It isn't easy being Rahul Gandhi

The government of the day is adamant in showing Rahul as intellectually inadequate, emotionally unstable and now also an alleged money launderer

It has become a habit for many commentators to trash the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi. In their reckoning, he is one person who does not follow Dale Carnegie's advice on how to win friends and elections - hence he is abrasive and alienates his party men. Consequently, everything that is going wrong with the Congress party is blamed on him: from the ignominious loss in the 2014 parliament elections to an angry exit of a political nobody, Ghulam Nabi Azad, at a time when the party is heading for a 'Bharat Jodo Yatra' and elections to the party president. Bizarrely, this time, his detractors are also blaming him for ushering in the much-delayed internal democracy in the party.

The truth is that it is not easy to be Rahul Gandhi when the government of the day is adamant in showing him as intellectually inadequate, emotionally unstable and organisationally inept and now also an alleged money launderer. He has been interrogated for 55 hours by the Enforcement Directorate regarding the Gandhis' attempts to revive their struggling newspaper, National Herald. The Gandhis were careless when bringing about these changes, but no one really believes that they could have shortchanged their own publication, which was started by their great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, as the vehicle to disseminate nationalist ideas. Now Gandhis live in fear of being put away in jail for a long time without the ED, under the new dispensation, providing evidence of why they had been arrested. It is in these difficult circumstances that the scion of the Gandhi family and his ailing mother, Sonia, have been leading one of the oldest political parties in the world, Congress.

Also Read | Congress must answer Ghulam Nabi Azad in party poll

Though it is not fashionable to defend the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi, the truth is that contrary to all spin doctoring, the party is still a force to reckon with in many parts of the country. Since 2014, the Congress has indeed won many state elections under Gandhi's leadership. That way, he has shown that the invincibility of the BJP under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah was a well-crafted fiction. After the 2019 general elections, that colossal poll debacle, the country has forgotten that Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa were won in 2017 and beyond but could not hang on to all of them as different state governments were brought down by enticing their MLAs. For instance, Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh, Eknath Shinde in Maharashtra and other worthies in Goa, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur helped in pulling down non-BJP governments, including in Karnataka.

More recently, a beleaguered Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, under pressure from the BJP, has claimed that ever since 2014, the BJP has managed to get 277 MLAs defected. They put an enormous cost to this operation and claim that a similar one is being played out in Delhi, where allegedly 40 odd MLAs are endeavoured to be bought by well-funded ruling party brokers. Kejriwal's deputy, Manish Sisodia, whose house was raided, revealed pressure from the probe agencies to quit Aam Admi Party (AAP) and join BJP. He is not the only one who has made these allegations.

Also Read | Shashi Tharoor reportedly contemplating running for Congress president post

Many others before him in Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and even Rajasthan, where Congress CM, Ashok Gahlaut, managed to save the Congress government, have made similar allegations. The amount of money offered is so mind-boggling that it is difficult to believe anyone can resist the double whammy of threats from enforcement agencies for putting people behind bars on some dodgy issues of corruption or money laundering and the promise of pay-offs.

According to a TV channel, 600 opposition leaders and their relatives have been subjected to corruption probes by the government. No leader from the BJP has had to contend with investigations from the CBI or ED. In these circumstances, would it be possible for any party to engage in any normal politics? What makes matters worse for the Congress party is the sustained campaign of the BJP, which met some opposition from within, to create a "Congress-free India". The implications of this campaign suggest that the Congress party was a scourge that the country needed to get rid of.

In these circumstances, Rahul Gandhi has had to fight his demons and those that reside within his own party. Besides the group of 23 that decided to raise the banner of revolt against the party leadership for displaying drift and not having internal democracy, the former president, Rahul Gandhi, has also been confronting opposition from his mother and some of her advisors on holding party elections. Family faithful, the late ML Fotedar never felt the need for internal elections and dilution of the Gandhis in the Congress' scheme of things. To be fair, Rahul Gandhi had been talking about party elections for many years, but his hand stayed as he was told that internal democracy could be destabilising. More so in the post-2014 era, when the Congress is in the opposition, a better-funded ruling party could cause harm to the electoral process in unimaginable ways.

Ghulam Nabi Azad's departure represents the real threat to Congress party as it embarks on its attempts to renew itself through a long march and elections. Azad has been part of the coterie that served the Gandhis for a long time. And he was rewarded by being nominated to Rajya Sabha five times and being the CM of Jammu and Kashmir. Ever since he became the signatory of the group of 23 within the Congress, his dalliances with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have become a public spectacle. Despite the recent release of the rapists of Bilkis Bano in Gujarat, Azad found the PM compassionate. Though he denies that he would join the BJP, the kind of venom he is spewing against Rahul Gandhi suggests that he will not go away quietly and do his best to blight the party's electoral process - if the polls are held and not prove to be a stillborn exercise. His attack against Rahul Gandhi of being immature is an attempt to delegitimise him and show him as incapable of becoming a party head. It does not worry him that he himself is a creation of the arbitrariness and adhocism that epitomised the Congress coterie, and he has no credentials to be talking of internal democracy.

Azad's attack is a manifestation of the challenge coming from other parties to the Congress party that is inherently non-democratic. Do they worry about how they would deal with a situation of the Congress having internal democracy?

Many Congress leaders are adamant that they would have Rahul Gandhi as the party president, but the buzz in the organisation is that he has made it amply clear to his mother and others that he is not interested. Some suggest that there is a personal issue other than the fear of being arrested that prevents him from becoming the party president. If Rahul Gandhi decides to stay away from elections, it could spell a slow end to Gandhis' involvement with the Congress party. Would that help the grand old party or the country as PM Modi claims? Only time will tell.

(The writer is the Editor of Hardnews magazine)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.