RIGHT since its inception in 1885, the Congress pursued a singular ambition: it would incarnate a pan-Indian nationalism akin to Indian civilization itself. All sections of Indians would be welcomed to its fold regardless of their class or creed, caste or linguistic affiliations. It would be at one and the same time an expression of the country’s bewildering diversity as well as the fountainhead of its intrinsic unity. The Congress would mean India, and India, the Congress.

This claim – which was sometimes derided as a vain boast and at other times as a conceit – enabled the Congress to lead the movement for freedom from British colonial rule without any major challenge until well into the 1930s. It was only when the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state of Pakistan began to gain momentum that the claim received a jolt. However, this did not deter the Congress from projecting itself as an inclusive political formation. It succeeded in large measure for decades both before and after independence thanks to the vision of the party’s leadership, especially Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The two men drew on different intellectual and cultural resources and indeed there were times when their ideas and approaches clashed. One adhered to a world view that was rooted in spirituality, ethics and religion per se; the other, in a modernity that sought to keep religion at an arm’s length and emphasized, instead, the virtues of reason, science, technology and statecraft. And yet their differences never strained their relations to breaking point. On the contrary, the differences enabled them to pursue with added vigour their shared goals: how to attain freedom and, having attained it, how to shape the future of free India. Both placed a premium on inclusiveness in public life and on addressing the interests and concerns above all of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.

And so it came to pass that from its infancy the Congress functioned as a mighty coalition. Its ranks included conservatives and radicals, industrialists and labour leaders, land owners and representatives of the peasantry, feudals and middle class professionals. The cohabitation of so many groups was of course no easy matter. The first rumblings of dissent began to be heard less than a year after the party was founded when the ‘moderates’ were pitted against the ‘extremists’. The former led by Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pherozshah Mehta favoured gradual constitutional reforms to attain freedom while the latter, headed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpatrai and Bipin Chandra Pal, advocated a confrontationist course. Tensions between the two sides came to a head at the Surat session of the party in 1907 which wound up amidst an unprecedented bedlam. The bitterness finally ended nine years later at the Lucknow session.

 

Virtually every subsequent decade witnessed similar conflicts. In the 1920s, C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru crossed swords with Vallabhbhai Patel, C. Rajagopalachari and Rajendra Prasad; in the 1930s Acharya Narendra Dev and Jayaprakash Narayan formed the Congress Socialist Forum which, however, remained part of the party; also in the 1930s Gandhi and Nehru, on the one hand, and Subhash Chandra Bose on the other locked horns on the question of the presidentship of the Congress. Bose won but had subsequently to step down. He proceeded to form a separate party – the Forward Bloc.

What generated these tensions were genuine differences of an ideological or programmatic nature and, up to a point, of temperament. Considerations of power and pelf seldom entered the picture. This was also the case during the clashes that took place in the party in the first decades after independence. Nehru, a quintessential secularist, suspected some of his senior colleagues like Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Purushottam Das Tandon of nursing Hindu communal sentiments. In the election for the Congress presidentship held in 1950, Tandon defeated Acharya Kripalani which led to acute problems between the government and the party.

 

Tandon eventually stepped down in September 1951 and Nehru was elected president in a near-unanimous vote. Some scholars have argued that Nehru may have gone a bit too far in painting Patel, Prasad and Tandon in lurid communal colours. The fact remains that by firmly opposing them he made it clear that unless the Congress was steadfast in its commitment to a vision of a secular polity and with a strong accent on social and economic justice, it would lose its soul and, by and by, its relevance on the political landscape.

That commitment stood the Congress in excellent stead in the first general elections in 1952. Neither the Jan Sangh, nor the Socialists, nor the Communist Party could challenge its hegemonic presence. Nehru controlled the government and the party without let or hindrance.

However, the challenges to Nehru’s supremacy also appeared on the horizon. The ties that bound groups and parties representing all manner of interests and ideologies during the freedom movement began to loosen and indeed to snap altogether. The 1957 general elections were revealing in this regard. For example, in Orissa the Ganatantra Parishad, a party of rich landowners, teamed up with left parties to ensure that the Congress won no more than seven out of 20 seats. Two political formations agitating for the creation of Maharashtra and Gujarat together saw to it that the party captured just 38 out of a total of 66 seats in the state of Bombay. The Centre finally acceded to this demand three years later. Coming in the wake of police firing on the agitators, this tardy response showed the extent to which the Congress leadership failed to grasp the growing importance of regionalist aspirations.

 

Another example of rising regionalist aspirations was the emergence of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) which wanted the creation of a separate Tamil ‘nation’. While it did not fare well either in the parliamentary or the assembly elections, its emergence on the political landscape was nevertheless worrisome for the Centre. It threatened the very unity and integrity of India.

Just as worrisome for the Congress was the formation of a communist-led coalition government in Kerala. Many in the party feared that given its radical economic agenda and its alleged allegiance to the Soviet Union, the CPI would seek to achieve through the ballot box what it failed to achieve through violence in the years immediately after Independence: the overthrow of the ‘bourgeois’ dispensation in the country.

Nehru did not quite share these fears. He reckoned that the communists would cease to be communist if they succeeded in government and rendered obsolete if they failed. But in the end he had to give in to persistent demands within his own party, spearheaded by Indira Gandhi, to dismiss the Red regime. Many neutral observers felt at that time that this move was not quite in keeping with the federal nature of the polity. Similar moves made in later years would strengthen the belief that the Congress would abandon constitutional values in order to impose its will.

 

In 1959 the Congress had to contend with a challenge from another quarter. Rajagopalachari, along with stalwarts like Minoo Masani and Professor N.G. Ranga, launched the Swatantra Party to counter the ‘personality cult’ around Nehru and oppose his economic policies. These policies, they claimed, slowed down economic growth and increased the bureaucracy’s grip on trade and industry. This, in turn, would lead to an excessive centralization of state power and breed large-scale corruption. In retrospect, it is obvious that Rajaji was prescient. The Congress would veer around to his views a quarter of a century later.

To all these developments outside the Congress fold must be added the grim developments within its own ranks. Factionalism, in-fighting and power-seeking were the order of the day. Time and again Nehru warned his party men to mend their ways. But neither he nor the tall leaders who surrounded him could make much of a headway in this regard. On 2 May 1958 a deeply frustrated Nehru announced to a stunned Congress Parliamentary Party his decision to quit as prime minister. The party, and public life as a whole, he argued, had been corrupted by ‘too much jobbery’. The CPP refused to accept Nehru’s decision and in an unanimous resolution urged him to stay on.

 

None of this helped to stem the tide of ‘jobbery’. Less than a year later Nehru was compelled to appoint a commission to investigate how and why the state-owned Life Insurance Company had made large investments in a private, Kanpur-based company owned by one Mundhra. The scandal forced the Finance Minister, T.T. Krishnamachari, to exit from the government. Even more significant, it dented the image of the Congress as no other scandal had since independence.

Nothing, it seemed, could refurbish that image: neither the personal integrity of the top Congress leaders, nor Nehru’s policies in favour of the poor and the minorities, nor even the prime minister’s assiduous efforts to reach out to the opposition parties to seek their cooperation on issues of national importance. The reason was plain enough. Nehru had leaned on the state party bosses for far too long. The bosses had become so used to wielding power and dispensing patronage that they no longer considered themselves as guardians of the public weal.

Nehru realized that drastic action alone could salvage the party from rack and ruin. In August 1963, he put into effect the so-called Kamraj Plan. All cabinet ministers and all Congress chief ministers were asked to submit their resignations. They expected to be given key positions in the party’s hierarchy. When Nehru refused to oblige they intrigued against the incumbents. Far from rejuvenating the party the Kamraj Plan only served to demoralize the rank and file and to set in motion more infighting. Nehru’s death in May 1964 accelerated this process of demoralization.

Its impact was felt in the 1967 elections when Congress seats in the Lok Sabha dropped from 361 to 283. The party’s performance in the state assembly elections was far worse. In Tamil Nadu the DMK secured 138 out of 234 seats. Most humiliating was the defeat of Kamraj, the party president. An alliance of left parties trounced the Congress in Kerala while in West Bengal, another alliance of left parties and breakaway Bangla Congress was able to form the government. In Orissa, too, the Swatantra Party and a breakaway Congress faction seized the reins of power.

 

The decline of the Congress was far more dramatic in the northern states of UP, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Bihar where governments were formed with the slenderest of majorities. They fell like ninepins when disgruntled elements defected from one party to another. In all these instances, legislators switched sides not because they were opposed to programmes and policies but on account of their exclusion from the ambit of power.

Providing a fillip to such tendencies was the rise of politically-driven intermediate castes – Jats in Haryana and UP, Kurmis and Koeries in Bihar, Lodhs in Madhya Pradesh, Yadavs in all these states, Marathas in Maharashtra, Vokkaligas in Karnataka, Vellalas in Tamil Nadu, and Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh. These castes were the main beneficiaries of land reforms but they had no representation in the political power structure commensurate with their numbers and wealth. Now they did. It took the national parties – especially the Congress, the Jana Sangh and the Left – quite a while to come to terms with this burgeoning reality.

Meanwhile, stresses and strains within the Congress itself precipitated a split in 1969 when right-wing Congressmen, collectively known as the Syndicate, put up their candidate Sanjiva Reddy against V.V. Giri, supported by Indira Gandhi, in the presidential election. Giri won but in the bargain the Congress was reduced to a minority. Indira Gandhi managed to secure issue-based support from an assortment of parties. But she knew that this arrangement would flounder unless she took radical steps to consolidate her position.

Consequently, she nationalized 14 banks and abolished privy purses which resulted in widening the Congress base among the rural and urban poor and in sections of the middle class as well. But this was also the period when she promoted the idea of a ‘committed’ bureaucracy and judiciary. This would have a long-term adverse impact on the institutions of governance.

 

The rapid polarization of politics along Congress – anti-Congress lines was writ large during the 1971 elections. Ranged against the Congress was a Grand Alliance comprising the Congress (O), the Jana Sangh and the Samyukta Socialist Party. To counter their slogan of ‘Indira hatao’ she coined the slogan ‘garibi hatao’ and in the process swept the polls gaining 352 out of 518 Lok Sabha seats. In the state assembly elections held in the following year the Congress performance was equally impressive.

Armed with this victory Indira Gandhi redoubled efforts to tighten her grip on the party and the government. For decades delegates to the AICC were elected by the PCCs, which in turn consisted of representatives elected by the Congress bodies at the taluka and district levels. Legislators in the state assemblies also elected the chief minister.

However, after the Congress split in 1969, Indira Gandhi packed the AICC with her own nominees. Chief ministers had to prove their loyalty not to their legislators or to the people of their state but to her alone. With ministers and the ‘committed’ bureaucrats in cahoots to take their cuts in government-financed projects, corruption became endemic. And with the economy in a right royal mess, the slogan of ‘garibi hatao’ sounded like a sinister joke. The prime minister had one exceptionally bright moment of glory in this enveloping darkness: her firm and resolute leadership which, in the face of heavy odds, led to the break-up of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in December 1971. But this moment proved to be ephemeral.

 

In 1974, the opposition parties, cutting across ideological lines, rallied together again under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan. Their agitations created such anarchy in the country that Indira Gandhi seized the first opportunity following her disqualification by the Allahabad High Court to impose a state of emergency in June 1975. The eclipse of democracy alienated even those who were well disposed towards her. Their alienation continued apace as she consolidated all power in the prime minister’s office and allowed her younger son, Sanjay, to function as an extra-constitutional authority.

Without surprise, the excesses of the emergency accounted for the rout of the Congress in the 1977 general elections. In January that year, three of her senior colleagues, Jagjivan Ram, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Nandini Satpathy, left the Congress to float their own outfit, the Congress for Democracy, which became a constituent of the anti-Indira front. The Congress formally split again in January 1978. Ironically enough, barely a month later, Indira Gandhi’s party won the assembly elections in Karnatka and Andhra Pradesh.

 

All Indira Gandhi had to do now was to bide her time. The in-fighting and the ineptitude of the post-emergency dispensation cleared the path for the recovery of her political fortunes. She gained in stature as the government hounded her in a shockingly ham-handed manner. In the January 1980 elections, Indira Gandhi returned to power with an impressive majority. The victory, however, soon proved to be a chimera.

Novices who had neither a broad base of support nor administrative acumen replaced the veterans who had left the party. Yet again loyalty to the prime minister mattered. Ministers were reduced to function as rubber stamps. Sanjay Gandhi continued to call the shots in the government as in the party. But this time his diktat was short-lived. On 23 June 1980, he died in a plane accident.

At this point Rajiv Gandhi entered the picture quite reluctantly. He was elected to Parliament and in 1983 became the General Secretary of the party. But he was hardly in a position to check the factionalism in the Congress. State units seemed to be engaged in a protracted war of nerves with their own state governments. It is during this period that the Congress lost the assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh to the newly established Telugu Desam Party and to the Janata-led front in the assembly elections in Karnataka. The party had governed both states without a break since independence.

Expectations about reviving the Congress ran high when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister after his mother’s assassination on 31 October 1984. But the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination cast a dark shadow on the new helmsman. Certain Congress leaders were alleged to have been involved in the killing of the Sikhs. To shore up the party’s image, Rajiv, surrounded by a number of bright young people, announced a number of bold policies and programmes. He set up six technology missions, conferred constitutional status on Panchayati Raj, launched the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana and Operation Blackboard, strove to restore normalcy in Punjab and Assam through negotiations and so forth.

 

While all this served to enhance his popularity, his own party remained wayward. This explains why he made a frontal attack on the ‘power brokers’ in the Congress at its centenary celebrations held in Bombay in December 1985. But on one pretext or the other Rajiv Gandhi failed to get rid of them. Organizational elections were postponed time and again. He had set out to reform the Congress ‘system’; now that very ‘system’ began to ‘reform’ him.

One close associate after another – Arun Nehru, Arun Singh, V.P. Singh – drifted away. He made a flip-flop on the Shah Bano case to appease the conservative Muslim clergy. Then, to assuage Hindu sentiment, he allowed puja to be performed at the Babri Masjid which the right-wing Hindu outfits believed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. He also got involved in the protracted Bofors scandal. By early 1989 he was left with no choice but to turn to the power-brokers for support.

Though it secured the largest number of seats in the 1989 general elections, the Congress refused to form the government. The party’s conduct during the short-lived tenures of V.P. Singh, and Chandrasekhar did precious little to shore up its credibility. Like much of the political class, the Congress was caught napping when V.P. Singh, in order to pre-empt a challenge to his leadership from Devi Lal, announced the implementation of the Mandal report on 7 August 1990. It also withdrew its support to Chandrashekhar a mere six months after he assumed office over a trivial matter.

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination during the campaign for the elections that followed Chandrashekhar’s exit did generate a sympathy wave for the Congress. P.V. Narasimha Rao assumed office even though he did not command a majority in the Lok Sabha. He gradually managed to secure one through means that can politely be called questionable. Rao’s record in office was a mixed one. He initiated radical economic reforms, improved the situation in Kashmir and Assam and took daring steps in the realm of foreign policy. But he also failed to protect the Babri Masjid which provoked massive communal riots. He could not check corruption nor root out intrigue at the highest echelons of the government and the party.

 

The Congress habit of offering outside support to a prime minister and then withdrawing it at will continued after the 1996 elections. This happened with Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral. Fresh elections had to be held in February 1998. Once again Atal Behari Vajpayee was sworn in as prime minister and once again his government could last for only a year. But the Congress had no hand in the BJP’s misfortunes. Indeed, after the September-October 1999 elections, the Congress, now led by Sonia Gandhi, managed to get only 134 seats along with its allies.

The BJP-led NDA government lasted its full term but the Congress showed little grit in exploiting its failings. This included a number of financial scandals. But far more telling was the party’s inability, if not unwillingness, to take the BJP head-on during the post-Godhra killings in Gujarat. During the entire period of violence against Muslims the state unit of the Congress was nowhere in sight. Muslim hostility to the party, which had intensified after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, gathered even more strength.

 

Things began to look up for the party after the April-May 2004 elections when the BJP-led NDA suffered a most unexpected defeat. In a move that won her much acclaim, Sonia Gandhi, who was mainly responsible for the good performance of the Congress, declined to accept the prime ministership. This paid put to the vicious campaign unleashed against her on account of her Italian and Roman Catholic origins. Her stock rose further when she asked Manmohan Singh to lead the government. He already enjoyed an enviable reputation as an economic reformer and as a person endowed with unimpeachable integrity.

Many ups and downs marked Manmohan Singh’s tenure. From the start it was obvious that the CPM, which lent support to his government from the outside, would obstruct his bid to push economic reforms and to recast India’s foreign policy to better adjust to the post Cold War world. Less obvious, but also true, was the opposition he faced from his own Congress colleagues in the cabinet. Often there were rumours, never entirely substantiated, that he had to obtain a nod of approval from the party president before he acted on any given issue. The rumours were floated to drive home the point of ‘dynastic rule’ prevalent in the Congress even though by this time many a party in the country functioned as a tightly held family concern.

Yet, when push came to shove over the nuclear deal with the U.S., Sonia Gandhi not only backed him to the hilt but went all out to ensure that the prime minister won the trust vote in the House following the CPM’s withdrawal of support. However, the circumstances in which this vote was won left a taste of ash in the mouth. The government received support from two parties which had been bitterly opposed to the Congress. Their record of probity in public life left much to be desired. Add to this the accusations and counter-accusations of horse-trading culminating in the scene in the Lok Sabha where three BJP MPs threw in the air wads of currency notes they had allegedly received as bribes to disobey their party’s whip. The scene nauseated the nation.

 

As the country heads for the next election the stark question is whether the Congress is geared to face them. It needs to bring down inflation, ensure adequate food and energy supplies, dramatically improve internal security, maintain peace on the border and not least, see to it that the many welfare measures the government has taken in favour of the poor and the minorities are implemented on the ground.

This is a tall order. The party’s mascots, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, can be trusted to reach out to the people. They have the drive and the energy. But the Congress lacks enough leaders who enjoy mass support. Its propensity to welcome to its fold politicians with dubious credentials has harmed its prospects in the past. It will harm them again. The party is also bereft of dedicated cadres. Like cadres of most other parties the ones in the Congress appear in the public eye to be opportunists at best and at worst lumpen elements. To make matters worse, the party, along with other political formations, is seen to be kowtowing to powerful corporate groups.

However, the party’s biggest handicap is the absence of a coherent and uplifting vision of India’s future. For the past several decades it has sought to be all things to all men at all times. It has often given the impression of treading not the middle path but a muddled one. In the process it has alienated large swathes of its traditional constituencies: Dalits, minorities, the poor in general and even sections of the middle classes.

The reason for this lack of vision surely lies in the party’s failure to fully grasp the significance of the major shifts of power and authority shaping India beneath the surface of day-to-day events: the shift from a geriatric and middle-aged India to a young India; from the upper castes to those lower down in the social pecking order; from the Centre to the states; from the state to the market; from government to civil society; from a man-centred India to an India which yearns for gender equality.

 

Acknowledging these trends and understanding their import would enable the Congress to finesse its core ideas and values which set it apart from parties with a communal, casteist or regional/parochial out-look: inclusive growth which safeguards the environment, secularism free of the taint of vote-bank politics, protection of citizens from the scourges of religious extremism and terrorism, crackdown on corruption, building the physical infrastructure without bureaucratic skull-drudgery, providing a robust social network (education and health in particular) bereft of populist rhetoric. This way alone can the Congress, which was primarily responsible for bringing us freedom from colonial rule and for laying the foundations of our republic, reiterate its pan-Indian relevance.