The Gandhis Ensure That No Outsider Gets To Run the Family Run Party

For the first 62 years until Independence, the Congress party had 53 presidents. From 1947 to 1977, the party had 13 presidents. For 92 years, the Congress party was headed by a Nehru-Gandhi family member for only 11 years, even though Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had collectively been PM for 28 years.

Then things changed. Indira was party president for seven consecutive years, and was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi for six years. After Rajiv’s assassination in May 1991, PV Narasimha Rao was party president as well as Prime Minister of India for five years. He was succeeded by Sitaram Kesri, who was president from September 1996 to March 1998.

Enter Italian-born Sonia Gandhi. Barring 20 months from December 2017 to August 2019 when her son Rahul was party president, she has been Congress president for more than 23 years.

During her ‘reign’, the party has seen an average 31.6% decline in vote share and a 50.2% decline in seats in the Lok Sabha.

As the Congress’s second ‘Madam’—the first was Indira Gandhi—refuses to let any non-family member take over via a free and fair election that was the norm in the party during the first 92 years, the Indian National Congress is collapsing.

Several Congressmen have been complaining about the “lack of effective leadership” for seven years—since the Narendra Modi-led NDA routed the party in May 2014. Many, including senior leaders, have left the party, which doesn’t even seem to win state elections anymore.

Even pro-Congress journalists are now writing unabashedly against the ‘family culture’.

And the BJP/NDA under the able leadership of Modi is gaining from strength to strength.

In an India Today poll of August 2019, of the people who did not choose the option ‘Don’t Know/Can’t Say’, as many as 57.5% said ‘Yes’ to the question “Do you think the Congress is in terminal decline?”

In a similar India Today poll in August 2020, 55.3% said ‘Yes’ to the question “Is the Congress nearing its demise?”

A noteworthy fact deserves a mention here. Today’s Sonia/Rahul-led Congress claims to be the party that fought for Independence, but nothing could be further from the truth. The pre-1947 Indian National Congress (“INC”) has split several times. The major splits were:

• In 1950 Syama Prasad Mukherjee, India’s first Industry & Supply Minister left the INC and in 1951 founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the BJP’s predecessor. BJS won four LS seats in 1957, 14 in 1962, 35 in 1967 and 22 in 1971.
• In 1951 Acharya Kripalani, INC president in 1947, formed the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party which won nine LS seats in 1951-52. It merged with the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) in 1952, which won 19 seats in 1957 and 12 in 1962.
• In 1959 C Rajagopalachari, India’s first ‘Indian’ Governor General, Home Minister, and former CM of Madras State formed the Swatantra Party which won 18 LS seats in 1962 and 44 in 1967 when it was the second-largest party in the LS.
• In 1966 H Mahtab, the first CM of Orissa and former Industry & Supply Minister of India founded Orissa Jana Congress (OJC).
• In 1967 former CM of UP Charan Singh founded the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD); and former CM of West Bengal Ajoy Mukherjee founded the Bangla Congress.
• In 1969 former CM of Orissa Biju Patnaik founded the Utkal Congress. Its successor is the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) founded by his son Naveen Patnaik in 1997. The BJD won nine LS seats in 1998, 10 in 1999, 11 in 2004, 14 in 2009, 20 in 2014 and 12 in 2019.
• In 1974, PSP, Swatantra Party, BKD, and Utkal Congress merged to form the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), led by Charan Singh. These parties had together won 16 LS seats in 1971.
• In Nov 1969 the INC split into Congress (R) led by Indira Gandhi and Congress (O) (also known as ‘the Syndicate’) led by K Kamraj and Morarji Desai. Congress (O) won state elections in Bihar, Karnataka, and Gujarat. In 1971 Congress (O) won 16 LS seats.
• In 1977 ‘Babu’ Jagjivan Ram (who held several important ministerial portfolios under PM’s Nehru and Indira Gandhi and was the most prominent Scheduled Caste face in the INC), HN Bahuguna (former Union Minister and CM of UP) and Nandini Satpathy (former CM of Orissa) founded Congress For Democracy (CFD).
• In 1977, Congress (O) merged with PSP, BJS, Swatantra Party, OJC, BLD, Bangla Congress, and Congress (R) defectors to form the Janata Party (JP). The JP contested the 1977 LS election in alliance with CFD, CPM, SAD, DMK and four other parties. The alliance won 345 seats and formed India’s first non-Congress government with Morarji Desai as PM.
• In 1978 former CM of Karnataka D Devaraj Urs, along with AK Antony, Dev Kant Barooah, Sharad Pawar, Sarat Chandra Singha, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, and KP Unnikrishnan formed Congress (Urs) which won 13 LS seats in 1980. When Pawar became president in Oct 1981, the party’s name was changed to Indian Congress (Socialist) and it won four seats in 1984. Pawar merged the party back into the INC in 1987.
• In 1996 GK Moopanar formed the Tamil Maanila Congress which won 20 LS seats in 1996 and three in 1998. After his death, his son GK Vasan merged the party with INC in 2002. It again split from INC in 2014.
• In 1998 Mamata Banerjee founded the All India Trinamool Congress. It won seven seats in 1998, eight in 1999 and two in 2004 (all the three elections as part of the NDA), 19 in 2009 (as part of the UPA), 34 in 2014 and 22 in 2019 (on its own).
• In 1999, then former three-time CM of Maharashtra Sharad Pawar again left the INC to form the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) with PA Sangma (former Union Minister, CM of Meghalaya and Speaker of the LS) and Tariq Anwar. However, the NCP became part of the UPA. It won nine LS seats in 2004 and 2009, six in 2014 and five in 2019.
• In 2011, YS Jaganmohan Reddy, son of former CM of undivided Andhra Pradesh YS Rajasekhara Reddy, formed the YSRCP. It won nine LS seats in 2014 and 22 in 2019.

There were at least 15 more smaller splits between 1951 and 2016 which not only hurt the Indian National Congress in the Lok Sabha but took away many state assemblies from the ‘grand-old-party’, the primary examples being UP, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha.

More than two years after the 2019 Lok Sabha election results, Congress’s punctured tyre still does not have air. After Rahul Gandhi resigned as party president, no one seems to have a clue what to do.

In July 2019, the Congress–JD(S) coalition government in Karnataka collapsed just 14 months after it had been formed.

In August 2019, high-profile Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh, Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi, and Shashi Tharoor disapproved of Rahul’s all-out attack on Modi.

 

In March 2020, the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh collapsed just 15 months after it had been formed.

In July 2020, Rajasthan Deputy CM Sachin Pilot revolted against CM Ashok Gehlot and was sacked the next day. His name had been floated as a possible party president after Rahul had resigned just a year earlier. Pilot was finally coerced to reconcile after a month of back-and-forth.

On August 7, 2020, 23 party leaders (“G23”) wrote to ‘interim’ party president Sonia Gandhi, criticising the way the party was opposing the Modi government, calling for an overhaul of the party and a “full-time, visible president”. The G23 included Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Veerappa Moily, Ashok Chavan, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, PJ Kurien, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Mukul Wasnik, Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada, Renuka Chowdhury, and Shahsi Tharoor. Never before has such a revolt happened since 1969.

Senior Congress leaders who have left the party since 2013 and joined the BJP include Rao Inderjit Singh, Ch. Birender Singh, Himanta Biswa Sarma, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, SM Krishna, Bhubaneswar Kalita, Jyotiraditya Scindia, and Jitin Prasada.

Others who have left the Congress include YS Jagan Reddy (current CM of Andhra Pradesh), Jayanthi Natarajan, GK Vasan, Ranjit Deshmukh, Ashok Tanwar, and Pradyot Debbarman.

Many prominent spokespersons have also left: Shehzad Poonawalla, Tom Vadakkan, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Sanjay Jha (who was sacked for writing an article which said that the party needs to introspect), and former actor Khushbu Sundar.

In any case, the main point here is that the Congress of 2021 is not the Congress of 1947, and this ‘new’ Nehru-Gandhi-Vadra pariwaar-owned enterprise is clearly collapsing.