Family’s party

While India is in a state of perpetual political churn and political parties focussed in preparing for the semi-finals in 2023 and the ultimate big fight in 2024; India’s oldest and once reputed and glorified political party, has buried its head in the sand, like an ostrich and disabled its focus on the environment and reality. The nearly 140-year-old Congress party, which spearheaded Indian independence movement and where all freedom fighters and Indians united under, is today a very poor shadow of its glorified past. Many leaders have left Congress and more are leaving it because of the sycophant syndicate. The Congress has reached the last pinnacle in 2004 when it cobbled a secular majority to form the government and again repeated the fear in 2009 but it was jarred into reality in 2014 not because of the Modi phenomenon but its over reliance on the ‘mag-ic’ of the Gandhi family. Since drum beaters and sycophants want a ‘Gandhi’ the naïve and re-luctant Rahul led the Congress in 2014 to its worst defeat when it could win only 44 seats as against 206 it won in 2009. Had it been another person, he or she would have been thrown out but not a Gandhi. He again led the party to its second disastrous defeat when it could win only 52 seats in 2019. The Congress is like a blind man being led by another blind man. This was re-vealed when the party constituted a fact finding committee (as if this was needed since every-body knew that poor and immature leadership led to the rout) on the causes for its debacle. However, the AK Antony committee was kind on Rahul or blind when it blamed the defeat on the politics of Muslim appeasement. The truth is that Muslims have left the Congress in droves since the pre-1992 days. It has lost Muslims to SP in UP, JDU and RJD in Bihar, TMC in Bengal and AIUDF in Assam etc. The party tried to distance itself away from Muslims and Rahul sought to project himself as pro-Hindu by visiting mandirs and performing Pujas. For good measure he even declared that he is a ‘Shiv Bhakth.’ These antics did not win him votes from the Hindus but instead lost whatever little Muslim votes the party had. The string of mandir visits and puja performing acts did not help Rahul who even lost from his own home bastion of Amethi against outsider Smriti Irani. The Congress is supposed to elect a president by September this year because Rahul is adamant not to take up the leadership. However, Rahul continues to tour the nation and project himself as the prime ministerial candidate. If Rahul is serious that he does not want to be a leader then he should maintain a low profile going around as the leader, Rahul is only fueling the justification of party sycophants who insist on a Gandhi. Sadly, for them, with Sonia in poor health and Priyanka unintentionally disqualifying herself because of her disastrous misadventure in the UP elections and also ruining her party by propping up the perennial dissi-dent Sidhu; the cupboard is bare. At the height of Indira’s popularity after she led India to de-feat Pakistan in 1971, there was a slogan ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’. Today the name Gandhi is restricted within the party as ‘Gandhi is Congress and Congress is Gandhi’. Unless the mindset in the Congress is changed, it will not matter who becomes its president.