When rats start jumping out or when the passengers begin making a big noise collectively in a ship, chances are rather high that the vessel is sinking.
On the face of it, the Indian National Congress is in the process of reworking and realigning its political revival strategy. The party is likely to finalise by today evening its nominees for the Rajya Sabha elections in a meeting that will be chaired by interim president Sonia Gandhi with son Rahul scheduled to join from London through videoconferencing.
Veterans such as P Chidambaram, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ajay Maken, Anand Sharma, Vivek Tankha, Rajeev Shukla, Mukul Wasnik and Pramod Tiwari are believed to be the frontrunners even though the party is considering local leaders and minority representatives in line with the resolutions made at its Chintan Shivir in Udaipur, Rajasthan.
The grand old party also has great chances of winning at least eight Rajya Sabha seats, from Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. But these things are hardly a true indication of the party’s health. With chaos and confusion all too evident on other fronts, there can be little denying that it is facing a question of survival.
A few days ago, Hardik Patel, Working President of the Congress in Gujarat, quit in a huff citing the insincerity of party’s top leaders (particularly Rahul Gandhi) and stating that it was being rejected practically by every state of the country due to its inability to present a roadmap to the people.
Not long before him, former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar ended his 50-year-long association with the party saying that the high command must take control and get rid of the sycophants surrounding it.
The prolonged sidelining and recent resignation of veteran Kapil Sibal, the most vocal of the so-called G23 – a group of senior Congress leaders who called for changes to the organisational structure and leadership model of the Gandhi family-led party – is the most recent example.
Not just Indians, but the whole world seems to be aware about the leadership crisis in the grand old party. A recently published article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Indian Democracy Suffers for a Lack of Competent Opposition”, pointed out that the biggest problem facing Congress party is Rahul Gandhi. It noted that when he joined as Congress’s vice president in 2013, the party was controlling 206 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. And now, under his de facto leadership, the party is reduced to just 53.
There is little hope that things are going to get any better. His recent remarks that the Congress alone can fight the BJP as regional parties neither have an ideology nor the right organisational approach to do so left many opposition parties, including Congress allies, fuming. The damage control that he tried to do after the backlash by saying Congress is not the “big daddy” or in any way superior to other parties hardly doused the flames.
The nation has also noticed how his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was fervently campaigning across Uttar Pradesh ahead of the assembly polls, has been conspicuously missing from the state ever since the Congress suffered its worst ever electoral performance – winning just 2 out of 403 seats.
Congress has never looked more like a sinking ship than it is now.
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