Deve Gowda, found his fulfilment only in the UPA regimes after TMC had merged with Congress in Tamil Nadu in the larger interest of unification of secular forces, to stem the growing influence of the BJP with other regional allies like the AIADMK first and the DMK later.Almost 18 years hence, a fresh churning in the Congress thus comes as no surprise, though the focus this time is Rahul Gandhi-centric.The message, in the post-2014 Lok Sabha polls context, is loud and clear that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar cannot damage credible, regional faces, either through polarising tactics or by the so-called development plank. And back to the basics does imply a leadership crisis has to be overcome too. This is the new stage setting for the “grand old party” to rejuvenate itself, as the leadership of the Gandhi-Nehru family has been central to its identity in post-Independent India. The BJP, thanks China Knotter Device manufacturers to the Ram Janma Bhoomi Movement, was already on the ascendant despite the political genius of a P.Rewind to September 1998, to the famous “brainstorming session” of the All-India Congress Committee at Panchmarhi in Madhya Pradesh, where the party’s momentous resolution that later paved way for a new experiment in power-sharing at the Centre with like-minded parties (the nucleus of the UPA experiment so to say), ended with these words:
The Congress “under the leadership of Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, commits itself to becoming again the party of the brightest and the best, a party of principles and ideology, a party of ethics in politics, and thereby entitled to primacy in the country’s polity as the party which mirrors the hopes and aspirations of the millions of downtrodden and dispossessed of this country. And the PDP, which first got chief minister’s post in J&K and shared power with the Sonia Gandhi-led party, is currently sharing power with the BJP.The current leadership of the Congress thinks that the dynasty of Gandhi-Nehru family will continue to deliver as it has a pan-Indian appeal, despite the series of political setbacks since 1989 that really began with the Bofors’ gun deal expose in the media. It is true that the Congress did not come to power on its own majority at the Centre since the 1984 Lok Sabha polls. They include the All-India Trinamul Congress led by Mamata Banerjee, the NCP, and in J&K the Peoples Democratic Party founded by late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.It also means that the terms of engagement between the Congress high command and its state units should change, giving more powers to develop leadership at the State-level, just as Congress had regional satraps in the 1950s’ and 1960s’, ranging from Kamaraj, Nijalingappa, Devaraj Urs, S K Patil, Y.Earlier, the Congress loyalists used to ridicule breakaway factions by predicting that they cannot survive for long. (Photo: PTI)With barely three years to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, there cannot be a riper occasion for the Indian National Congress (INC), the major party of the Indian Independence movement, knitting a bewildering variety of people, ideas, cultures and faiths with a singularity of purpose, to grapple with a re-evaluation of its core. But they are finding it difficult to explain how the so called “wave” did not influence the polls in over half-a-dozen key states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Orissa, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Punjab.B.K. Senior Congress leaders, including the party chief ministers, concede that the party’s debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections was due to the Narendra Modi wave.At least three parties which came out of the Congress on different issues in the recent past, have not only survived but have become the ruling party in their respective states, either on their own or with allies.
