CONGRESS LEADERSHIP REMAINS AN UNDISPUTED GANDHI LEGACY
▶ Rahul Gandhi unaminously nominated to take over from his mother, Sonia, as the next head
As the process to determine the next president of India’s Congress party got under way, 89 nominations – from party members in every state – made their way to Congress headquarters in New Delhi.
But when party officials checked the nomination papers on Tuesday, they were all found to contain only one name: Rahul Gandhi.
Mr Gandhi, 45, the party’s vice president and the son of the present leader, Sonia Gandhi, will run unopposed in the election. If he has not withdrawn his nomination by the deadline on Monday, there will be no need for a vote.
“Rahul-ji has been the darling of the Congress,” said Manmohan Singh, the ordinarily reserved former Indian prime minister. “He will carry on the great tradition of the Congress party.”
Mr Gandhi’s promotion will feed the frequent criticism levelled at India’s oldest political party – that it is a dynastic organisation incapable of true democracy and dedicated only to the Gandhi family’s hold on power.
The party, founded in 1885, had a series of presidents drawn from every Indian community until independence in 1947.
But since then, three generations of family members have occupied the presidency for long periods. First Jawaharlal Nehru; then his daughter Indira Gandhi; her son Rajiv; and Rajiv’s wife Sonia.
Congress presidents from outside the family have mainly held the posts only briefly. In the 27 years since 1947 during which time Congress had neither a Nehru nor a Gandhi at its head, nine men occupied the role. In all but three cases, a Nehru or a Gandhi was prime minister, so the family was still the power centre.
Within the party, dissent is usually mild to non-existent. This time only one Congress member, Shehzad Poonawalla, the party secretary in the state of Maharashtra, has spoken out against Mr Gandhi’s “Mughal-style coronation”.
On Monday, Mr Poonawalla decried the nomination process as “a black day in the history of my party”, saying it was “unconstitutional and illegal”.
Last week, when nominations were still open, he called the internal election rigged.
He released letters he had written to Mr Gandhi this month, urging him to find “concrete solutions to curb dynasty politics in our party”.
But Mr Poonawalla was singing solo. Even his elder brother, Tehseen, another Congress member, disowned him.
“Me, my wife and my mother are no longer associated with this gentleman,” Tehseen said on Monday.
“I would like to clarify that me and my family are completely with Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party. We want Rahul Gandhi to take over as leader of the party.”
Mr Gandhi has only rarely addressed the question of his dynastic privilege.
“Most of the country runs like this,” he said during a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in September.
“It’s a problem in all political parties in India.”
He named other leaders who had followed their parents to lead their national or statelevel parties. “So don’t go after me. That’s what happens in India.”
Ever since Sonia Gandhi took over the Congress presidency in 1998 – seven years after Rajiv was assassinated – it seemed a foregone conclusion that one of her two children would follow her.
Mr Gandhi’s younger sister Priyanka has also thrown herself into campaigning for Congress, but has never taken on a bigger role within the party.
“She has a young family to nurture and we must remember that this family has lost two prime ministers to assassinations,” one high-ranking Congress official said.
But Ms Gandhi has shown an instinctive grasp of politics, the official said. “She gets the rhetoric right.”
Her brother “does not come across as a natural or trigger the insane, passionate loyalty that’s needed in politics, but he’s smart, very analytical, and works hard”, the official said.
For years, Mr Gandhi came across as a reluctant leader-inwaiting, but his enthusiasm grew after Congress suffered a drubbing in the 2014 general election, winning only 44 out of 545 parliamentary seats – its lowest tally to date.
His immediate duties are formidable.
His party has continued to fare poorly in state elections since 2014, inevitably losing to prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Now, if he does become party president, Mr Gandhi will have a year and a half to revitalise Congress before the next general election in 2019.
Since India’s independence in 1947, three generations of Gandhis have occupied the Congress presidency