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What is wrong with the Congress is neither Sonia Gandhi nor Jitendra Prasada. They are merely symptoms of the disease. The disease remains undiagnosed entirely because nobody wants to face the truth. The truth is that the party as a whole has no vision. And as the Bible so starkly says: where there is no vision, the people perish. And what does one mean by a lack of vision? When the Indian National Congress was first formed, its leaders had a vision of a free India. Never mind if, over the years, they fought among themselves on the issue of how to gain that freedom. The fight whenever it took place was in regard to means, never in regard to self-aggrandisement. Bal Gangadhar Tilak was not seeking personal power; neither were Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai. The Lal-Bal-Pal trio had a vision for their country and they were willing to make any sacrificies.
Tilak spent many years in prison. To him swaraj was his birthright that no one could deny him. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi took over the reins of the Congress, his vision too was clear and undimmed. He prescribed for the people a specific plan of action that was both practical and non-violent. Self-reliance was not only an effort to regain one's self-respect and create large scale rural employment but a means of crippling Britain's textile industry and thereafter its economic power. Simultaneously the Mahatma—for by then he had become one—looked for ways to regenerate India morally and spiritually. He toured the country extensively to fight not only for the cause of freedom but at one point he seemed more interested in restructuring Indian society than winning freedom for India. In restructuring India, Gandhi saw another face of the freedom struggle. He identified flaws and sought to correct them. Today’s dalits may hate the word ‘Harijan’—that is their way of asserting themselves—but it was Gandhi who was the moral crusader in the thirties and had the courage to stand up for the downtrodden. His determined bid to raise social consciousness raised the Congress in public estimation.
Gandhi was seeking to empower the dalits; he wasn't seeking power for himself. In fact, as is well known he even gave up his four-anna membership of the party he had for so long led with such distinction. At the highest level we had men like Subhas Chandra Bose who, in his quest for freedom for his country, did the unbelievable in evading the British police, make his way from Calcutta through the Ganga plains to Afghanistan and thence to Moscow, Germany and Japan, eventually to raise an Indian National Army that was intended to fight the British. They were all men of vision. One may or may not agree with the political thinking of Jawaharlal Nehru at this point in time. But the man had a vision; out of the ashes of a defeated nation that had phoenix-like risen to independence, he wanted to build a nation modern in outlook and scientific in daily conduct. Nehru, like his colleague, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, wanted a strong united nation. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the fulfilment of that mission even if they were ideologically miles apart. To both of them it was India that mattered.
Theirs was an unimpaired vision of a great India that towered above the rest of the nations. Nehru may have been the chosen of Gandhi, but there were men of stature in the country and in every state, men of the stature of a C. Rajagopalachari in Madras, Bidhan Chandra Roy in Bengal, Gopinath Bardoloi in Assam, Rajendra Prasad in Bihar, Govind Ballabh Pant in Uttar Pradesh, not to mention Purshottamdas Tandon who could challenge the great Nehru himself or Pattabhi Sitaramayya in what is today Andhra Pradesh, or T. Prakasam or in Bombay, Bal Gangadhar Kher and earlier a K.F. Nariman. The Indian political sky was full of stars. Where is the leadership of yesteryears? The leaders of the twenties, thirties and forties became leaders because they were men of steel who put the country above their personal glory; they courted imprisonment, suffered poverty all because they had a dazzling vision of an India that was free.
What a contrast we find with today’s ‘leaders’. They are people who search for power for the sake of power, for the sake of self-aggrandisement, for the perks of office, for personal glory and for distributing favours. And the country be damned. When was the last time that Sonia Gandhi addressed a public rally in Calcutta, or Chennai, Hyderabad or Mumbai? For that matter has any Congress leader stepped out of his State to speak to the wide, wide India beyond their narrow confines? Whether it is the so-called ‘coterie’ or the ‘rebels’ they are all primarily intriguers, scheming and counter-scheming to do each other in the eye. And to think that the fortunes of the Congress are in the hands of one person, Sonia Gandhi, access to whom is controlled by one insignificant petty clerk called V. George? One suspects the Mughal Durbar was more open to the public. There is something sickening about the Congress of today. The problem is not about Sonia Gandhi's foreignness.
The problem is of a party that has no vision. Right or wrong Indira Gandhi at least could talk bravely of garibi hatao. Many recognised it as just a slogan, a political gimmick, like nationalisation of banks. There may or may not have been some cynicism on that score but at least she had a sense of direction. What does today's Congress have? The only ideology that the Congress has is how to get into power by hook or by crook. It is to that sorry state that the party of Tilak and Gandhi has been reduced. Today we have small people trying to capture a great party—and it doesn't really matter whether it is Sonia Gandhi who heads it or someone else like Jitendra Prasad. Their squabbling only underlines the essential irrelevance of the Congress. Everything that it had pastly tried has failed, whether it is the so-called ‘socialistic pattern of society’ that Nehru wanted to create, whether it is garibi hatao, whether it is the creation of public sector units, the story has been one of failure, failure, failure.
None really enthused
the citizen and served to bring out the best in him. Today all efforts
are at grab, grab, grab. The Congress has to get out of the groove
it has got into and go to India's cultural roots to find new meaning for
first itself and then the country. That calls for deep inward-looking,
a sense of humility and a stern re-fashioning of priorities. Sonia
Gandhi is incapable of that exercise because spiritually she just does
not belong to India. Sadly, the party is a prisoner of its past and
it does not have the courage to re-fashion itself. Hence this talk
of secularism which has lost all meaning, and has been reduced to a phrase,
a joke, a catchword meaning nothing. We need a party that can summon
India to rise to its former greatness. That the Congress cannot do.
It is secular.
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