Grand old party needs new blood

The despicable farce that the Congress Working Committee meeting on Monday played out before a tired and impatient audience of Indian citizenry nicely sums up the grand old party’s malady and maltreatment. The Gandhis, Sonia and Rahul, acted their parts to pitch-perfection, crying hoarse over their life-long sacrifices for the country and now, after the Congress suffered the worst-ever defeat in the history of post-independent India, ‘offered’ to resign from party posts. In a befuddling refusal to sever its toxic and rotting umbilical cord from the Dynasty, the Congress party, in a rehearsed and stage-managed outcry, rejected their resignations. This after the electoral catastrophe, the absolute inability to connect with their supporters, the traditional snobbery of the Gandhis and the ineffectuality of Rahul Gandhi who failed to deliver the onerous task of managing a successful poll campaign. What does this say of the gang of supine sycophants who make up the Congress party? Nothing, except that while India has moved ahead, left its old ways of looking for patronage and replaced it with rights to demand growth and development for all, India’s oldest political party is busy nursing its bruised ego and doggedly refusing to learn. It also shows that the 81-crore-strong electorate, of which 31 per cent voted for Narendra Modi, and less than nine per cent rooted for Congress, cannot be hoodwinked anymore with traditional loyalties and legislations that remain only on paper.       

        It is unfortunate that ‘rights-based-legislation framework’, a brilliant intervention by the Congress-led UPA, has been left to wither in the wilderness of political immaturity of the Gandhi scion. Congress party is the story of a string of reluctant politicians being passed on the baton by their dominatrix mothers blinded by filial love. Much like the late Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul’s fate shouldn’t have been tied to his lineage and instead on his inclinations, which are not instinctually political. India has turned development into a computer game, an obsession, which does not belong to any one original creator and can be reclaimed by anyone who’s willing to give it a different and definite direction. What the Gandhi family forgot and what the unimpressive second-order leaders in the party unfortunately never reminded the thoroughly disconnected monarchs of Congress about was the staggering scale of expectations that India had placed on its new legislative supremos. For good or bad, the world’s biggest democracy had, before it went to polls, demolished the vestiges of inherited elitism and opted for a ‘parvenu efficiency’, and likewise, found its technocratic dream-come-true in Narendra Modi. While it’s not fair to say that Nehruvian model was just a rehash of colonial British administration, it is 2014 that India first woke up without a nightmarish allegiance to that difficult past. Congress, nevertheless, still opted to look the other way.