Rahul Gandhi’s ostensible remarks on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have always been miscued and tantamounts to some irresponsible rants. Gandhi, in his talk on the ‘Craft of Listening’ at Cambridge, made politically immature accusations of the breaking down of the Indian democracy and claimed to have the ‘repair work’ going on by the Congress and also alleged malfunctioning of the Indian Parliament where he feels being ‘stifled’.
His intellectual naiveté knows no bounds when he makes juvenile remarks on the security and integrity of India, by stating how he feared a possible terrorist attack in Kashmir valley and eventually the terrorists didn’t attack him only due to his power to listen.
INC facing a near-annihilation situation
The reactions of this illogical Indian become logical as his fief, the Indian National Congress (INC) is facing a near-annihilation situation and is at the crossroads of life and death. In 2014, the Congress won a helpless figure of 44 seats and in the 2019 General elections, the party won only 52 seats out of 542 seats which constitutes a meagre 9.6 percent seat sharing. Due to the party’s consistent political miscalculations and the Gandhi family’s misgivings, at least 460 leaders left the Congress between 2014 and 2022. Around 177 MPs/MLAs left the party during elections, while 222 electoral candidates left the Congress for other parties. Coming to electoral performance, till now, since 2014, the Congress has lost 43 out of 48 Assembly polls. Since 1998, the Congress has had a low strike rate of 26 percent, of the total 20,847 Assembly seats contested since 1998, the party has won just 5,397 till the end of 2022, which will further decline after their complete defeat in the last three Assembly elections in the Northeast.
A democratically and morally un-anchored Gandhi talks about erosion of democracy
Ironically, Rahul Gandhi, the defacto supremo of a party where the dynasty’s wish is the follower’s command, tries to make an international image of being democratic and libertarian. But in reality, he stands in complete contradiction to such ethico-legal underpinnings. In the crudest exhibition of power, Rahul never showed any respect towards the senior party men or the PM or the Cabinet in the two UPA regimes. One such instance which brought severe humiliation to the Congress was when Rahul tore a copy of an Ordinance in 2012 publicly, in an election campaign in Lucknow brought by the UPA government, and then rebuking the then PM Dr Manmohan Singh. Gandhi, who is falsely portraying the world his belief in liberal-democratic ethos, is the greatest violator of democratic practices including the procedural ‘substantive democracy’, which encompasses a ‘core set of beliefs’, crucial to the well-functioning of a democracy, ranging from intra-party democracy to a ‘bottom up’ approach in the decision making of a party.
But the monolithic Gandhi lineage has set aside inclusivity and what predominantly has prevailed, is a pre-disposition of ‘lineage worship’ which Sonia Gandhi conveniently refers to as ‘we three’ (Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka). For the first time in the past 24 years, no member of the Gandhi family was a candidate for the Congress party’s top post. Sonia Gandhi has been the party’s longest-serving president, in its 137-year-old history for 24 years, except for two years of Rahul Gandhi. Congress held the elections in 2022 just to create a facade of decentralisation of the party authority and her shadow still looms large on the party. This is evident from the fact that the senior party leaders officially asserted that the Gandhi family will continue to play a key role in the future. It is noteworthy that Sonia Gandhi still heads the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) which shows the Gandhi family’s grip over a toy Congress.
An absentee party defacto
Rahul Gandhi’s disillusionment and despair is sinking him into a position of nowhereness and he is turning all his agenda to malign PM Modi and the BJP government. During the entire period of electioneering in the three states of the Northeast, when the BJP leadership under the PM was campaigning and working hard on the ground level in a competitive environment, Rahul Gandhi was either skiing in Gulmarg or out in Britain conspiring against the Indian government by making seditious comments.
He couldn’t stay back to chalk out concrete strategies to come out of the pathetic performance of his party, unlike PM Narendra Modi, who has always been like a solid block of support for his party workers. Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra was nothing but a ploy to be away from party responsibilities. Maybe democracy, as per his limited understanding, is facilitating the perpetuation of the de facto, de jure rule of the Nehru-Gandhi lineage over India.
Atmanirbhar Bharat is an integrated Bharat
A little recollection of the undemocratic manoeuvring this political dynasty did is sufficient to historically prove that tempering with Indian democratic credentials is embedded in their genes. And Indians are defiantly democratic and hence, the Congress is at its all-time low. With enormous political disappointment (losing Congress bastion of Amethi) and consequent frustration, the Gandhi scion now turns to subvert his political disconnect and non-commitment to blaming the vibrant democratic practices followed by the Modi government.
The travesty is that Rahul Gandhi uses the colonial British stage to malign the image of the nation, while Modi is busy making India atmanirbhar (self-reliant). Atmanirbharta is woven into India’s process of decolonisation from British colonialism, right from the Swadeshi movement of 1905. The renewed pursuit of Atmanirbharta sows the seeds for a new course of long-term development and serves as the pivot on which India can emerge as a global hub for manufacturing and investments generating, in turns millions of job opportunities.
Lineage of disruption of democracy
If it comes to damaging the democratic credentials of India, no one can surpass the Congress. Even in a hyper-partisan method of history writing, it is impossible to gloss over the chequered legacy of the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, in June 1975, which continued for 21 months when she emerged as a dictator. On June 12, 1975, the Allahabad High Court convicted Indira Gandhi of electoral malpractices and barred her from holding any elected post for the next six years and also her election to be null and void. Indira Gandhi immediately imposed a national emergency under Article 360 of the Indian Constitution. Through extra-constitutional measures, she brought an unbridled state of incarceration, stifling of dissent, press censorship and a massive state crackdown on civil liberties. The prerequisites of a democracy frayed. Parliament and judiciary became less effective in holding the executive accountable for its excesses through various preventive detection laws like the MISA, AFSPA, and COFEPOSA which were a clear breach of human rights mentioned in the Constitution under Article 19. These included forceful exclusion of people from private properties, searching of houses without warrants, killing people with suspicion without any trial and many other such practices which were certainly not democratic. The fiduciary theory of human rights clarifies the substantive and procedural principles that guide international law’s regulation of human rights violations during emergencies, which she clearly violated.
The Opposition parties were broken by 18 months of imprisonment under the notorious preventive detection law of MISA. 40,000 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) members were jailed and their families were under dire financial stress and 80 RSS members faced custodial death. Indira Gandhi had inherited her father’s deep hatred for the RSS, and she decided to crack down on Ananda Marg, the ABVP, and the RSS. The RSS Sarsanghchalak, Balasaheb Deoras, was arrested in Nagpur on June 30, and the RSS as an organisation was banned on July 4, 1975. During this period and beyond, Indira Gandhi’s greatest confidante was Michael MacKintosh Foot, who was the UK’s Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons.
Thus Rahul Gandhi’s obligation to the colonial ties is inherited just like his dynastic pursuits. For the Gandhi family, personal and political are deeply intertwined and it’s always intent on holding on to power by any means and then passing it over to the next generation. For Indira, it was Sanjay, not Rajiv. Sanjay Gandhi grew as a parallel authority to the PMO and his mass-sterilisation program was a fascist act of the highest order. Indira Gandhi, under the influence of Sanjay Gandhi, was the one who was responsible for the growth of the politician-criminal nexus and for initiating a serious rising trend of criminalisation of politics.
In March 1977, Indira Gandhi revoked the Emergency and called for Parliamentary elections after being under severe mass pressure (as unemployment, inflation and political chaos became the order of her rule) and international pressure. She lost her seat in Rae Bareli and Sanjay Gandhi lost in Amethi in the elections of March 1977 and the Congress faced a massive humiliating defeat.
An indelible record of communalising politics
An impatient Rahul Gandhi makes teensy weensy remarks on the BJP as a communal force. But he must reckon that the Congress, 1975 onwards, has time and again dipped its toes in communal politics for the sake of the ballot. Sanjay Gandhi emerged as a leader of the Youth Congress and took on the reins of power and control during the Emergency. Under Sanjay Gandhi’s execution of the mass-sterilisation program, the Muslims had to endure the worst of his bigotry enforced in the form of ‘family planning’ and a development agenda.
After Indira Gandhi’s assassination, in 1984, in Delhi and its adjacent areas, massive Sikh genocide occurred in the worst face of organised crime against not just a community, but against humanity. Independent sources estimate the number of deaths at about 8,000 to 17,000. Official records report about 3325 Sikhs being massacred. And the anti-Sikh riot was organised by the Congress leaders, not by some unnamed mass. The Congress certainly benefitted in the elections from the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. In the 1980s, huge Muslim massacres took place in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh under the party’s rule. Rajiv Gandhi reversed the Supreme Court judgement (the SC ruled in favour of appellant Shah Bano, under Section 125 of the CrPC which applied to all citizens, the order for maintenance of wives, children and parents and urged to implement UCC under Article 44) in the Shah Bano case, appeasing conservative Muslims, who were angered by the decision of the court, through a Constitutional amendment. This is a blot on Rajiv Gandhi being catapulted by the Muslim cleric. As against this, Narendra Modi-led ruling NDA government restored the rights of Muslim women by the abolition of talaq-e-biddat or instantaneous talaq (triple talaq) as a practice, by criminalizing it through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019.
UPA I & II: Dyarchy at function
Now coming to the UPA regime I & II, a form of dyarchy developed. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi stealthily grabbed power during the UPA regime. The mother-son duo orchestrated a systematic erosion of mass leaders and grew intolerant of autonomous power centres during UPA I & II. The then PM Manmohan Singh became a silent spectator of the erosion of PMO’s power, leading to egregious governance. He was forced to “turn a blind eye” to the alleged corruption charges against the ministers in his CoM (Council of Ministers), who were close to the Gandhis.
With Manmohan Singh wielding no or little power naturally led to the denigration of the position and office of the prime minister. In decision-making, Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council always superseded the decision of the PMEAC, which resulted in the much controversial ‘proxy government’ under dyarchy in UPA I & II.
Rahul Gandhi’s misunderstanding of the regional parties, that they lack, ‘ideology, structure and organisation’ and that the Congress has the only substitution power of the BJP with a ‘central ideological structure and organisation’, proves a clear misreading of the regional identities and specificities unlike that of the understanding of the BJP’s central leadership. Instead of trying to be a hit on the colonial land, he needs to work hard in India, within the varied spectrum and from level zero. 2024 again seems to be a distant electoral gain for the Gandhi scion keeping in view the successful two terms of the Modi government and BJP’s undiluted commitment to party functioning and to the electorate which constitute its political clientele.
The author is a senior faculty in the department of History, ARSD College, DU. She has done her MPhil, PhD program from Center for Historical Studies, JNU. Views expressed are personal.
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