The Congress: Breaking the Gandhian knot

On March 14, 1998, the Congress brought in Sonia Gandhi as president to save the party from imminent disintegration. The Gandhi surname was seen as a saviour—seven years after former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, it still had immense electoral equity across India. Since then, Sonia has been the pivot of Congress politics, while her children Rahul and Priyanka joined the power nucleus in 2004 and 2019, respectively. In fact, for the first time in Congress history, three Gandhis are now simultaneously active in politics. It should have strengthened the Family’s grip over the party. Instead, on March 13, exactly 22 years since Sonia’s debut, the Congress matriarch was offering a complete family evacuation. “If there is a pro­blem with the three of us, we are willing to make any sacrifice. We are very clear that the party comes first, and nobody is bigger than the party,” she told the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the highest decision-making body of the party.

On March 14, 1998, the Congress brought in Sonia Gandhi as president to save the party from imminent disintegration. The Gandhi surname was seen as a saviour—seven years after former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, it still had immense electoral equity across India. Since then, Sonia has been the pivot of Congress politics, while her children Rahul and Priyanka joined the power nucleus in 2004 and 2019, respectively. In fact, for the first time in Congress history, three Gandhis are now simultaneously active in politics. It should have strengthened the Family’s grip over the party. Instead, on March 13, exactly 22 years since Sonia’s debut, the Congress matriarch was offering a complete family evacuation. “If there is a pro­blem with the three of us, we are willing to make any sacrifice. We are very clear that the party comes first, and nobody is bigger than the party,” she told the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the highest decision-making body of the party.

This offer of sacrifice, not the first from the Gandhis, came amid a growing discourse that the Family must take a back seat to save the party from being wiped off the political landscape of India. Since 2014, the Gandhis have presided over a series of electoral debacles, both at the national level and in the states. In the previous two Lok Sabha polls, the Congress could not go beyond double digits in a house of 543. The number of states it rules has shrunk to four—Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh on its own and Maharashtra and Jharkhand as junior partners in coalition governments—down from 13 in 2014. Just three days before the CWC meeting, the party had suffered a humiliating defeat in the assembly polls to five states, including Punjab, where it was in power.

As expected, the CWC requested Sonia to continue as interim president until organisational elections take place later this year and asked her to effect necessary organisational changes to take on political challenges (a similar resolution was passed in 2020 as well). However, this show of faith is restricted to Sonia. Several Congress stalwarts, apart from a ginger group popularly known as G23 who have openly sought organisational overhaul and accountable leadership, are wary of letting Rahul and Priyanka run the party—either in official positions or as de facto chiefs.

In 2019, Rahul resigned as Congr­ess president owning responsibility for the Lok Sabha poll debacle, but continued to take all major decisions while his mother remained interim president. His critics point out that two significant decisions—to sack Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh just four months before the polls and appoint Navjot Singh Sidhu as PCC (Pradesh Congress Committee) president—demolished the party in the state. If Priyanka backed Sidhu in Punjab, as general secretary in-charge of UP, she led the party to its worst ever performance here—two seats and two per cent vote share.

The Rift with Rahul

Ever since the 2014 Lok Sabha party debacle, the rift between Rahul and several veterans has been widening. While submitting his resignation in 2019, he criticised many of them, saying they did not support him in the fight against the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP. His detractors claim he is inaccessible, relies on inputs from a handful of “politically inexperienced” favourites, doesn’t consult party veterans and takes arbi­trary decisions. For instance, many seniors believe Rahul’s stand on the India-China conflict or display of soft Hindutva backfired in the elections.

The failure of his chosen ones has added to the frustration. In the past two years, Rahul sent Randeep S. Surjewala to supervise the poll camp­aign in Bihar, Ajay Maken to do the same in Punjab and Jairam Ramesh in Manipur. He also appointed three favourites as state in-charges—Jitendra Singh (Assam), Devender Yadav (Utt­arakhand) and Harish Chaudhary (Punjab). The Congress lost in all these states.

Yet the Family continues to show faith in their chosen ones. For insta­nce, even after the recent debacle in five states, the Congress sent Maken to Punjab, Jairam to Manipur and Avinash Pandey to Goa to assess the situation. “The ones who lost it [for us] will exam­ine why they lost. It can’t get worse than this. Can they explain why Manish Tewari, an MP from Punjab, was not a star campaigner in the state and why Raj Babbar, a former state president, was left out in Uttar Pradesh?” asks a rebel leader.

When the Congress lost in four states in 2021, a five-member committee—which included G23 leader Manish Tewari— was constituted to examine the reasons for the defeat and suggest remedial measures. Tewari claims the reports were buried and no action was taken on the recommendations. Party MP from Tamil Nadu Manickam Tagore refutes this, saying the early formation of screening committees and early announcement of candidates in the past five assembly polls were due to these recommendations.

Upset with their increasing mar­ginalisation, the G23 made their resentment official in a letter to Sonia in August 2020. Now reduced to G18, after the exit of nine members and entry of four new ones, they have reiterated their primary demands. If Kapil Sibal said that the Gandhis should step aside from leadership roles, another G18 leader, P.J. Kurien, believes Rahul should lead the Cong­ress in Parliament and leave the post of president to others.

Rahul’s inaccessibility was raised even by other stalwarts such as Digvijaya Singh, Mukul Wasnik and former Union minister K.H. Muniyappa (who are not part of G18) at the CWC meeting. Ghulam Nabi Azad, the unofficial head of G18, took a subtle dig at Rahul when he said the party needed a president who would be “accessible, acceptable and accountable”. “The emphasis on accessible and accountable leadership is to indirectly dissuade Rahul from contesting the election to the post of president scheduled in September,” says a CWC leader.

The party’s central election auth­ority (CEA), headed by Madhusudan Mistry, a known Rahul loyalist, has been supervising the organisational process. The electoral college for choosing the Congress president comprises the 10,000-plus PCC delegates elected at the block level by block presidents. This is the base on which the whole pyramid stands—the delegates elect the 1,400 AICC members from amongst themselves, who then further elect the CWC elite from that pool.

While this is the procedure on paper, the rebels claim that, in practice, the CEA, in consultation with the central party leadership, prepares the lists of PCC delegates and AICC members and gets them signed by the respective state presidents. The party president and CWC members are then elected based on it. This is why the G18 members are demanding an overhaul of the ele­c­tion process. “The process is rigged to elect a Gandhi as president and a group of clowns as CWC members,” says a Congress MP from Punjab.

That’s why the real objective of the G18 is to ensure that the election to the CWC does not sideline those who don’t have Rahul’s backing. Elected CWC members can strongly oppose the decisions of the president as they are not there at his/her mercy. So even if a Gandhi is the next president, the arbitrary and whimsical ways of running the party will end.

In nearly half a century, CWC elections have been held only twice—in 1992 and 1997. On both occasions, a non-Gandhi was at the helm. Since Sonia Gandhi took charge, she has been nominating CWC members. The last time she recast the CWC was in September 2020, a month after the G23 letter. Three of the ori­ginal G23 leaders—Azad, Anand Sharma and Wasnik—retained their positions in the CWC. In response to the demand for collective leadership, she even formed a six-member panel to assist her and included Wasnik as a member. Since then, he has distanced himself from the rebels.

Can G18 Dethrone the Gandhis?

Family loyalists assert that the Cong­ress has always practised collective leadership and dismiss the rebel allegations as a “bogus claim”. Seven of the G18 leaders are part of multiple Congress committees, they point out. Azad was the general secretary in-charge and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was campaign committee chief during the assembly election in Haryana in 2020. Former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan was screening committee chief for the 2021 Assam poll.

The G18 leaders counter this, saying such occasional assignments (with many restraints) don’t amount to collective leadership, which is a “continuous process”. One of them points out how Sharma is rarely consulted on the India-China conflict though he heads the foreign affairs department. “Find out how many times the six-member committee to assist Sonia Gandhi has met in the past two years. All decisions are taken by the Gandhi siblings based on their personal likes and dislikes, which then gets the stamp of their mother,” says a Rajya Sabha member.

The G18 leaders have been ridi­culed as leaders past their prime without mass or organisational appeal and who are seeking official positions of influence, including accommodation in the Rajya Sabha. Azad lost his RS membership last year. Sharma, Sibal and Vivek Tankha will lose their seats by July and are unlikely to be re-elected. Azad has not contested a Lok Sabha poll since 1984. Sharma has never contested one. Sibal and Tankha have lost multiple times. Mani Shankar Aiyar lost his deposit in 2014 and Shankersinh Vaghela is not even a Congress member (he quit in 2017).

However, there are others among them who enjoy mass support. For instance, Shashi Tharoor has won three consecutive Lok Sabha polls, Tewari is a two-time Lok Sabha MP. Hooda, a stalwart of Haryana politics, is leader of the Opposition in the state assembly. “Any of them can contest election to the post of president if there is a free and fair poll,” says a G18 leader. But any chance of rejigging the electoral process is lost without the support of senior leaders such as Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot, Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel and MP stalwarts Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh. Gehlot and Baghel have stood firmly behind the Gandhis while Nath and Digvijaya are focused on winning back MP. In December 2020, Nath brokered a tempor­ary peace between some of the rebels and Sonia. This time, he has stayed silent.

Meanwhile, the process to divide the G18—the way it was done two years ago—has begun. Rahul reached out to Hooda and there is speculation that if his son Deepender is made president of Haryana Congress, the ex-CM may exit the rebel team. Sonia met some rebels leaders too in batches—first Azad and then Sharma, Tewari and Tankha together.

What worries the Rahul acolytes is a situation where they may need to find a ‘dummy’ candidate, if he decides not to contest the presidential poll. This is a situation even the rebel leaders are anticipating. Two of the most speculated about names are from Rajasthan—CM Gehlot and his chief detractor, Sachin Pilot. Both have shown little interest in leading the sinking ship, though the Family has in the past tried to convince Gehlot to take the post.