The other Gandhis who may need to give up leadership
PremiumHumanitarian movements funded by old money have done little and this is India’s real tragedy
Every now and then there are elections, the Indian National Congress fares poorly, and all sorts of people then call for liberating the party from the Gandhi household. The party’s top rung has a series of dinners in Delhi. People can’t talk, it seems, without eating. Unattributed news would leak that the Gandhis are willing to step aside, but then the most powerful members of the party would plead with the family not to quit, and the family would gracefully agree to stay on formally and in other ways.
This has been the recent history of the Congress and the chain of events was repeated again a few days ago. But with every electoral defeat, calls for its liberation from the Gandhis have grown bolder and louder within the party and its long tail of intellectuals, activists, media observers and other politicians who are not called politicians. Even people who don’t vote Congress call for the resignation of the Gandhis—just for a lark, like how Indians honk without knowing why. Asking the Gandhis to resign is an Indian subculture.
There are Gandhis in other spheres of Indian life, people whose surname is not Gandhi but were born into privilege, into luck, and who are classy in an old-world way. They can be found today in academia, responsible journalism, activism, policy circles, think tanks, environmentalism, something called civil society, art, culture and the subjective humanities establishment. This is the long tail of the Congress party, the fellowships of those who used to feed off its power.
They had two informal political jobs: to promote the party, and to promote its values. As we can see, the long-tail, too, has failed. The metaphorical Gandhis of the long tail who control, run or occupy the liberal Congress ecology have not been able to stop the emergence of a new India that is the exact opposite of what they hoped to achieve. But they are more distraught by the failure of the original Gandhis in elections. And they now say aloud what they never had the courage to say in open, that “the Gandhis should go". But what about them ? Shouldn’t they, too, face the consequences of failure, and make way for more talented evangelists of their gospel?
To understand the scale of what our metaphorical Gandhis control, let us first look at what the Congress party stands for. To understand anyone fully, we must consider their best side, not their worst. So do not let the party’s reality interfere with the marvel of their first principles. The party is an umbrella for various pressure groups and regional grouses. As a result, it stands for a broad and unique set of absolute virtues that no other political party in India can easily adopt without antagonizing a sizeable voter base. Generally in modern India, if you feel you are prospering or you feel you have some cultural swag, you lean towards the Bharatiya Janata Party, but if you feel unlucky, depressed, bereft of job prospects, poorer than before, culturally insecure and seek political compassion, you are in the Congress frame of mind. Thus there is a significant moral reason for the party to exist and also an obligation to achieve power.
The metaphorical Gandhis are in the same moral space, which is why it is not surprising that they directly and indirectly campaign for the Congress. A decade ago, when the party ran India, its national advisory council that “advised" the prime minister was made up of social activists and intellectuals, most of whom, in terms of class and luck, were long-tail Gandhis. They failed in their evangelism as badly as the Gandhi household and the Congress party.
Liberal ideals of Western extraction, which once had many prophets in the Congress long-tail, are faceless today in India. The ideals themselves have faded away. Since my childhood, I have seen people describe themselves as socialists, communists, human rights activists, anarchists, environmentalists and other things. What exactly have they achieved? The same people are now fighting the same battles on behalf of the same kind of people, who are in fact worse off if you take into account how far ahead the middle classes and rich have moved. So what did all that activism achieve? What did all their angry essays achieve?
I do not say that the Congress long-tail has been useless. I am sure they have somehow made some lives better, brought justice to some and influenced useful policy. But this is like saying the original Gandhis, too, have not been a washout. The Congress does win some seats here and there, and even form a government here and there. I say this is not enough.
Our most important idea is that the lucky should take care of the unlucky, and this idea in India is managed by those who are not smart enough to succeed and will not make way for the more talented to take over.
Historically, human progress has been triggered by three forces: when greed drives the economy, when a society’s second rung revolts against the elite in the masquerade of activism, and when people do compassionate things because human misery breaks their hearts. From what I see around me, most of India’s progress is because of market forces and the enchantment of greed—of entrepreneurs looking to prosper and politicians with the same goal. The humanitarian movements controlled by old money have done very little. This has been India’s real disaster. Organized compassion and direct action need exceptionally smart people. Our crisis is that we have no mechanism to filter incompetence out of humanitarian efforts. Maybe one great humane act they can do is sacking themselves so that smarter people can take charge. They need to do to themselves what they ask the Gandhis to do. Get out of the way.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’
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