Cricket coaches ask a simple question to those who want to be included in the team: how many runs have you scored and how many wickets have you taken? That approach always settles the matter - except, it seems, in the Congress party where they ask: who are your parents?
The same outcome-oriented method can be applied to any kind of performance including the recent elections to the five small, medium and large state assemblies. And the lessons from elections, too, can be drawn at the small, medium and large level.
The small level is the constituency analysis. It is for the party hacks.
The medium level is the election strategy, which is for the party bigwigs.
And the large level is the implications for national-level parties like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is also for the voters.
Commentators, attackers, and defenders usually tend to move seamlessly between the three categories of small, medium and large. This is clever as well as stupid because it obfuscates as well as highlights.
As such it serves no purpose. You can see this in what happens every evening on the news channels.
Their net effect is what is called confirmation bias: people absorb only what they want to hear. The rest is dismissed as bias by both sides.
Good philosophy, bad practice
The small and medium lessons - constituency analysis and election strategy - are not of much concern to voters. But the large lessons are, because they pertain directly to the extent of voter choice.
If it shrinks below a certain level, we should worry. If it expands above a certain level, then again we should worry. Just as in business, in politics also there is an optimal but dynamic level for political contestation.
This is the point that the Congress party seems unable to grasp. Its failure to do so is shrinking voter choice, which is not a good thing. A Congress-mukt Bharat might be good for the BJP-RSS and the regional parties whose dirty work the BJP is doing. But it is not good for India.
This is because few can seriously challenge the Congress's overall political philosophy. Its amorphous, soft-at-the-edges quality is ideal for a diverse country like India.
But philosophy is one thing, practice another. That is why everyone outside the Congress is saying that the Nehru-Gandhi family must not be seen as the only instrument for realising the party's philosophy.
Indeed, if India wants the Congress philosophy, which it should, the Congress must discard the Nehru-Gandhi family. This is the problem that the younger members of the party must solve if they truly believe in the Congress ideology.
The venal older members of the Congress are, after all, mere parasites who cannot survive without the Family. If it exits, so do they. They too need to be shown the door.
Nor is the point about political choice and the Congress restricted to the Nehru-Gandhi family. It applies to all families in politics. The 'family first' practice of the Congress, adopted by many regional parties, starts by first limiting the choice amongst leaders in the state and ends up limiting political choice itself.
You can see this in all the states where dynasties dominate: from Kashmir's National Conference to Tamil Nadu's Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, from Assam's Congress to Uttarakhand's, yes, Congress, the story is the same.
Love me, love my son?
But the dynasts need to pause and ask if loyalty to the sons/daughters is as intense as it was to the father/mother. We saw this was not so in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.
The Congress actually split in 1969 because Nehru loyalists could not stand Indira Gandhi. And it split again in 1978 after she lost the 1977 election because of the Emergency. Loyalty went out of the window.
One key Indira loyalist, Pranab Mukherjee, even left the party in 1985 because he didn't feel very loyal to her son. So did V P Singh in 1987, for the same reasons.
Then P V Narasimha Rao dented many remaining loyalties - and, but for the highly damaging Sitaram Kesri interlude, even the remaining loyalties would have faded.
And we must not forget Mamata Banerjee who left the Congress. Or the ever-unctuous and sneering P Chidambaram who left the party in 1996 to join a Tamil Congress formed by G K Moopanar and stayed out till November 2004. Sonia Gandhi had become party present six years earlier.
So loyalty cannot be taken for granted as being wholly transferable. We can see this in the Nationalist Congress Party also.
Indeed, the post-2014 exodus from the Congress has already started. It is a trickle right now, but could become a quite a flood.
That is why it is worth wondering how much of the loyalty expressed for Rahul Gandhi is actually for his mother, which brings to mind the once famous 1963 book by Welles Hangen: After Nehru, Who?
Here the 'who' would be 'what'.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
