Chronicle of a collapse

Despite nearly coming undone in 2019, Sanjay Jha’s book attempts to put the belief back into the grand old party.

At the outset, Sanjay Jha’s The Great Unravelling is ostensibly about India’s ‘great unravelling’ since 2014, but at its core, it is about the great unravelling of the country’s oldest political party. In any case, Jha doesn’t distinguish between the two. To him, failure of the Congress is the failure of liberal values, inclusion, plurality, and most importantly, secularism.

We’ve heard some version of this from the former spokesperson of the Indian National Congress in television debates. In the book, we hear it more forcefully; the outrage is in full display, the extent of the country’s tilt to right-wing extremism presented with facts and with greater urgency, as if the author wants to grab our shoulders and shake us out of our usual indifference about politics.

Jha’s criticism of the BJP is justifiable, even if the shrillness may startle some who haven’t heard it at this decibel level before. And why not? The country’s secular fabric is so much in tatters that a person who hails Gandhi’s assassin as a patriot was voted to the Parliament in 2019. Lynching of people belonging to the minority faith is so common that the news reports about them are received with cold indifference, and the economy, built through years of hard work, has been left in tatters.

A helpless witness

As a helpless witness to Congress’ second crushing defeat at the hands of the BJP, Jha painstakingly chronicles the journey of the saffron party from its failures to becoming a champion of muscular nationalism; he explains how the party effectively mischaracterised the opposition while presenting itself as a weapon against corruption and black money.

The combination of “shoddy communication skills, sloppy governance, poor image management and substandard political articulation” destroyed the Congress-led UPA in 2014. But in 2019, a year when it should’ve exposed the BJP’s glaring failures on multiple fronts, the grand old party once again balked.

This, despite having emerged buoyant from the victory of three Hindi heartland states in December 2018 and the “bearding of the lion” in its own den in Gujarat a year before, by getting tantalizingly close to winning the state.

Besides, Congress also had a “gamechanger” in the minimum income guarantee scheme Nyay and the “effective” campaign built around the Rafael deal. The idea that Congress would somehow get about 115 to 125 seats and become the major constituent of a potential UPA-III coalition seemed like a real possibility.

Despite the May 2019 gut-wrencher, Jha shows how the defeat wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the sharper polarisation. “At a private club in Mumbai, a Stanford university postgraduate with a smattering of salt-and-pepper in his enviable hair, had once told me that his biggest fear was that the Muslim population would overtake the majority Hindus in a few decades,” he writes. “The conversation made clear to me that the BJP’s social media fake- news factory had devoured unguarded minds, even among the most educated of citizens.”

Toxic hate

With the toxic hate filling the atmosphere and the two communities divided bitterly, Jha examines the need for the Congress to reinvent itself instead of falling back into slumber and letting its “organisational muscle” atrophy badly. And his criticism of the Congress is largely from this perspective, although it’s no less severe.

Cautioning that the party can’t consider itself as the default rulers and wait for the BJP’s failure, Jha goes on to spot several issues in the Congress right from the lack of inner-party democracy to self-serving leaders keeping the high command in an “echo chamber”. These are not entirely unfamiliar issues even to outsiders, but hearing it from an insider only confirms the prevailing maladies in the grand old party.

Coloured judgement?

It may be harder to buy the argument that the Congress’ woes is largely due to its clumsy communication strategy, but Jha’s criticism was at least clear. The same, however, can’t be said about his examination of Rahul Gandhi. It’s as if he has allowed his liking of the man to colour his judgement of him.

Even the most skeptical might concede the point that Rahul is probably the most misunderstood politician, but it’s a bit of a stretch to term him as the “original iconoclast” before Arvind Kejriwal. At least not on the basis of the “PR disaster” caused by the spectacle around his (metaphorical) tearing up of the ordinance protecting convicted legislators, although he’s right in saying how much the ‘Suit-Boot Ki Sarkar’ gibe hit its mark. In fact, his facile examination of the former Congress chief only shows the Gandhi scion as a man damaged beyond repair by the BJP social media machinery.

In the end, this book helps reinforce the belief that there’s still hope for the opposition to emerge as a formidable force. As Jha points out “a week is a long time in politics”. Three and-a-half years should be sufficient time for the grand old party to reinvent itself, discover its narrative and protect the “idea of India.”