Reviving the Grand Old Party

After witnessing a steady downhill journey in Indian politics for years, the Indian National Congress lost complete grip when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power at the centre in 2014. The journey thereafter was not a pleasant one as its bastions fell one after another into the hands of its rival parties. Amid this gloom, the win in a few crucial state assembly elections in the last couple of years gave some hope that the grand old party might bounce back, but then, it found difficult to hold even those states steady, indicating that all was not well with the party and just a facelift would not help. Just a few months after Jyotiraditya Scindia joined the BJP and brought down the 15-month-old Kamal Nath-led Madhya Pradesh government, another promising young Congress leader -- Sachin Pilot – has rebelled against the party, threatening to pull down Ashok Gehlot-led government in Rajasthan. This happened at a time when the Congress is perhaps going through the worst phase in its political history. Even the ongoing health crisis, which the whole world is grappling with, did not stop the young Congress leader from expressing his frustration by rebelling against the party. But this is a culmination of frustration that has been building for some time. It all started on the vote counting day when Pilot was pitted against his senior Gehlot for top post of Chief Minister. The Congress chose the old guard over the new by making the latter as the chief minister and the former as his deputy, which marked the beginning of a new attrition within. The party did something similar when Pilot was sacked as the deputy chief minister of Rajasthan and a disqualification was sought against him and 18 other dissident MLAs.

Who is to be blamed for this mess? While Pilot should have resolved whatever grievances he has within the party, Gehlot, being the head of the state and a senior politician who knows all the tricks of the game, should take the bigger blame. Instead of taking the extra step and solving the issue for the good of his party, he aggravated the situation by attacking and taking pot shots at his former deputy; and the party high command failed to stop it. The party’s leadership is answerable for allowing a molehill to turn into a mountain and failing to control the situation. Now, what should worry the party members more than the recent political fallouts in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan is the inability of the party leadership at the state-level to keep its herd together and the failure of the party high command to solve problems. If the Congress still has the ambition in national politics, it should first fill the leadership vacuum as soon as possible before taking up other calculated strategies. It is necessary not only for the grand old party to bounce back and regain its past glory but also for the country, as a healthy opposition is vital for a healthy democracy.