Reinvention

 

 Reinvention

 'History is a canvas constantly repainted’

From Da Vinci’s Demons, SO2E06.

After October 19^th, it is quite possible that the Congress will be left with a tenuous hold on just one state government, that of Karnataka. And, with its severe infighting and corruption, endemic, it seems, to all Congress administration, how long before that too slips away?

This, even as  its strangely  Hamlet-like absentee Vice President Rahul Gandhi,  is reportedly making an attempt to supplant the old guard in the decision making bodies of the Congress, with his pals in ‘generation next’.  His ailing mother Sonia Gandhi too belongs to the departing era, successful though her innings at the helm have largely been.

 The fatal DNA flaw however may now be that both mother and son share an ineffective socialist vision that is seriously out-of-date. They may reflect on the fact that their role models of the Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US have also been forced to move persistently to the Right in today’s world.

One analysis recently sees the niggardliness in the Congress dispensation’s emphasis on ‘poverty alleviation’ through rafts of expensive welfare measures, as opposed to, and in contrast with, Narendra Modi’s  ‘poverty eradication’ ambition.

Modi wants to turn India into the world’s manufacturing hub generating millions of new jobs in the process. He wants to clean up the physical and body politic. He wants smart cities, modern Railways, defence production, digital administration, modern farming and distribution backbones, with homes and toilets for all by 2022. He wants massive foreign investment, reformed laws, administrative overhaul and more of this ilk. How then can Congress’ one big ‘lady bountiful’  idea of badly administered hand-outs, compete with aspirational growth in a demographically young India?

In the corporate world, the most dramatic rebooting that took place recently is probably that of former IT bellwether Infosys. The new management, under former SAP veteran Vishal Sikka, will take the company into emphatically new and profitable directions. The old strategies are seen to be played out, quite like the band of ageing men who founded Infosys. But at least they have had the wisdom to let it go now .

While this copycat revamping intent on the part of Rahul Gandhi may be inspired by Narendra Modi’s  successful  turfing out of the BJP elders from positions of power; the youngish dynast has been, for quite some time, running election strategy, disastrously at that, with his inept band of newbies, mostly sons of old Congressmen, like himself.

Besides, the NaMo effect has broken the jinx, indeed the mould, of the BJP, congenetically unable to win more than 160 seats in the Lok Sabha.  But now, it is neither ‘untouchable’, nor concerned with any slurs to that effect. It runs a majority government at the centre, the first in 30 years. It is  building upon itself by pursuing  a policy of extending its reach and consolidating its hold on the states.

The heavy dependence on the NDA, so much the case in the Vajpayee administration, is gone as of May 16^th, and if the composition of the Rajya Sabha also changes in its favour, the remaining neediness will also evaporate.

Polls that show that the Shiv Sena does not stand a chance of forming a government on its own in Maharashtra, also tell us that the BJP was right to call their bluff. That the 25 year old alliance is broken is no bad thing when it is viewed in the context of the BJP growing into its role. It wants to become the main party of governance in the country.  

This emergence of the BJP as an electoral force on its own has been gradual, but it was accelerated once it found a charismatic and bold leader in Narendra Modi. Let us remember that the BJD broke away in 2009, and the JDU in the run up to 2014, convinced they were serving their own best interests. The last major ally, still left in the NDA fold, Punjab’s SAD, is suffering from considerable anti-incumbency, and there too the writing is on the wall.

But for Congress to reinvent enough to position itself to come back to power under Rahul Gandhi seems a near impossible task. This is not just because Mr. Gandhi lacks vision, charisma and leadership, but because the Congress has rendered itself irrelevant to the desires and dreams of the people today. It will take much more than biological youth to turn the tide.

When fortyish Rahul Gandhi, challenges Modi, in his sixties, it is Modi and his  developmental vision that resonates with the public. Rahul Gandhi must reinvent much more substantially, because his faltering and woolly championing of the ‘poor’, between relief bouts of luxe holidays abroad, is not going to cut the mustard.

 (799 words)

October 13^th, 2014
Gautam Mukherjee