A Congressman’s prognosis

Jairam Ramesh, a former Cabinet minister in the Manmohan Singh government, has broken his silence — and has also broken ranks with the party leadership. He has persuaded himself to comment in public on what he calls the Congress party’s existential crisis; he has argued that though the party had faced defeat and adversity in the past, this time the nature of the challenge before the party was substantially different and considerably exacting. What has changed, according to him, is that India has changed and that the Congress has to acknowledge and factor in this fact and re-design itself to suit the mood and temperament of the new India, an India that has no recollection of either our Independence movement or the Congress role in India’s national struggle.

Admittedly, Jairam Ramesh is a loyalist. He has risen in the party hierarchy from the sherpa’s backroom to a cabinet ministerial slot to a third term in the Rajya Sabha. His loyalty has been more than rewarded. It is precisely in this background of undiluted loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family that his call for a “collective effort” should evoke interest and support among fellow Congress leaders. His public utterances are reflective of a gathering sense of frustration and helplessness in the Congress hierarchy. It was widely assumed that the ignominious defeat that Narendra Modi was able to inflict on the Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, reducing its tally to a pathetic 44, would be a sufficiently jarring jolt to the party leadership; after 2014, there have been a string of electoral setbacks, yet there seems to be no indication of the Nehru-Gandhi family mending its ways. The Congress continues to operate like a maa-beta party as it did in the past, with the beta remaining unpredictable, elusive, and wayward most of the time.

The theme of Jairam Ramesh’s song of mild rebellion is that it would be unwise for the Congress to rely only on anti-incumbency against the BJP government to kick itself in. The Congress would have to offer the voters something more than a long catalogue of Narendra Modi’s failures and faults.