Does the Congress party need the Gandhis or the Gandhis, the party?

So one more Congress chintan shivir and more Congress stalwart, Kapil Sibal, quits the party. Last week, it was Sunil Jhakar. 

Thus, once again we see how politics can be full of ironies. You can have a leader without a party or you can have a party without a leader. 

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The Congress is a perfect example of the latter, namely, a great party without a leader. The descendants of Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the wife of Rajiv Gandhi are totally useless as vote-getters. Yet they continue as the party’s supreme bosses, a three-person politburo, if you like. 

The reason given is that without them the party will fall apart. But this ignores a new and very harsh reality: it’s falling apart anyway. Indeed, it is a wonder that it has taken so long. 

That said, it’s useful to flip the question and ask who needs who more: the party the Gandhis or the Gandhis the party. In 1998 when the Congress appointed Sonia Gandhi to lead the party, it needed the family more because it was slowly disintegrating then, just as it is now. 

But today, as a shrewd observer of the party points out, it's the other way round. Without the party the Gandhis will be consigned to the dustbin of history. 

In fact, without the party, they will be sitting ducks like the former finance minister, whose experience since his arrest a few years ago, is a pointer to what could happen to the Gandhis. Legal nightmares will haunt them mercilessly. 

That’s also why they are surrounded by what Mr Jhakar called ‘chaaplooses’ (sycophants) who keep up the myth that the party needs them. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s hard to understand, though, what the yes men get out of hanging around these losers. 

Remember: Rahul Gandhi lost his family’s traditional pocket borough in Amethi in 2019. It could be Sonia Gandhi in 2024. 

The extraordinary thing is that in 2019 the Congress received 19 percent of the vote. But did these people vote for the Gandhis or the local leaders who happened to belong to the Congress?

The answer is absolutely clear. That 19 percent is the sum of the votes cast for local leaders, not for the Gandhis. Those local leaders are low hanging fruit now which the BJP is plucking as more and more of them despair over their futures in the Congress. 

Soon, the Congress will be like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. It vanished slowly till only its smile was left. That, by the way, has happened to dozens of political parties the world over. The Congress will be an exception only if the myth that the party needs the Gandhis is demolished. 

When will that stage be reached? The answer has to be in the vote share. 

If it goes down below 15 percent in 2024, which it probably will, the remnant won’t be enough to make the BJP think twice before it acts against the Gandhis. Right now it’s the 19 percent share and the danger of making them martyrs that’s holding it back. 

What makes this sharp decline in vote share very likely is the presence of alternatives. The Aam Aadmi Party is a front runner in this regard. But there are others too. 

In other words, the Gandhi empire will be like Shah Alam’s about whom it was said “Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam”. (The empire of Shah Alam is from Delhi to Palam, a village about 30 km to the southwest from the Red Fort.)