Ten years after

Sonia Gandhi is the first person to have been president of the 122-year-old Congress for as long as a whole decade. This reflects both her strength and the party's weakness, since it shows the extent of the party's dependence on one individual. Admittedly, even the BJP and its predecessor the Jan Sangh have not produced any new top-rung leaders for nearly four decades, as the same two leaders have towered over the party from the late 1960s. As for the other parties in the country, with the exception of the Communists, all of them revolve around a single person and his/her offspring""and this is true of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Telugu Desam, the DMK and AIADMK, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Shiv Sena, the Akali Dal, the National Conference, the Biju Janata Dal, and so on. It would seem that individuals in Indian politics fashion parties as their personal vehicles, rather than the other way round. A visit to the Congress party's website makes transparently clear the extent to which it focuses on projecting the Gandhi family, to the almost total exclusion of everyone else.

Sonia Gandhi perhaps did not wish to be the party's sole rallying point. She stepped in and became party president when the Congress seemed to be in mortal danger of crumbling before one's eyes, around the time of the 1998 elections. Partymen were leaving in droves, the organisation was rudderless and seemingly devoid of any larger purpose, and it took the rallying power of the Gandhi name to stem the rot and set the party on the course to a fresh cohesiveness. Since then, Gandhi has moved the party away from Narasimha Rao's "soft Hindutva", away even from Rajiv Gandhi's modernist impulse, and more in line with Indira Gandhi's stress on the poor and minorities as the party's prime support base.

The difference is that Sonia Gandhi has tried to address three problems: an economic system that does not make a tangible difference to the lives of the poor despite rapid growth, partymen who have no great commitment to anything other than to their own advancement, and a government that is incapable of delivering the goods to the poor. Her response has been two-fold: draw on the conviction and energy of civil society activists to influence both politics and government, and focus on big-ticket, broad-sweep programmes that will make a difference in the remotest villages""hence the rural employment guarantee programme, the law on the right to information, the tribal land rights law, and such. From what has been in evidence so far, it would seem that Rahul Gandhi is made from the same mould.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the strategy has its central weakness, in that it continues to depend for its success on an imperfect government that is immune to change. Politically, the dependence on old party faithfuls irrespective of their ability to contribute to the party's growth and popularity, combines poorly with a High Command-oriented decision-making process that Rahul Gandhi criticised the other day for its lack of internal democracy. The fall-out is the party's glaring failure to make inroads into key states where the Congress presence has virtually disappeared""Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat. Since these states account for more than 40 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha, this condemns the Congress to status quo with about 25 per cent of the popular vote and a diminished status as the weak leader of a disparate coalition that pulls in many directions, and in which the primary concern of many coalition partners is to make as much money as quickly as possible. If Sonia Gandhi is to truly earn her place in history, she has to find a way to change this.