All conversations these days lead to the upcoming general elections - who will win, who will lose. If the other person happens to be from the corporate sector, you can be sure that nine times out of 10 he will argue in support of Narendra Modi (he is seen as decisive and business-friendly, lapses in raj dharma notwithstanding) and against Rahul Gandhi (confused and aloof). One line I have heard often in such conversations, especially over the last 10 days or so, is that after so many reverses, Rahul Gandhi, had he been the CEO of a corporation, would have lost his job by now. If that hasn't happened, it is because the Congress is like any old family-controlled Indian company: the promoter-CEO keeps on bungling, but nobody dares to take him to task.
If Rahul Gandhi is not the charismatic leader that Jawaharlal Nehru was, it is understandable: it's well established by now that the entrepreneurial spirit weakens with every generation. Some social scientists say it withers away totally in three generations. (Starting from Motilal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi is a fifth-generation national leader.) And it is equally well established that Indian promoters run their companies like personal fiefdoms, unfettered and unchecked. Vijay Mallya, for instance, wouldn't have lost his business if only his shareholders had cautioned him against diversifying into aviation. The list of discredited businessmen is long. The problem is that the ecosystem has always been accommodative of them, always tolerant of their mistakes. It is only now that banks have decided to name and shame errant businessmen, though only after they were nudged to do so by Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
It is tempting to see the Congress as a corporation, the Gandhi family as its promoter, and Rahul Gandhi as its CEO. But I don't know if it is strictly right to call the Gandhi family the promoter of the Congress. The shareholders of the Congress are its members. (Anybody above 18 can become a member; the fee is Rs 5 for five years.) So this makes all members equal promoters. There is no majority shareholder. Anybody can rise to the top, at least in theory. But it is possible to have outsize voting rights - the so-called golden share. This seems to be the reason for the exalted status of the Gandhi family in the Congress. Disproportionate voting rights can be vested in one shareholder if he owns the crucial intellectual property on which the enterprise survives or is the custodian of its brand equity. I'm not sure if the Gandhi family can lay claim to all the intellectual property of the Congress, but brand equity is a different matter.
It fuels the power of the Gandhi family; none within the Congress can even come close to it. It comes from almost a hundred years in public life and over four decades of running the country, directly or indirectly. Ashok Gehlot, who had to make way for Vasundhara Raje of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) earlier this month in Rajasthan, recently told The Indian Express that the Gandhi family "has made huge sacrifices for the nation and they have given up their live working for this country. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were martyred". Shashi Tharoor, minister of state for education, was quoted in Hindustan Times as saying, "Whenever someone from the Nehru-Gandhi family is available and willing, he or she is the natural leader of the Congress." This sums up where the Gandhi surname fits in the Congress brand architecture. Remove the Gandhis and the connection with the struggle for independence is lost. It could be coincidence, but the progeny of other Congress stalwarts of the pre-Independence era are not around to challenge the Gandhi family - at least not in any serious way.
Does it mean that legacy matters more than issues in India? If not, the Congress may be barking up the wrong tree and its strategy needs mid-course correction. Congress leaders choose to believe otherwise. Mr Tharoor, in the same report, called the Gandhi family "the force of unity within the Congress". To be fair, Gandhi is the only political surname that resounds all over the country, though its ability to leverage the brand recall to get votes can be debated. The rise of the BJP and the regional parties, coupled with the success of the Aam Aadmi Party in the recent elections to the Delhi legislative Assembly, suggests that brand equity alone doesn't translate into sales or win elections: the product has to work as well.
Rahul Gandhi, it must be said, has been trying to clean up the Congress, especially in the selection of candidates for elections. This is that part of the Congress that faces the voter (consumer). It cannot afford to look bad. The benefits of such a strategy will show up in the long run. Just like a corporation in restructuring mode must take a few quarters of bad results in its stride, the Congress needs to budget for some electoral loss.
The vital question is: if the party's shareholders (members) are unhappy with the leadership, can they change it? (It must be said that this doesn't happen frequently in the corporate world too, though increased shareholder activism in the West has served to keep promoter-CEOs on their toes.) Actually, there exist within the Congress channels to transmit disaffection: through the hierarchy of committees. But it seldom works. This is one of the rots that Rahul Gandhi wants to stem.
Postscript: Mahatma Gandhi wanted the Congress to wind up after Independence. In that sense, he saw the party not as a corporation, one that has a long life, but as a special purpose vehicle set up to achieve a specific goal.
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