After they had been guillotined, it was famously said of the Bourbons that they had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The outcome of the Congress party's latest conference -- labelled, altogether too grandiosely, as the Pachmarhi Declaration -- suggests that the Congress is no different. One can only hope that it will face the guillotine with even better grace than the Bourbons.
The Pachmarhi meeting had provided the Congress with two important opportunities. One was to reaffirm its undiluted faith in economic reform, the other was to face up to the new political reality that people no longer want it to govern India on its own. Not wholly surprisingly, it failed to use both opportunities.
Instead, on economic reform the party made it clear that when it comes to the dreaded R-word, it will leap away like a scalded cat. Indeed, rather like the Bourbons, it wants to restore the ancien regime by reverting to the ideas of the Avadi Congress of 1955.
Amazing? Not at all. It is precisely such nonsense that appeals to the Left, which means that Sonia has begun an intricate game of foot- sie with those two old romantics, Comrades Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet.
The Left, one might exclaim? In this day and age? Even more amazing? Not really, if you are from the Nehru-Gandhi family. The tendency to lurch drunkenly to the Left has for long run in the family.
Thus, Nehru in 1951 when Purushottam Das Tandon challenged him, Indira Gandhi in 1969 when she challenged the Syndicate and, Rajiv Gandhi in 1987, when he thought he was being clever. All have done deals with the Left when faced with political challenge. It is almost reflexive in their case.
But this ploy is going to fail because when history repeats itself the fourth time, tragedy, farce and disaster have all been exhausted. Only contempt remains. Contempt because this exposes the utter intellectual bereftment of the Congress party. In fact, this is one more aspect in which it resembles the BJP. Intellectually, the Congress has become a cross between a parrot and a mule -- reiterating inanities and refusing to budge.
On the political side, the Congress has boldly said that it will not consider coalitions except if one is inescapable and that too only after working out a prior agreement on issues. If this is supposed to make the Congress look brave as well as virtuous -- in Indian politics the two don't go together -- it will have to think again.
Coalitions are formed only if no party gets a majority on its own. Moreover, if this is the pre-election assessment, it is now customary to enter into pre-poll alliances. In that sense, the Congress hasn't said anything new. Instead, wholly unnecessarily, it may have succeeded not only in putting off the two Yadav supremos from UP and Bihar but also in sowing seeds of doubt in its own ranks.
It has been suggested by some, including this newspaper, that the Congress is trying to get back its old umbrella character. Such an attempt may well be worth making but, surely, trying to revive old caste formations like KHAM is a non-starter, at least until the current generation of OBC politicians have lost faith in this strategy. After all, they gain more from separate, caste-based political identities than by surrendering to an Italian-born heiress of dubious political appeal.
It has been suggested by several expert observers of the Congress party that too much should not be read into the Pachmarhi meeting. They say that it was no more than a show designed to reinforce Sonia Gandhi's control over the party and not a proper foray into electoral politics -- which one must assume now is some distance away. If so, that may be the only success of the meeting and possibly not an unqualified one. Sonia Gandhi needs to ask herself if she has not a made a rather one-sided bargain with the "socialists" in her party.
Another question which she may find herself asking in a few months is why Sharad Pawar wants to leave the Congress. And the answer may well be that there are 35 MPs from Maharashtra. Most of them are beholden to Mr Pawar who has been rudely shoved aside thrice. How long is it going to be before he asks himself if he won't be better off with a regional outfit of his own?
The fact is that if the Congress wants to return to power, it will have to allow the people not only time to get fed up with the alternatives -- as they have with the Janata sort of thing -- but also to forget its own misdeeds while it was in power. That could take quite a long time, perhaps as long as a decade.
In the meantime, Madame Gandhi, why not try some real work amongst the people? It usually helps, they say.
