Spineless Congress Rebels Fail to Throw Out Failed Gandhi Family
As the Gandhi family members are running the party as a street shop, they have completely failed to challenge the might of PM Modi, who is ruling the country in a freewheeling manner.
By Rakesh Raman
After years of intense bickering and demands for the ouster of the dictatorial Gandhi family, a group of 23 rebels – known as the G-23 – in the Congress party has finally accepted the status quo.
That means The Family – Congress chief Ms Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul Gandhi, and her daughter Priyanka Gandhi – will stay at the party’s helm of affairs despite their repeated failures in elections. [ You can click here to read a letter that I had sent to Congress president Ms Sonia Gandhi with a strategy for the survival and revival of the Congress party. She did not respond. ]
After Congress’s humiliating defeat in five state elections in March 2022, the G-23 dissident leaders met on March 16 with the main objective to remove the Gandhis from the party, as the family members cannot keep the party together because of their lethargy and lack of organizational skills. Some of the rebels claimed that under Gandhis, Congress has become a family fiefdom where other party members do not have any respect.
The rebels include Congressmen Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, Manish Tewari, Bhupinder Hooda, Akhilesh Prasad Singh, Prithviraj Chavan, Raj Babbar, PJ Kurien, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and a few others.
But strangely after their March 16 meeting, they willy-nilly decided that the Gandhi family will keep holding the top positions in the party. In other words, the spineless rebels failed to muster courage to ask the Gandhis to quit the party. Reason: All these so-called opponents of the Gandhi family are highly unskilled and parasites who cannot do anything to get the party revived.
Therefore, these good-for-nothing G-23 leaders can only make noise but do not have guts to challenge the impotence of the Gandhi family. As a result, Congress has lost relevance in the Indian political space and is facing extinction. Now it can be seen that the Congress top brass – rulers and the rebels – are equally responsible for the party’s persisting debacle.
PRESENT PREDICAMENT
The way things stand today, it appears that the Gandhi family will have to be forcibly thrown out of the Congress to save the dying political outfit. After dilly dallying the issue of presidential election in the party during the past couple of years, the ailing interim president Sonia Gandhi has repeatedly deferred the election to democratically elect the Congress president.
After the party’s drubbing in the 2019 Lok Sabha election that Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won, many thought that Congress will allow some intelligent leaders to control the political affairs. But it did not happen, although the then Congress president Rahul Gandhi – who is Sonia Gandhi’s own son – quit ostensibly.
But during the past 3 years, Rahul Gandhi has been working as a de facto party chief and did not allow the internal election to take place. The election to appoint a new Congress president is an urgent imperative because Congress is persisting with its losing streak.
Under Gandhis, Congress lost in the April-May state elections last year in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Bengal. Again, Congress lost 2022 assembly elections in 5 states: Goa, Punjab, Manipur, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh (UP). But after a perfunctory Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting to discuss the poll defeats, Sonia Gandhi did not announce the internal presidential election and decided to stay as the party chief.
After each election defeat, Sonia Gandhi casually acknowledges the need to introspect into the party’s repeated setbacks in the assembly elections but never takes any corrective steps. Rather, the CWC – which is full of Congress puppets – postpones the election for Congress president under one pretext or another. Usually dogs are supposed to be loyal to their masters. But in India’s opposition party Congress, most incompetent politicians are loyal to their masters in the Gandhi family.
In fact, the election is being delayed repeatedly because Sonia Gandhi wants her son to be the president without holding the election. In 2020, according to an NDTV report, nine former Uttar Pradesh (UP) Congress leaders had written a letter to Sonia Gandhi, asking her to “rise above the affinity for the family (parivaar ke moh)” and lead the party by establishing mutual trust and restoring constitutional and democratic values within the party.
Also, after a dissent letter sent to Sonia Gandhi by over 20 rebel Congress leaders in August 2020, more voices of internal opposition to the Gandhi family have been emerging. The UP dissidents included former Congress MP Santosh Singh and former minister Satyadev Tripathi. Their letter came on the heels of the earlier letter signed by top Congress leaders including Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Prithviraj Chavan, Anand Sharma, and Kapil Sibal.
INCOMPETENT GANDHI FAMILY
The restlessness among Congress leaders is increasing, as the Nehru-Gandhi family – including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi – refuses to give up control of the party despite their failures to save it.
The dissidents have questioned the lethargic working style of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and demanded an elected leadership which is active and visible on the ground to raise people’s concerns. They have cautioned that the uncertainty over the leadership issue within the party is demoralizing the party workers and weakening the party.
As the Gandhi family members are running the party as a street shop, they have completely failed to challenge the might of PM Modi, who is ruling the country in a freewheeling manner.
While Sonia Gandhi does not have any experience to run different departments of the party, Rahul Gandhi is so naive and incompetent that he keeps tweeting raw text lifted from newspaper reports to criticize Modi. Both – Sonia and Rahul Gandhi – keep sitting in the comforts of their homes without posing any challenge to the despotic Modi regime.
The Gandhi family could never offer any solution to tackle the growing problems in India under Modi’s dictatorial rule. Today, India is facing an unprecedented scale of socio-economic crisis with rampant corruption, extreme lawlessness, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and economic devastation under the Modi government.
Instead of addressing these issues head-on, the Gandhi family members are only repeating in their tweets or irrelevant video messages what everyone already knows about Modi’s failures. They could never tell how Congress would challenge the Modi government to overcome these problems. The incompetence of the self-styled Congress leaders has harmed the party in multiple state elections.
Under these circumstances, if the Gandhi family is not removed from Congress, the traditional party will soon die and the Indian democracy will be crushed under Modi’s diktats. Now, the Congress rebels must unite to remove Gandhis and give control of the party in some safe hands. Only then do they have a chance to perform well in the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha election which Modi’s BJP is expected to win.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of a humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society.
