-78 by the Janata regime. Congress workers used to accompany Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi in huge numbers when they appeared in courts or went to jail. Congress had a robust political organisation then. Things are different now. Sonia is not Indira. And neither Rahul nor Priyanka can match the political abilities of Sanjay Gandhi. Priyanka invoked the sacrifices of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi while defending Rahul—by shying away from mentioning Sanjay Gandhi, who was the architect not only of Congress resurrection post 1977 but also the man who conspired with Janata leader Raj Narain to bring down the Morarji Desai government in 1979, Priyanka betrayed her preference for being myopic on her family’s and party’s history.
Opposition unity is being perceived in the aftermath of the Rahul Gandhi expulsion. 2023 is neither 1977 nor is it akin to 1989. While Mamata Banerjee has spoken up for Rahul (as have many other Opposition stalwarts), the fact remains that after Mamata’s party lost the Sagardighi bypoll to Congress last month, the spokesman of West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, Kaustav Bagchi was picked up at midnight by West Bengal Police for having criticised Mamata Banerjee. Next morning, a CPM Rajya Sabha member, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, a leading barrister, made an exception and appeared in the district courts to get Bagchi released on bail. A fortnight after Bagchi, 136 Congress workers were injured when they clashed with police in Bhopal where the Madhya Pradesh PCC led by Kamal Nath agitated against the state government. Activism among Congress workers is not a thing of the past. But in the case of Rahul Gandhi’s present travails, the lack of a central direction acts as a dampener. When the Congress top brass met on the 24th, the top of the table had two chairs—for Mallikarjun Kharge and for Sonia Gandhi. Kharge, though ratified by the Raipur Plenary, is not in a position to either preside by himself nor is his ability to take independent decisions in display so far. An ad hoc, proxy organisational set-up can neither galvanise a movement nor can it enable the GOP to act as fulcrum of the Opposition to the 24X7 political juggernaut of BJP. Kharge has won nine elections, he has been leader of Congress in the Lok Sabha and now Rajya Sabha besides being Congress president. A fettered presidency does not augur well for a party, which has been on the downslide over the past decade.
The collateral of the present crisis in Congress may well be the emergence of an Opposition front, which while paying lip service to Rahul, prefers to see Congress as its junior partner, an eventuality which may not be all too pleasing for the GOP.