Old won’t go, young won’t stay

Is Congress imploding, with its gen-next leaders searching for greener pastures?

raj box

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The lines of Irish poet W B Yeats seem so appropriate in the context of India’s oldest political party Congress, which today looks like a rudder-less ship buffeted from side to side in the midst of a stormy sea. The Rajasthan political drama is yet another rude reminder to the party, if it needed one more, to bring its house in order in time.

Down in the dump after its second successive Lok Sabha poll debacle in 2019, Congress is running out of time in any bid it might be making to revive itself if political developments in the last four months are taken into account, the latest one being the rebellion of the party’s once-promising leader Sachin Pilot.

With Jyotiraditya Scindia having left the party and joined the BJP after a bitter rivalry with veterans Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh and the Pilot-Ashok Gehlot war for supremacy in Rajasthan out in the open, the infamous “crabs in a bottle” syndrome of Congress is once again very visible.

Leaving no one in doubt about the deep divide, Gehlot acknowledged that there had been no communication between him and Pilot, his Deputy Chief Minister, in the last one and a half years since Congress regained power in Rajasthan. For good measure, Gehlot also dismissed Pilot’s political standing saying, “Speaking good English, giving good sound bytes, and being handsome isn’t everything,” and added that “if betrayers leave the Congress, it will help refurbish the party.”

A similar bitter rivalry in Assam Congress between Himanta Biswa Sarma and party veteran Tarun Gogoi, who was chief minister, saw Sarma exit from Congress in 2015 and joining the BJP. The very next year, the BJP had a government in Assam, the first in the North-East, which allowed the saffron party to expand its footprint over the entire region, with Sarma overseeing the expansion.

Pilot is no Sarma, but he is young and a popular leader in the Gujjar community in the state. He could be characterised as being somewhere between Scindia, with a family legacy, and former Haryana Congress chief Ashok Tanwar, who worked at the grassroots to revitalise the party but was ultimately sidelined in favour of former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

After the Pilot episode, Tanwar voiced what many in the Congress think – that the party is sidelining leaders promoted by Rahul Gandhi, a charge earlier made by Maharashtra leader Sanjay Nirupam. After Pradyot Deb Barman, the former Congress state chief in Tripura, who quit protesting against the role of AICC general secretary Luizinho Falerio, Tanwar also flagged the structural problems in the party.

But a large number of senior leaders in the party share the sentiment of Gehlot towards many of the young leaders promoted by Rahul Gandhi, who are disparagingly called “baba log” in party circles. The seniors feel that most of these leaders have flamboyance without substance and they lack ideological commitment and are hence ready to jump ship anytime they do not get what they desire.

Replacing the ‘old guard’ has never been an easy task in Congress. That answers why Congress chose to stick with the current ‘old guard’ – with Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh, Gehlot in Rajasthan, Hooda in Haryana, Virbhadra Singh in Himachal Pradesh, Capt. Amarinder Singh in Punjab and, in the past, with Tarun Gogoi in Assam. Sometimes the veterans delivered, sometimes they did not -- like Virbhadra Singh won Himachal Pradesh in 2012 but lost in 2017 and Amarinder Singh lost in 2012 but won Punjab in 2017.

In Assam, MP and Rajasthan, ego clashes happened as party performance depended on both the elders and the younger generation, and hence the fight for the spoils.

The larger problem for Congress is that most of the elders in the states are way past their prime but there is no second-rung leadership in states where it still has some organisation left -- like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. In Karnataka, too, the old guard has an iron-like grip on the party. In states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and recently Delhi, the party has found it difficult to stage a comeback once the veterans declined as they did not allow a second rung of leadership to rise.

The tapes that have come out also show disturbingly a crisis of commitment in the Congress, where leaders who owe their rise and current positions to the party, do not blink before switching sides. The party’s “promising leaders” are proving to be “young men in a hurry.”

The dilemma before the Nehru-Gandhis is that most of the young politicians promoted in the last few years have failed to come up to scratch. Those who have performed somewhat well, such as Pilot, have turned out to be highly ambitious and in no mood to wait for their turn. The terrible show the party put up in the 2019 LS elections, including Rahul’s own defeat in Amethi, has also chipped away the authority, moral or otherwise, of the Nehru-Gandhis.

The confusion over the leadership issue at the top after Rahul Gandhi’s resignation last year and Sonia Gandhi accepting temporary tenure has made matters worse as it has hurt the party’s ability to intervene in time in crises in the states.

Yeats, writing ‘The Second Coming’ in a time of pandemic, hoped for a while that “Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” Can we say that of the Congress party today?