Priyanka consolidates Gandhi fief

THE glacial silence in the Congress party following its decimation in the Maharashtra Assembly polls last week tells you why Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP continue to wield power across the country.

In one word, it’s because the Congress enables them to do so.

Photos by The Tribune photographer Mukesh Aggarwal of a Congress Working Committee meeting in the capital on Friday unerringly captures this unwitting state of play in the grand old party. One photo shows the elderly president Mallikarjun Kharge, wrapped in his trademark muffler, obsequiously showing his younger colleague Rahul Gandhi, also in his trademark white T-shirt, a sheet of paper — instead of it being the other way round.

Over the last six days, the airwaves have been full of tugs and pressures within Maharashtra’s Mahayuti alliance on who is going to be the next chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis or Eknath Shinde. In contrast, the Congress seems to have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Some talk about Uddhav Thackeray exiting from the MVA alliance is roiling the state, but much of the sound and fury between the alliance constituents had actually come before the poll results had come in — when they argued about who would be the chief minister of Maharashtra.

Certainly, it’s a remarkable state of affairs. The Congress and Rahul Gandhi regularly accuse the BJP of promoting Modi to demi-god status – a fact the PM himself acknowledged in an interview to News18 in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election in Varanasi, when he said he “was convinced God had sent (me), as this energy cannot be from my biological body” — but the fact remains that although it continues to lose one election after another, and Jharkhand is the exception rather than the rule, the Congress has simply refused to look inwards.

The astonishing fact remains that the Congress’ refusal to squarely point the finger at Rahul Gandhi’s leadership allows Modi and the BJP to consolidate themselves in state after state. When the BJP lost its majority in Parliament this summer, it closely examined what happened, including why the RSS hadn’t helped out. In the Haryana and Maharashtra polls that followed, it ensured it learnt from its mistakes — so it micro-managed every Assembly seat in Haryana to pull the rug from under the feet of an overconfident Congress and romped home in Maharashtra with the help of schemes like Ladki Bahin that guaranteed to put money directly into the bank accounts of women.

In sharp contrast, the Congress has blamed the EVMs and put down its failure to “large-scale fraud”. Instead of acknowledging failure, like all good leaders, Rahul led the charge in celebrating the win of his very charismatic sister from Wayanad — all very sweet, especially as the young lady showed up in Parliament in a traditional Kerala kasavu sari to take her oath as an MP in impeccably spoken Hindi.

But look at it, really. There are now three Gandhis in the house — mother Sonia in the Rajya Sabha, children Rahul and Priyanka in the Lok Sabha, he from the heart of Uttar Pradesh in Raebareli, she from the stunning southern hill district of Wayanad. Make no mistake, the family fief has gotten even stronger. The control of the Gandhis over the Congress has become even tighter.

The anti-dynasty argument has been long closed in Indian politics — every political party today, not just the Congress, is littered with the sons and daughters of their mothers and fathers supposedly fighting the good fight. We know the argument by now. That the people of India are so smart that they won’t accept you, however entitled you are, if you don’t work hard enough for them.

The problem with the Congress is no longer dynasty. It is the fact that the Gandhis continue to insist on a ‘mukhauta,’ a man with a mask, a puppet, really, while the Family pulls the strings from behind. With her elevation to the Lok Sabha, Priyanka has joined the ranks of the puppeteers. As her mother, a remarkable woman who held the family together in the awful aftermath of her husband’s assassination in that tragic summer of 1991 and went on to give the Congress 10 years under the remarkable chairmanship of Manmohan Singh, fades from public life, her daughter has stepped up to the plate.

It’s irrelevant who the baton has been passed to, whether Sonia’s son or daughter. Just the incredibly magnetic presence of the newest Gandhi in the House is enough warning that the Gandhis are no pushovers.

That’s why Priyanka matters. She may charge up the party and shake up politics. When she speaks in Parliament, she is sure to electrify the free-floating ions. She is unlikely, though, to rock the boat, because it is her brother who is steering it.

This means that the Rahul-led Congress would rather undermine the vote, both in Maharashtra and Haryana. Or that the brother-sister duo are okay with cracks in the INDIA bloc — as the Trinamool Congress pleads that Parliament be allowed to function this winter session — rather than climb down from Rahul’s Adani-fuelled bugbear.

All this would be fine if the Congress had won a few states — after all, everyone loves a winner. But when it continues to lose and lose, the question why the Gandhis are so special and cannot be challenged — like the G23 once thought it could, to its detriment — has still not been properly answered.

Certainly, no one will be more pleased with this development than Modi. He knows that when he taunts the Congress for its lack of inner-party democracy, he strikes a chord in millions of Indians. He knows and the country knows that the days of ‘India is Indira’ are long over, and if the Gandhis refuse to take responsibility, the grand old party will slowly wither and the mothballs take over.

Once upon a time in the good old days, Priyanka used to be described as the ‘brahmastra’ of the Congress party. The question is, if such a weapon of mass destruction matters in today’s politics.