Old older changeth, to be the same again

Congress veterans refuse to budge from their high perch and rigid doctrine of family-first as the party ‘young’ jockey for position

- Puneet Nicholas Yadav

EVEN before campaigning for the Delhi assembly polls began, the eventuality of yet another wipeout was not lost on anyone in the Congress. Notwithstanding the mild signs of electoral revival witnessed some months ago in Haryana or Jharkhand— or that of political savvy as seen in Maharashtra—even the dwindling breed of optimists in the party agreed privately that the Congress would fail to wrest a single seat in the city-state it ruled for 15 consecutive years before the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) pushed it to the fringes.

Yet, somehow, the predictable Delhi election result is being touted as a catalyst for the ongoing implosion of the Congress. Over the past fortnight, a bevy of Congress leaders have revived calls for urgently resolving the party’s leadership vacuum, effectively communicating its stand on critical socio-political issues and, as Jairam Ramesh said, “collective submergence of individual egos”.

True to Congress-style, the electoral drubbing also triggered unseemly reactions from party veterans like P. Chidambaram who applauded the AAP’s victory because it meant a defeat for the BJP, only to be met with criticism from the party’s Delhi leaders—Sharmistha Mukherjee being the most vocal—who wondered if the Congress had now “outsourced the task of defeating the BJP” to other parties. Running a parallel verbal duel were party leaders P.C. Chacko and Ajay Maken who sought to absolve themselves of responsibility for the defeat in Delhi by criticising the late Sheila Dikshit and got slammed in return by Pawan Khera, Milind Deora and Sandeep Dikshit.