NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTION 99
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

If Indira was India, is Sonia soonya?

Is politics like a 100-metre dash or is it a marathon? The answer to that depends on whether you are a Congressman or a BJP-wallah.

When a freshly charged Sonia Gandhi took over the reins of the Congress party last year and trounced the BJP in the Hindi heartland, she was feted by many -- including me -- as the Congress party's great white hope.

Today, with a rout in the general election under her belt, and the party organisation in a shambles, she is reduced to a fate worse than Sitaram Kesri's. Today, so shaken is she that organisational polls have been postponed, for fear of revolt among the rank and file. Sonia Gandhi today presides over an empire whose boundaries seem to end at the gates of 10 Janpath.

What could have gone so wrong, is a question that she, and only she alone, can answer.

Not her advisors, not her vilified coterie, if she is looking for the truth.

Taking off from the beginning, it sure looks like she tried to do a 100-metre dash when the course was set for a marathon.

Saying so, however, reduces the exercise of running a political party into a track event, while it is clearly beyond being just that.

At the risk of sounding erudite, it must be said that Sonia Gandhi's fault, since taking over the party, was in mistaking electoral performance as the sole indicator of the Congress's health, to let the initial rush of blood that victory at the hustings brought to start treating the organisation as an extension of her personal space.

One could argue in turn that what she was doing was not very different from what her mother-in-law did with the same party, and could not be entirely wrong. If the party could take it under Indira only because she brought them the votes, why would it resist the daughter-in-law?

For two reasons, essentially. One, of course is that the mother-in-law combined her autocratic hold over the Congress with an intimate awareness of the nation's mood, a feel for her partymen's mood, and immense knowledge of the nation's history and its present. She, in many ways, was a politician's politician, and there is no way Sonia Gandhi is going to be able to match all of that.

I don't think she should even try to measure up to her mother-in-law, at least not in this regard.

The second fault that is costing Sonia dear is her neglect of the party organisation. This, of course, is not such a major lapse -- as Indira showed -- but only when the votes keep coming in. Not when election results show up the law of diminishing returns. Disenchantment within the party did not spare even Indira, but she could overcome the challenges to her leadership because of what she was.

In Sonia's case, it is what she is that will ultimately go against her. Since she obviously cannot change herself, what she could try to do is to change her candidature.

Whether she likes it or not, the Congress's fight was, is and will be for the middle space in the political spectrum, a space that the BJP has cleverly managed to oust it from. Regardless of Mamta's talk of a grand alliance, the Congress party cannot hope to survive as an independent entity after being seen on the same side as the BJP.

To overcome the crisis that is confronting her, Sonia Gandhi needs to discover her strengths, and find people to fill in her areas of weakness.

The nation has no clue as to what her strengths and weaknesses are, its only experience of her administrative skills being the inept manner in which she managed to have the 12th Lok Sabha dissolved.

What Sonia Gandhi could try to do is take over the running of the party herself, and not offer herself up as a contender for the top job. Heaven knows that the dinosaur needs to be reoriented, and who better to get it done than someone who has no historical baggage to stymie her?

If Sonia were keen on confronting the BJP's challenge, the best way for her to go about it would be to bifurcate the responsibility of administration between her and a trusted lieutenant, by which she focuses on refurbishing the party organisation while the political affairs are handled by the aide who will also be the natural choice for prime ministership if and when the Congress were to win a majority once again.

Obviously, what's keeping Sonia back from following such a course is the same that motivated her mother-in-law to combine the party presidentship and prime ministership, a decision that has eventually brought the party to a pass where just one invididual makes all the difference to its wellbeing: hunger for power.

In that sense, Sonia Gandhi has reached a decisive point in her political life. On one hand, she could try and emulate her mother-in-law in full, even if the present does not warrant such a course. Or she can choose the best from her mother-in-law's life, discard the rest as inapplicable, and try to fashion her party's future.

It is a tough call all right.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy