A combination of Priyanka as the organisational head and Rahul as the parliamentary face could put Congress on a trajectory of comeback.
PANDIT Dwarka Prasad Mishra, a two-term Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, who emerged as an effective power centre in New Delhi in the initial days of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister (he brokered truce between her and Morarji Desai—making Desai agree to be Deputy PM; the truce was short lived), once analysed for me and my deceased colleague Udayan Sharma the reason for the inefficacy of Congress in the initial days of Rajiv Gandhi as AICC general secretary.
DP Mishra (his son Brajesh Mishra ran the show in New Delhi in the Atal Behari Vajpayee era) lived at 11 Race Course Road (now Lok Kalyan Marg) and from there the politics of 1 Safdarjung Road, the PM House of Indira Gandhi vintage, was manipulated. According to Mishra, who was in those days referred to as ‘Chanakya’, it is the right of every successor to demolish the power structure set up by the predecessor and build a new edifice. Jawaharlal Nehru dispensed with the favourites of Mahatma Gandhi—Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya JB Kripalani, Acharya Narendra Dev, Jayaprakash Narayan and a host of stalwarts walked away from the Congress in the Nehru era. Lal Bahadur Shastri retained most of the Nehru structure in his short, twoyear tenure, during which a major war was fought but there were no electoral contests. When Indira Gandhi took over, aided by the likes of DP Mishra, she created a new power equation. The old guard were summarily eased out or challanged. The 1969 split gave Indira Gandhi a Congress behemoth loyal to her and bound by her thought.
The triumph of 1971 and 1972 elections followed. Then came the Allahabad judgment and the consequential declaration of Emergency.
This story is from the April 2017 edition of gfiles.
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This story is from the April 2017 edition of gfiles.
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