Congress: The Great Slide
Tavleen Singh
It is that season in Delhi when there are so many weddings that it is hard to
go down a street and not run into a baraat. Sometimes wedding parties collide
and there are horrendous traffic jams, and so on my way to the wedding
reception of a friends daughter I found myself stuck for an hour trying to
negotiate the road to the Maurya Hotel. When I asked a passing policeman what
the problem was, he said, There is a wedding and they say that the Prime
Minister will be coming, so that is why there is this jam.
It was the wedding I was invited to, and though the Prime Minister did not
come, Sonia Gandhi did and a hundred other personages of political importance.
When I finally made it to the entrance of the wedding tent in the hotel
gardens, I ran into LK Advani and his wife and daughter who were just leaving.
Among the other personages of political importance present were cabinet
ministers and chief ministers, high officials and so many TV anchors and
editors that we joked about how if there was a bomb it could take out the
entire upper echelons of the Indian media. When journalists are invited to an
event of this kind, they never refuse because rarely do you get a chance to
meet so many sources of important political information with so little effort.
If you want to find out how the political winds are blowing, there is no better
place to be than a power wedding in Delhi.
The first conversation I found myself drawn into was with a spokesman of the
Congress party who was being asked by a woman journalist why Rahul Gandhi was
not more evident in a leadership role. The spokesman bridled instantly. Well,
I do not know what you mean because he works very hard, you know. You can
always find him in the Congress party office, meeting people and attending to
party matters. The woman journalist was not deterred by this put down and
insisted on knowing why the heir to the Congress party was wasting his time on
such things as para-sailing. Is that what a future Prime Minister of India
should be doing? The Congress spokesperson refused to answer.
The next conversation I found myself having was with a politician who is
actively involved at the moment in promoting a Third Front. It was already a
reality, he said, and would become a more powerful reality soon because the two
main Marxist parties were expected to join in the not-too-distant future. So
what did he see happening by way of the next government of India after the 2009
general election/ Oh, we will have a Third Front government for sure he said,
with the Congress either joining it or supporting from the outside. Did he
think there was any chance of LK Advani becoming Indias next Prime Minister?
He did not deny that this was a possibility. The one thing he was certain of
was that he did not think the Congress would be in any position to lead the
next government.
That evening as I flitted about talking to politicians of varied hues and
journalists of varied views, I found that this was the general view. In my many
years of covering politics and governance in Delhi rarely have I seen a
political party lose so much support in so short a period. Usually when a
government enters its last year in office, what sets in is anti-incumbency; so
what is interesting about the present situation is that there is less
anti-feeling towards the government and more towards the Congress. It is as if
people have accepted that the real boss of Dr Manmohan Singhs government is
Sonia Gandhi, and since she is the president of the Congress, she is to blame
for the things that have gone wrong.
It is hard to believe that this is the same Sonia Gandhi who till not so long
ago was treated with awe not just by her own party but by opposition parties as
well. It seems like only the other day that whoever you talked to in Delhis
political circles talked of how Madam had taken a political party that was
nearly dead and breathed new life into it. Her charisma was respected even by
those who objected to her foreign origin. So what has gone wrong in the past
few months?
After my evening of instant investigative journalism at the power wedding, I
sought the views of political pundits and asked them to analyse why the
political wind had now started blowing in a direction that was no favourable to
the Congress. They said that it was mostly because decisions related to
governance and politics were being made by Sonia Gandhi herself and this had
exalted 10 Janpath to a position that was above that of the Prime Ministers
Office. A political analyst who is an ardent Congress supporter had this to
say: Dont ask me what theyre thinking any more or why they think that the
Congress is going to win the next election by sending Rahul Gandhi off to spend
a night in a Dalits hut one day and para-sailing in Maharashtra the next day.
Sonia Gandhis singular personal failure has been her inability to project her
son as her heir, and having concentrated her energies on doing this, she has
let the Congress slide. This is the gloomy view of even those who think of
Madam as Indias great white hope. Sentinel Assam Editorial 18.02.08
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