Ponmala

In an effort to revive its flagging fortune, India’s 136-year-old ‘grand old party’, The Indian National Congress, recently embarked on two major initiatives. The first was a 3,570-km-150-day long walk covering the entire length of India from Kanyakumari to Srinagar by Rahul Gandhi, and the other was the election of a new president, which would represent the handing over of the reins of the party by the Gandhi family to an outsider after holding it for a quarter of a century. Rahul Gandhi’s long walk is almost half way through and MallikarjunKharge, a seasoned veteran from Karnataka, has been elected the new president of the party.

Rahul Gandhi’s main gripe is that the vice-like grip Modi has established on media of every variety has stifled the voice of the opposition. He attributes Modi’s phenomenal success, despite monumental failures, to his embrace of the corporates and his capture of the media. Modi has fulfilled none of his grand promises. His campaign against the high price of cooking gas, fuel oil and the US dollar under Manmohan Sing’s rule and his promise of one crore jobs every year and Rs 15 lakhs to every citizen as their share of unaccounted money stacked abroad had much to do with his rise to power in 2014. Further more, Modi’s steps like demonetisation and hastily executed GST put millions out of their jobs and derailed the economy. And yet, his popularity remains high thanks to the partisan role played by the Indian media to divert the attention of the nation away from the woes that afflict it. Rahul Gandhi argues that the only option left to him is to talk directly to the people, and therefore a long walk through the length of India.

Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat JodoYatra’ from Kanyakumari to Srinagar is evocative of Mahatma Gandhi’s 385-km march from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi. If the Mahatma’s Dandi March was a non-violent protest against the British rule, Rahul’s long march is a similar protest against the fascist rule of the RSS backed BJP, which is ripping India’s society apart through aggressively promoted divisive policies. While the Mahatma’s march was a milestone in India’s freedom struggle, Rahul’s march is arguably a clarion call to a second freedom struggle for safeguarding India’s unity as a nation that has always been a harmonious home for people of diverse cultures and faiths.

The detractors of the Congress describe Rahul’s long walk as a vain effort to revive a moribund party that is bereft of vision, leadership and organisation. Rahul, on the other hand, is strictly adhering to it’s proclaimed apolitical character. He has desisted from making any political statement in the press conferences he has given in the course of the march. He just keeps repeating: “We need to be a united India. Every one should get justice in India; every one should get a paying job in India; and in India we should have an atmosphere of fraternal friendship.”

We now have two ideologies engaged in a struggle to establish supremacy over India’s soul. First we have the fascist ideology of Hindutva that is marching towards what looks like an unstoppable victory. And then we have the desperate fight of the Congress to hold on to Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nehru’s idea of a modern secular and socialist democracy, something that India enjoyed uninterruptedly for seven decades up until the emergence of Modi. Rahul Gandhi is attempting a Herculean task, but he marches on undaunted saying, “I will either find a way or make one, but nothing will stop me.”

The BJP knew only too well that the Congress was its only pan India rival. And so it gave primary focus to a Congress-free India. In that effort, it got the support of regional parties, for whom also the Congress is the main rival in their own fiefdoms. That campaign has had a significant success. With a weakened Congress on the one hand and regional parties whose chiefs are rivalling for the post of Prime Minister on the other, the BJP is cosily ensconced in Delhi. A divided opposition is the BJP’s biggest guarantee for prolonged rule, and parochial interests and personal ambitions are their biggest guarantee for keeping the opposition divided.

Despite the rank and file of the Congress party pressuring Rahul Gandhi to lead the Congress once again, Rahul Gandhi stubbornly refused, because he wanted the party to shake off the stigma of dynastic rule. In the contest that followed for the post of the party’s president, 82-year-old MallikarjunKharge got pitted against 66-year-old ShashiTharoor. They presented a picture of stark contrasts – old age versus youth, experience versus change, old guard versus new-gen, orthodoxy versus avant-garde, establishment verses challenge, local versus global…

ShashiTharoor was clearly an unfancied contestant, but he proved a point by pocketing 12% of votes, all of them from the younger leaders. The youth is longing for a new beginning, but the problem with them is that they are too much in a hurry, not so much for change as for capturing power. Rahul Gandhi encouraged young leaders like JyotiradityaScindia and Sachin Pilot. The former ditched the party and joined the BJP because he was not made the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and the latter came to the threshold of emulating him in Rajasthan.

One electoral slogan that did the rounds in social media during the presidential election was this: ‘Who do you want, an old donkey or a young horse?’ So poor in taste! How could they refer to someone who was elected 9 times to a legislative assembly and once to the parliament and had served as minister and as leader of the opposition in Karnataka as a donkey! ShashiTharoor’s disadvantage was that most leaders feared he was an uncontrollable horse that had grown horns. As a transition president, MallikarjunKharge was the right choice. ShashiTharoor will have his day, provided he has the patience to wait for it.