The present of the Congress is the future of the BJP.
Comparisons may confuse, but the past and the present fuse to provide enough insight to foresee the inevitable.
Faced with a clarion call for a Congress-free India as the grand old party brainstorms to reinvent itself, parallels emerge pointing to the irony of how powerful leaders have ended up pulverising their own organisations.
Inherent in the rise of prime minister Indira Gandhi were the seeds of the Congress decline. "Indira is India" went a common refrain of the time, first voiced by then party president D K Barooah. In time, her power dominated every facet of governance as well as the party dwarfing all others to merely the roles assigned by her. The BJP is headed the same way as Prime Minister Narendra Modi eclipses his mentoring edifice. Today his is the name that lords over a homogenous whole, party and government included. The decline of the Congress took a long time to surface after Indira Gandhi's departure. The fate of the BJP post-Modi is set to take a similar route. It is in the nature of the banyan tree that nothing grows under it.
Once upon a time, Congress chief ministers would vanish without a word. Now BJP chief ministers are here today, gone tomorrow. Biplab Deb became the latest BJP chief ministerial head to roll into history in the north-eastern state of Tripura on Saturday. Until September last year, four BJP chief ministers were sent packing in six months in three states: Uttarakhand, Karnataka, and Gujarat.
If India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was essentially a statesman and a democrat with strong secular credentials and a zest for promoting science and technology, his daughter Indira Gandhi metamorphosed fast from a "gungi gudiya" (dumb doll) into a strong, aggressive hard-boiled politician who could captivate and cut down with equal ease. She was as much at ease in the dust and grime of the Indian countryside as holding her own at international forums.
"Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, main kehti hoon garibi hatao" (They say remove Indira, I say remove poverty). 'They' included the Jana Sangh then. Sounds familiar? Years later, Modi was heard saying, "who kehte hain Modi hatao, main kehta hoon corruption hatao" ( they say remove Modi, I say remove corruption). 'They' now meant the Congress. Similarities abound. Indira Gandhi's doughtiness and propensity for playing on the front foot formed the basic template of Modi's politics, which deviated sharply thereafter into the rough and tumble of no-holds-barred freestyle kickboxing.
Nehru was PM for 17 years, and his Congress had influential state leaders like Pratap Singh Kairon in Punjab, Mohan Lal Sukhadia in Rajasthan, Dwarka Prasad Mishra in Madhya Bharat, Shri Krishna Sinha in Bihar, Gobind Ballabh Pant and Sampoornanand in UP, K Kamaraj in Madras state, KC Reddy, K Hanumanthaiah and S Nijalingappa in Karnataka, to name a few, with respect guiding relationships. In Indira Gandhi's case, she went slam-bang into the old guard of her father's era and bludgeoned her way to the top, including splitting the Congress. K Kamaraj, the author of the Kamaraj plan, played a key role both in installing Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister in 1964 and Indira Gandhi in 1966, both at the cost of veteran Morarji Desai. This firmed her politics.
Indira Gandhi was one of the most powerful of prime ministers in the history of India who was famously described by BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Durga after she split Pakistan to carve out Bangladesh in 1971 in the teeth of US president Richard Nixon's threat of sending in the seventh fleet and leveraged the friendship treaty with USSR to call the bluff. Sikkim also became an integral part of the Indian Union during her tenure though the promulgation of Emergency in 1975 blotted her copybook.
However, during her 15 years at the helm, the PMO became all-powerful, and the party was reduced to an add-on to Indira. All power flowed down from her, whether the government, party or constitutional appointments. All state chief ministers, even ministers and other key appointments were at the 'will' and 'pleasure' of the prime minister. Her assassination in October 1984 began the slide that was relatively pronounced in the party's organisational structure.
In fact, the Congress return to power after defeating the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led 'India shining' NDA in 2004, and the two terms thereafter lulled the Congress-led UPA into a false sense of complacency while the RSS was busy cobbling together a new narrative that was being tested in its political laboratory in Gujarat by strategist Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The recipe involved a potent blend of heightened religiosity, communal cleaving, corporate indulgence, grandiose schemes, global lobbyists and tech-savvy social media management besides the backroom planning of Prashant Kishor's Citizens For Accountable Governance (CAG), which was put to work well ahead of the 2014 general elections. This was topped with Modi's masterful oratory and skilled self-marketing.
The Congress stood hopelessly outclassed, unable to fathom its ruthless rival. It was more like a hippo competing with a Hummer.
However, after eight years in power, the Narendra Modi-led BJP is suffering today from all the infirmities that have brought the Congress to its present state. The Jana Sangh and its current avatar, the BJP, prided themselves on being cadre-based parties where decision-making flowed from the bottom to the top. The pyramid stands inverted, and today power flows from a single source down to the bottom.
In a tearing hurry for a 'Congress-mukt' Bharat, the ruling party at the Centre is a bloated 'Congress-yukt' BJP. Manik Saha, the replacement for Deb in Tripura, is the fourth leader of Congress lineage in the Northeast to become a BJP chief minister in the region. That he was elected to the Rajya Sabha just two months ago also confirms that there is no method in the measure, just a summary step to neutralise anti-incumbency as Tripura goes to the polls next year. The Congress realises, much to its chagrin now, and the BJP will in times to come: For all the jostling crowds up the BJP power stairs, it will take just a few tumbles for a stampede in the reverse direction. Idol worship may be a part of the popular Indian genetic make-up, but their 'immersion' at the end of the fasting and feasting is an intrinsic part of the same casting-away ritual.
Hardly any of those who served as state party chiefs or chief ministers after Narendra Modi in Gujarat have risen on the strength of their own standing. Vijay Rupani disappeared along with his cabinet a day after being praised for good work during the pandemic and so did many other BJP CMs countrywide. CR Patil, the present Gujarat BJP chief, wields more power than Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel but it is largely proxy power seconded to him due to his proximity to Modi. Ditto Amit Shah at the national level, powerful as he is. Modi remains the only name that stirs beyond the party label. But the party under Modi resembles the Congress under Indira Gandhi - overshadowed and overawed. In the post-Modi era, the future of the BJP is headed to what the Congress faces today, with the irony that institutional decline is written into the power matrix of the respective personas that have wielded power like a sledgehammer.
(R K Misra is a senior journalist based in Ahmedabad)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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