Dear Ghulam Nabiji,
I thought you were going to lead our party out of the woods. Instead, you have chosen to walk out. Do you seriously expect to find a Congress destiny outside the Congress? Or, were you in the Congress only because it loaded you over four decades with every office in government or the party that was available—except prime minister and party president?
If it was your aspiration to lead the party, the opportunity was yours for the asking at next month’s party presidential elections. Would you have walked out if you, rather than Ashok Gehlot, had been the favoured one?
Illustration: Job P.K.
The step you have taken cannot lead to the rejuvenation of our party. You cannot rejuvenate a party from outside. And, if you think you can give a nation-wide alternative to the Congress by becoming a Congress party-in-exile, you will need more than a century and a quarter to accomplish that as the Indian National Congress has done since 1885. Had you stood in next month’s Congress presidential election, you might well have succeeded in rallying around your standard all those that are in despair over the straits in which the party finds itself today. Even if you had come second, we would have got a measure of how far disillusionment within the party has spread. It might have spread wide. Or it might be confined to those who have enjoyed perks only the party can bestow and suddenly find themselves deprived of it.
And if you answer, as you have done, that the presidential elections are rigged from the start of the process at the booth/block/district/state levels to ensure that the chosen one will be elected president, I would like to know whether such distortions of the democratic process began only after Rahul Gandhi became vice president in 2013? Might I take the liberty of reminding you that the process of making him VP had the full concurrence of the wholly nominated Congress Working Committee of which you were the leading member.
The CWC elections were held at Tirupati (1992) and Kolkata (1997) under non-Gandhi family presidents. It was only in 1998, and, thereafter, for 25 years, that all CWC positions have been filled by nomination. Those are the precise 25 years during which you were among the Congress president’s closest confidantes. I was confident that once Soniaji came to the helm, we would sincerely implement the Uma Shankar Dikshit committee recommendations—precisely because Rajiv Gandhi, as Congress President in 1990, had convened an extended meeting of the CWC to endorse the recommendations and then received the unstinted support for this vital step at the AICC session held in Mavlankar Hall, Delhi, in July, 1990.
Why in 25 years, when you were at the fulcrum of power, was the Dikshit report pulped to the point that not a single copy is available in AICC or anywhere else? You were general secretary in charge of Tamil Nadu when I had the mortifying experience of hearing you instruct us in 1999 to not canvas for election to the CWC because it had been decided that all CWC posts would be nominated. Had we had CWC elections, a second echelon would have been thrown up, which could have picked up the gauntlet when the challenge was thrown by Rahul Gandhi in May 2019 to choose an alternative to him and his family. If no one had the guts to rise to that challenge, it was because the second line leadership was gutted by the decision to have all of them, including you, nominated.
It is tragic that the single most important challenger has fled the battlefield before battle is even joined.
Yours in profound sorrow,
Mani (Shankar Aiyar)