Mallikarjun Kharge, the new Congress president, was never a contestant in a free and fair election. He was the frontman of a wretched dynasty that had fixed the result before a single vote had been cast. What transpired between then and now was, as one ageing toady of the Gandhi family put it, a “sideshow”.
Consider the sequence of events. On 29 September, a day before nominations to the Congress presidential elections closed, Shashi Tharoor was the only major candidate in the fray. Ashok Gehlot had ruled himself out after developing grave doubts about the wisdom of relinquishing executive power in Rajasthan to become the Gandhis’ marionette in Delhi. So the party establishment raced to exhume Kharge. The next morning Kharge, surrounded by a phalanx of career sycophants and craven careerists, filed his nomination “on behalf of the Congress party”.
What followed was an effort to “convince” Tharoor to withdraw in favour of a “consensus” candidate. Behold the entitlement: A Lok Sabha member who spent two years arguing passionately for genuine democratic reform in Congress, became the first person to enter the presidential contest, and published a detailed manifesto on democratising the party and kickstarting its revival was pressed to step aside for a Rajya Sabha grandee conscripted as a substitute surrogate candidate in the final minute.
Also read: Veteran leader Mallikarjun Kharge is Congress president, the 3rd Dalit in party’s 138 years
Free and fair?
When the browbeating failed to yield the intended result, Sonia Gandhi, who did not once profess her neutrality in public, appeared at Rajghat on Gandhi Jayanti accompanied by Kharge. The result: Tharoor was spurned by party apparatchiks in almost every city he visited. Still, he persisted with the campaign. Kharge, having limited himself to performing circumambulations of Sonia Gandhi, was eventually shamed into some light travel. But the party establishment’s proxy candidate, forgetting that he had only weeks before read a script castigating the government for burdening ordinary people with record-high costs, flew around India on a private plane. And yet it was Tharoor, flying budget airlines, who was denounced as an “elitist”.
There was an even more revealing contrast. Kharge, received with ceremony wherever he went, addressed halls filled with leaders and officials appointed by “consensus”: The functionaries who owe their positions to the status quo and are determined to maintain it. Tharoor, mixing his campaign with lectures, packed auditoriums to the rafters with ordinary Indians: The voters who will elect the next government. This distance between the party and the people is one clarifier of why Congress is withering away. Tharoor was prevented from campaigning in Uttar Pradesh, and the official humiliation was followed by a profusion of premeditated rumours that he was quitting the race. But worse perhaps than the falsehoods was the absence of data about voters: His campaign was handed lists of delegates without their contact details.
Given all of this, the proliferating complaints of serious poll violations are perfectly unsurprising. Over the past week, delegates in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh told me that they were afraid of retaliation by the “high command” if they voted for Tharoor. I reminded them that the ballot was supposed to be secret, but they were sceptical – perhaps with good reason.
Also read: India is an election away from becoming Hindu Pakistan. But Kharge wants Congress status quo
Highest act of patriotism
Tharoor is the casualty of a deep-seated prejudice against meritocratic outsiders. Despite winning three successive popular elections to the Lok Sabha, he is branded “out of touch”. A party hierarchy that sustained Sonia Gandhi as the longest-serving leader of Congress declares that the quality of Tharoor’s Hindi is a disability. Tharoor is called a “donkey” and a “guest artist”, and abandoned in the moment of truth by the cowardly men and women who co-signed a letter urging reforms in Congress.
Despite it all, Tharoor has treated the Congress party with reverence—as a repository of the cherished ideals of our nation’s founders—and participated in this race with an earnestness that is uncommon in politics. We have seen conceptions of patriotism and nationalism mutate into a variety of novel expressions in the past eight years. Most are cynical, some are murderous, and others merely shrill. Tharoor’s run for the presidency is, in my opinion, one of the highest expressions of patriotism and decency by a major politician in recent memory.
But what has happened in Congress is about more—much more—than Tharoor. It is about our country. The next Lok Sabha election is now less than two years away. No effort to weaken Narendra Modi’s hold on power can succeed without a rejuvenated opposition. Tharoor—with his national profile, and his vast experience in international bureaucracy, diplomacy, government, and politics—was ideally positioned to spark reform within the party and forge alliances beyond it. That opportunity is now squandered. Congress, even in a moment of existential crisis for our republic, was unwilling to look beyond the Gandhi dynasty.
Rahul Gandhi, the star of the party’s expensive march, is their supreme deity. The tragedy for the rest of us is that Rahul Gandhi’s quest to become a leader has taken longer than it took the Buddha to attain enlightenment and the Prophet Muhammad to found a religion. His hike, sucking up the resources and energy of the entire party machinery, is not a fight against “fascism”. It is an act of self-indulgence and vanity that, despite its intentions, will ultimately succeed only in aiding and entrenching the ideology he decries as fascism. The purpose of politics should be to secure power to put principle into practice. Those who make a virtue of principle and forget about power do no more than feel good about being virtuous. Today’s result, guaranteeing the preservation of the status quo behind a new facade, may just have fetched Modi another term in office.
There will be a deluge of tributes to “internal democracy” by those wishing to distinguish Congress from others in the political marketplace. To buy into them is to become complicit in the effort to distort our recent memory. Congress has given us a demonstration not of democracy, but of the ways in which democracy is subverted. Those of us who still value Indian democracy—and wish to reclaim and repair it—must now look beyond this degraded cult.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. He tweets @kapskom. Views are personal.
(Edited by Neera Majumdar)