Breaking the Gandhian Knot

The poll debacle stirs calls for change in the Congress. The rebels and others want unbiased organisational elections and an ‘accountable leadership’. Will the Gandhis give way?

- Kaushik Deka

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 matri­ arch 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 decision­making body of the party.

This offer of sacrifice, not the first from the Gandhis, came amid a growing discourse that the Fam­ ily must take a back seat to save the party from being wiped offthe 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 Chhattis­ garh 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.