Sonia Gandhi & the Congress

It was exactly 12 years ago that Sonia Gandhi was appointed party chief, in a development that stemmed the Congress’s downward slide, helped it capture Dilli Durbar after a decade-long power drought and put the party on the road to re-capturing its pre-eminence. Twelve years, to paraphrase former British PM Harold Macmillan, may be a long time in politics, but few would have imagined the turnaround that Sonia has scripted since the day when members of the Congress Working Committee, deeply worried about the party’s existential crisis, turned against the incumbent Sitaram Kesri to hand over the reins to her. Sonia helped woo back Muslims and upper castes .In 1998, the Congress, which had lost the pole position to a resurgent BJP two years earlier, was adrift and threatened to sink further. The polarisation brought about by Mandal-Mandir politics saw the party losing the crucial constituencies of Muslims, OBCs and Dalits in north India as well as huge political spaces across states to rivals. Its ‘catch-all’ appeal was blunted with the middle class, put off by the stink of corruption and compromises, embracing the BJP’s offer of a clean alternative and the bold espousal of economic reforms making the poor and vulnerable doubt the party’s intent. The task that faced Sonia as she set out to pull organisational chestnuts out of the fire was tougher than the challenge Indira Gandhi had encountered after the party’s first-ever defeat in 1977. A procession of Congress leaders invented various excuses to join the BJP. Doubts assailing the faithful did not disappear even when Sonia arrived, with many suspecting that her “foreign origin’’ would handicap her terribly. The 1999 polls—when the Congress’s tally dipped to just 114 while BJP opened up a huge gap at the top—only reinforced the in-house sceptics. In just over a decade, the fortunes have been reversed with the Congress regaining the number one slot and appearing well on its way to establish the ascendancy it has traditionally enjoyed. The 2004 polls saw the party score a victory “on points’’, by being pragmatic in courting allies and by capitalising on BJP’s pre-poll hubris. The chance thus gained was, however, used by Sonia to re-establish the ‘aam aadmi’ credentials lost in the wake of reforms and to reach out to the left-of-centre part of civil society which was never enamoured of the Congress. Sonia’s painstaking work has helped the Congress regain the affection of Muslims and lure back upper castes in the north, with the results of the LS polls from UP suggesting that it may be able to re-stitch the social coalition that helped it dominate the political landscape. But as it practises old-style populism represented by debt-waivers and guaranteed job scheme for rural areas, the party has also been able to identify itself, for the first time since the euphoria generated by nationalisation of banks under Indira, with the aspirations of the growing category of urban Indian youth. The determined push for the women’s bill on Tuesday, despite reservations among government leaders, was part of the enterprise helped considerably by the arrival of Rahul Gandhi. Resistance from the Yadav troika appears to have forced the government to put the bill on hold but the tactical retreat cannot camouflage the intent to press ahead with efforts to form a purely Congress government after the next LS elections.