Everyone is telling the Congress, Mr Pugalia said, to rid itself of the Gandhi family. But if it does so, will it still remain the Congress party? What will be the consequence for the Uttar Pradesh election?
That led to a similar question in my mind: with Narendra Modi at the top of it, is the Bharatiya Janata Party still the BJP we knew? Many people would say yes, it is, in terms of its political, social and economic orientation.
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But, in the way it functions it definitely is not. Atal Bihari Vajpayee never had the kind of power that Mr Modi has. This is perhaps why so many comparisons are drawn between Mr Modi and Indira Gandhi. She also wielded similar authority and power.
Such changes in a party’s DNA can, however, generate enormous strains. We saw this happen in the Congress in the 1970s.
The Congress in that decade was nothing like the old Congress, of the pre-1970 period. And the Congress after 1980 became totally different from the one between 1970 and 1980.
In a hugely accelerated way, this seems to have happened to the BJP under Mr Modi.
What happened over a decade-and-a-half in the Congress – and after two splits – has happened in the BJP over just two years since it came to power in May 2014.
Indira Gandhi managed the stresses generated by her departures from the old operating style by splitting the party in 1969 and 1978 and then, after 1980, by turning it into a modern version of the Mughal dynastic durbar or a private limited company.
The Indira way
Similar stresses are building up within the BJP now. It remains to be seen whether Mr Modi can manage them, and if so how.
Indira Gandhi was a winner of elections, and that helped her greatly in managing her party. So is Mr Modi. But if he wants to remain a winner, he will have to copy her method as well.
The core element in Indira Gandhi’s method was not to promise a good life to the individual, but to the group to which he or she belonged - caste, communal, or economic. This was in sharp contrast to the promises made by her father to the electorate, the promise of a good life to every individual, you know, that “wipe every tear from eye” line.
Ironically, as elections promises go, Mr Modi is doing what Jawaharlal Nehru did and he will find that it is a bad promise to make because it simply isn’t do-able in a country with India’s population. Indian governments just don’t have the delivery capacity to service every individual.
But they do have the delivery capacity to reach groups. There is no better example of this than reservations. Though intended to benefit entire groups, they actually benefit about 0.001 per cent of the people in that group. Despite this, the group thinks it has gained. Just look at the Other Backward Classes and Dalits.
Or consider farmers. Mr Modi’s policies all focus on targeting the individual farmer - soil health cards, for example - when everyone knows it is impossible to reach every farmer. But the Congress-type, group-oriented policies - doubling of the minimum support price (MSP) between 2004 and 2012 or fertiliser subsidies - fools the farmer into thinking he has benefitted, whereas the benefit goes to a few in that group.
We can see the same thing in the Jan Dhan Yojana. It is aimed at the individual, whereas the Congress had been focussing on economic groups via its differential rate of interest schemes and such like. A few got the benefits and the rest were left with a hope.
The Modi-Nehru style, of targeting the individual, makes it easy for critics to point to the unfulfilled part. Indeed, the former United Progressive Alliance minister P Chidambaram makes a weekly meal of it.
The problem with targeting individuals is that even if Mr Modi succeeds in quadrupling the number of people who benefit from his policies - which his government keeps tweeting and trumpeting - in absolute terms the number of those who will get nothing will still remain very high, perhaps in the hundreds of millions. That’s enough to put the party workers on the ground on the defensive when people ask them, “Yes, but what did I get?”
Sonia Gandhi thought she could focus on the individual via her Mahtma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and went unrewarded in 2014 after it had taken off between 2008 and 2014. Under attack that he was going to dismantle MGNREGA, Mr Modi told Parliament in 2014 that he was too good a politician to do that. He raised the allocation to it - and lost in Bihar.
In Assam he promised the group – the Hindus – that he would stop immigration from Bangladesh.
And he won.