ONE REASON FOR CONG’S STATE OF SUSPENDED ANIMATION SINCE THE 2019 ELECTORAL DEBACLE HAS BEEN THE EMERGENCE OF A DE FACTO POWER GROUP

party and in states where the Congress has governments.

The internecine tussle gave rise to a party-within-the-party; a parallel power structure that limited the space of the old guard and their set of young supporters. The result: a largely dysfunctional Congress under an ailing Sonia Gandhi who enjoyed wide respect but lacked the energy that helped her navigate it to power in 2004 and 2009.

In the short run, the haemorrhage can be plugged through a representative advisory council the CWC decided to constitute to help Sonia Gandhi in the remaining period of her interim presidency. The envisioned panel’s inclusive character could keep the chasms from widening. That’s needed because the most unsettling fallout from the feud has been the Congress’s obsolescence, in terms of public perception, as an alternative to the Bharatiya Janata Party. It won elections in the interregnum, but not the popular trust to project itself as a viable democratic option.

The authors of the much-debated letter seeking an organisational overhaul under an elected leader with a tangible presence could read the message -- and decided to alert the incumbent dispensation. They had their little nests to feather. They saw, nevertheless, the withering of the tree -- which is the Congress -- on which they were perched with the arriving sparrows of generational change.

Be it as it may, several party functionaries consider the built-up friction more complex than a battle between the old and the young. They decode it as a pushback against relative beginners who have -- or pretend to hold – Rahul Ganshi’s power of attorney. Holding junior positions in the AICC set up, or as members of his inner circle,