Implosion (36 page)

The announcement came at a large party conference and Rahul made an acceptance speech that was strong on emotion and on what was wrong with the corrupt and power hungry in India.
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It reflected a famous speech made by his father Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister in 1985, attacking Congress power brokers who, he said, had handicapped ordinary party workers. Rajiv failed to change the system and his son offered nothing more, apart from a pledge that he would work for the party and the country. He generated a rousing standing ovation from the audience and tears from some leaders. In the months that followed, he challenged established systems and worked hard at trying to reform the party’s constituency and state-level organization, picking new local leaders and candidates who might revive the badly run party. This showed the power he could wield when he chose to do so – for example, in the choice of young ministers and regional political leaders, though it upset many existing power brokers.

Rahul made remarks that seemed to suggest he might renounce the prime minister’s job, as Sonia had done in 2004. His plan to reorganize the Congress with grassroots elections would also logically and significantly reduce the chances of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty continuing into another generation after him. It was beginning to look as if that might be what he ideally wanted with democratically elected grassroots party members rising up through the ranks.
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When he was asked by journalists and Congress MPs in the Central Hall of Parliament in March 2013 whether he wanted to be prime minister, he was reported to have said that was the wrong question. ‘Today, I see how MPs feel without power and it is the same story in all the parties, be it the Congress or the BJP. I want to empower the 720-odd MPs in Parliament. I want to give voice to the middle tier, empower the middle-level leaders. There are some parties in India which are run by one leader, two leaders, five to six leaders and 15 to 20 leaders. My priority is that I want to empower the MPs as also the 5,000-odd legislators in various states.’ He was also reported to have said that he regretted that political parties prevented youth from acquiring key positions at a time when the young were seeking a greater say in political affairs. ‘At one point, the pressure from the youth will be such that there will be an explosion’.
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These remarks chimed with criticism he had frequently voiced about the Congress party’s ‘high command’ culture (even though that was his mother’s role), and seemed to suggest that new people would rise up. But it was not clear whether Rahul was envisaging these new leaders being ready to take over the top job in 20 years’ or so when he might retire, maybe leaving nothing for the next generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to do. Moreover, he only talked about giving power to MPs and ‘voice to the middle tier, empower the middle-level leaders’. Did it mean that he envisaged a dynastically defended glass ceiling above that level? He was similarly vague about what he intended to do when he spoke for the first time to a business audience in April 2013. His theme was that India’s future lay in taking politics down to pradhans (village headmen) to give ‘a billion people the power to solve the problems’ and facilitate development.
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At that meeting he showed he had developed an easy style of impromptu public speaking, but he presented no policies and had no answers to specific questions that he was asked about how to solve clashes between the central government and the states, and what to do about inadequate water supplies.

He needed, however, to do much more than simply talk about grassroots power to restore the dynasty’s image that was steadily declining. This had been demonstrated the previous October with Kejriwal’s allegations about Robert Vadra’s business dealings. The family, it seemed, was becoming vulnerable to personal attacks, albeit only against someone who had married into the family rather than a member of the dynasty. It raised questions about whether Sonia’s protective chakra was becoming vulnerable.
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Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist, suggested that the Vadra attack indicated the collapse of a ‘taboo’ in Indian politics about exposing and naming members of the dynasty, though he followed taboo traditions and only wrote ‘R for Robert’ to indicate who he was writing about and did not use the words Vadra, Priyanka, Sonia, or the Gandhi dynasty, choosing instead to refer to a ‘particular family’.
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Yogendra Yadav, a political pollster and pundit who became a member of Kejriwal’s political party, praised the revelations because they had ‘violated a code of silence observed in Delhi’s corridors of power’.

Different Priorities

During this time, it gradually emerged that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi had different priorities. Sonia wanted to maintain the old Congress systems of dynasty and patronage that had allowed her to emerge and reign supreme, along with economic policies based on aid schemes designed to help the poor while doing little or nothing to lift them out of their lot. Rahul shared that economic vision for short-term electoral benefits, believing that the poor would then vote for the Congress. But he was mainly focused on reforming the way the party was run and empowering people both in the party and outside to develop their futures. That vision is not based on conventional economic reforms favoured by the trio of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, but on empowering local villages to run their own affairs and by developing grassroots voluntary organizations and self-help groups.

Sonia’s determination was illustrated in August 2013 when she made a rare speech in the Lok Sabha to introduce a Food Security Bill against the wishes and advice of senior ministers and economic advisers. Politicians in India usually give bangles, saris, electrical goods and even laptops away at election time in order to woo voters, but Gandhi raised the bar with the handouts that increased the government’s food aid bill to $20bn a year.
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‘There are people who ask whether we have the means to implement this scheme. I would like to say that we have to figure out the means. The question is not whether we can do it or not. We have to do it,’ she said in parliament
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in a speech that hit the value of the rupee and upset Chidambaram’s efforts to halt the slide in the country’s economy. A few days earlier, she had launched the Bill as part of the Congress party’s platform for imminent assembly elections in the state of Delhi (which the Congress lost badly). She chose to do this on the birth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi, who however might not have approved because he believed in constructive economic growth policies, not well-meaning but wasteful handouts. (Sonia Gandhi’s ill health was also evident on the day she introduced the Bill in the Lok Sabha because she had to leave parliament and be taken to hospital for tests before the legislation was voted on and passed.)

Rahul Gandhi Wakes Up

Rahul Gandhi’s impatience with old-style politics was best demonstrated a few weeks later when he burst unexpectedly into a Congress party press conference in Delhi and denounced a government plan to pass legalisation that would have nullified a Supreme Court order issued two months earlier
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and allowed politicians convicted of crimes to remain members of parliament while their cases were appealed.
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The plan was to introduce a quick temporary ordinance, pending permanent legislation, so that Lalu Yadav, the regional leader from Bihar, could stay in parliament while he appealed conviction and an imminent sentence on a massive fraud case dating from the 1990s. Gandhi described the ordinance as ‘complete nonsense’ and declared that it should ‘be torn up and thrown out’ – which it was, a few days later, when the cabinet reversed its decision to introduce the measure. Sonia Gandhi was clearly not pleased with her son’s political guerrilla warfare, and Rahul said she had told him ‘that the words that I used were strong’. With hindsight, he added, he felt ‘maybe my words were wrong but the sentiment I felt was not wrong’.

The most significant remark that Rahul made when he invaded the press conference was that ‘if we want to fight corruption in this country, whether it’s us the Congress party, or the BJP, we cannot continue making these small compromises because, when we make these small compromises, we compromise everything’. In other words, he considered his mother, her advisers and the cabinet had gone too far with such compromises when they decided to protect Yadav by introducing the ordinance quickly, before his jail sentence was announced a few days later.

For decades, maintenance of political power has provided an excuse and a cover for the gradual criminalization of governance. Gandhi seemed to understand that this had crippled the power of institutions and wanted to change course. It was an implicit criticism of both Manmohan Singh and his mother, who had presided over a highly corrupt government and party and had made ‘small compromises’ such as keeping corrupt politicians in the cabinet so that their parties would continue to support the coalition government.

Rahul Gandhi was clearly emerging as a potential reformer, if only he could be more consistently convincing and if he followed up his occasional forays into current events with focused moves to clean up the country’s politics and governance. His behaviour, however, was still too erratic to be effective and he showed no understanding of the intricacies of policy making. His efforts to galvanize voters failed again with the assembly elections in December 2013, as they had earlier. The Congress was routed in Delhi by the BJP and the new Aam Aadmi Party founded by Kejriwal, the anti-corruption campaigner, as well as losing in three other states.

The AAP’s victory and the Congress defeats spurred Gandhi into action and he forced the government to revive the Lok Pal Bill that would set up an anti-corruption ombudsman. The main parties had resisted the legislation for decades and the government had only agreed to produce the Bill two years earlier under intense pressure from Anna Hazare, who was then working with Kejriwal. The BJP amazingly co-operated with the government and the Bill was passed through both houses of parliament and enacted within a few days.
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Gandhi hoped this would show that the Congress was serious about tackling corruption and he made a powerful speech in parliament – only his third in ten years – calling for six other anti-corruption bills to be implemented covering subjects such as public procurement, foreign bribery, judicial standards and whistleblowers. He also forced the Congress-led Maharashtra state government to re-open a corruption case on an army-linked real estate scandal.

It seemed that the assembly election results had at last made the Gandhis realise that the country wanted a change, not just between the Congress and the BJP, but with the election of new figures like Kejriwal, who did not carry the baggage of established politicians. For the first time in his political career, Rahul Gandhi took command of a policy. He was clearly in charge, replacing his mother and sidestepping Ahmed Patel, her trusted aide, who was said to have been blocking many of his earlier initiatives. But he had woken up too late. Defeat loomed for the Congress in the 2014 elections. Rahul Gandhi’s best hope was that he would build up enough personal credibility to be able to reform the party for a later election, maybe working with his sister Priyanka, who was becoming more active politically.

Crisis of Confidence

The dynasty was by now having its worst crisis of confidence for two decades, which raised the question of whether the family has or has not been good for India. The country would certainly have benefited from a wider choice of prime ministers. Nehru initially set India on a sound footing in 1947 but Shastri could, historians suggest, have been a better leader of the country than Indira Gandhi if he had lived – and that might have thwarted the dynasty’s survival.

Sonia Gandhi’s main contribution has been to the Congress party, not to the country, Offsetting that has been her determination that Rahul should succeed her. She stymied the Congress’s development by not encouraging democratic elections for party leaders either nationally or around the country, thus playing into the hands of those who wanted to resist change. For years she held back the promotion of new, young leaders while Rahul dithered about what to do. By contrast, when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister in the 1980s, young politicians such as P. Chidambaram, Madhavrao Scindia and Rajesh Pilot were given key responsibilities as ministers of state – Chidambaram handled national security when he was 40.

One can argue, of course, that Sonia has benefited the country because her revival of the Congress enabled it to be a viable alternative to the Hindu-nationalist BJP. However, her lack of vision beyond soft-liberal populist policies was a reminder that India’s main reforms have happened when the dynasty has not been in power – the early years of the Narasimha Rao 1991–96 government and the BJP’s 1998–2004 period.

The conclusion has to be that India would be better off if the dynasty lost its automatic top role. The Gandhis’ supporters argue that it is essential they continue as leaders in order to hold the Congress party together because, without them, it would splinter and there would not be any nationally viable party apart from the BJP. Coalition governments would then be weaker without the Congress as a focal point around which other parties could gather.

That, however, is a negative argument for keeping a dynasty which is so out of tune at a time when there are growing demands for significant changes in the way that India is governed.

Notes

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http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/anti-america-and-anti-corruption-are-key-issues-as-india-general-election-looms