Rasheed Kidwai, Senior Journalist and Author

THE Congress is not imploding. It is just that the intense power struggle among various competing interests in the grand old party has entered a decisive phase. The Gandhi trio — Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka — is closing ranks. A number of regional satraps, chief ministers of Congress-ruled states, the old guard and others intend to assert themselves and extract their pound of flesh from party posts, Assembly poll ticket distribution etc.

Sonia Gandhi, Congress’ longest serving party chief, now seems to have begun discarding her focus on unity within the party at all costs, consensus-building and attempts to carry everyone along. The realisation has come after her rather uneventful stint as AICC’s ‘interim president’ from August 2019, that her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka have a different temperament to run the party organisation. Sonia has reportedly conveyed once again to senior party leaders that she would not like to continue as interim chief, even for a day beyond August 10. As per the Congress constitution, the interim chief, in any case, is not supposed to have a tenure beyond a year.

The ongoing political crisis in party-ruled Punjab, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh is now witnessing a pattern of sorts. Rahul, who was the 87the president of the Congress and tipped to take over from Sonia, wants to ‘judge’ party leaders at all levels of hierarchy, instead of being guided by the past, experience, loyalty or ‘nuisance’ value. His quest for a ‘new Congress’ has become more complicated in the absence of electoral success, which has been a prerequisite for political authority.

Assisting Rahul in the endeavour is Priyanka Gandhi, the in-house crisis manager. Priyanka has subtly elevated Rahul as a ‘supreme leader’ of sorts by meeting disgruntled leader Navjot Singh Sidhu first and then helping him have an audience with Rahul. The subtext for the party leaders was clear — they would get to meet Rahul only after placing their cards on the table and professing loyalty to the young Gandhi.

It remains to be seen if the Punjab template would work in Rajasthan, where Sachin Pilot has been waiting patiently for Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot to fulfil the promises he had made in terms of accommodating Pilot camp followers in Rajasthan’s council of ministers and the state party organisation. Both Capt Amarinder Singh and Ashok Gehlot are seasoned campaigners and respected leaders within the Congress, though their track record in the Assembly elections is patchy. Capt Amarinder led the party to victory in 2002 and 2017, but suffered back-to-back defeats in 2007 and 2012. Gehlot faced reversals in 2003 as well as 2013.

There is more trouble brewing. The Hoodas versus Selja in Haryana; Siddaramaiah versus DK Shivkumar in Karnataka; Bhupesh Baghel versus TS Singhdeo in Chhattisgarh; Kamal Nath versus Ajay Singh in Madhya Pradesh; are part of a rather long list of disputes that require Rahul-Priyanka’s intervention. In addition, the poll preparations for Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Goa need a clearance from the Congress high command. The Congress’ handling of social media and mainstream media, television news etc. has been coming under a lot of criticism from within and outside. Rahul is under pressure to take some drastic and urgent steps.

That all is not well in the Congress was evident in the manner a recent virtual meeting took place in the presence of Sonia Gandhi. A discussion on Congress’ social media strategy took an ugly turn even as Sonia watched stoically, if not hopelessly. It happened when a section of the Congress began praising Rahul’s ‘White Paper’ on Covid-19 management against the Narendra Modi government on June 22. Someone intervened to say that on YouTube, it was watched merely by a few thousand people (current viewership is over 55,000) even though the Congress’ own membership would be a few millions or lakhs. An attack on social media head Rohan Gupta followed. Except for KC Venugopal, nobody came to the rescue of Gupta who had owed his allegiance to Ahmed Patel. Towards the end of the discussions, Priyanka Gandhi too reportedly agreed that the social media campaign required a fresh impetus.

It is worth recalling that in the 13 years that the mother-son duo worked together between 2004 and 2017, there were many occasions when Rahul’s vision and course of action were overturned and withdrawn by Sonia. The most glaring cases were Rahul’s initial thrust on the restoration of inner party democracy. Senior Congress leaders, also known as the old guard, worked overtime to advise Sonia to confine Rahul to the Youth Congress, NSUI and Sewa Dal. Rahul remained busy as the party general secretary in charge of these frontal organisations, while the main party organisation remained unaffected.

The question now is whether Rahul would get a chance to work as per his political instincts. Would it lead to a revival of the Congress is something that only the future can tell. Rahul seems to believe in Om Swami’s quote that “Success by design is infinitely better than a win by chance.”