Tuesday, August 04, 2020


Comprehending the convulsions in the Congress Party and comments in the media

                An intervention by Rajiv Satav in a meeting of his party MPs, late in July 2020, has stirred the placid affairs in the party once again some reactions; Satav’s demand that the party introspect its record since the time of the UPA-II has drawn criticism from insiders of the UPA-II regime. It is only natural. It is for the Congress party to resolve whether an introspection is called for and in the event decide the cut-off date; the party may even decide whether Dr. Manmohan Singh’s actions or inactions are interrogated or to put him on a pedestal for worship.
                The episode involving Satav, however, has become subject matter for discussion with journalists offering advice and even solutions to the party. Most of these consultants, indeed, have jumped in to attack Satav; if they are to be believed, Satav committed blasphemy. He dared to suggest that something that happened when Manmohan Singh held the reigns ought to be interrogated and judged as to whether the seeds of the party’s decline were sown then. Among them is Harish Khare (https://thewire.in/politics/the-fight-is-not-between-youngsters-and-seniors-but-of-three-gandhis-against-the-congress) who had been the Prime Minister’s media advisor.
It is not unusual for journalists to assume expertise on matters political and more so with developments within a political party. Such expertise, then, leads them turn into consultants; I must add here that consultants had emerged indispensable in anything and everything in the post-1991 era (coterminous with India embracing the Washington consensus and Manmohan Singh’s entry into the political domain). And as it is with consultants, the Congress party’s consultants too are wedded to an article of faith: The economic policy shift in July 1991 (which they call reforms) was the “bestest” (I know there is no such word in English language) thing to have happened to India and it could not have happened without Manmohan Singh around.
They will not listen to reason when pointed out that the reforms were not chosen by the regime then; that the Structural Adjustments Programme was not one of the many options but one that was thrust by the Brettenwoods institutions on India as it was done by the former colonialists on what they called the Developing Nations. Well. Consultancy assignments, by their very nature, are meant to highlight the pros of a proposition by those engaging them. In other words, they are not meant to substantiate arguments to the contrary unless their brief comes from those who seek to argue against a proposal.
                So, the demand by Rajiv Satav, an internal affair of the Congress party turning into an occasion for the consultants to get active and offer solutions raises a few questions. The questions are more justified when most of these solutions are in the nature of attacks against Rahul Gandhi. It is not my business here to put out one more prescription; and I do not wish to be included in the secret political clique or faction working for Rahul Gandhi (the cabal about which Harish Khare pointed fingers at).
                Having moved out of New Delhi almost quarter century ago and given up active journalism many years ago, I had not even heard of Satav; and as a matter of fact, I have not met Rahul Gandhi, his sister and their mother anytime. However, I have known some of those, in the party, who find Satav’s remark and demand untenable. Almost all, if not all, of them had come into the Congress party in the 1980s; some were known for having been loyal to Sanjay Gandhi and others who found themselves being liked by Rajiv Gandhi. While the Sanjay loyalists were not known for any exceptional skills in the technological or managerial sense, those who found themselves liked by Rajiv Gandhi were blessed with education from abroad or having been to the same school Rajiv did!
They did not have to work hard breathing dust and beating the heat and the cold as politicians of another generation had to. The collapse of the Janata Party and its regime in 1979 was also marked by the remnants of the Congress old-guard deserting Indira Gandhi (into the Congress-U) and Sanjay Gandhi’s followers thus became the party’s assets. Rajiv Gandhi added a few of his own to this; most of his old-school-boys did not remain with him for long. Some left the party to go elsewhere – Arun Nehru for instance- while many others quit politics for good – Arun Singh for instance. 
Among those who stayed were P.Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, Kamal Nath, Ashok Gehlot and Ahmed Patel. The party did not collapse for a while even after such of those like Arjun Singh and N.D.Tiwari tried setting up their own party; nor did the party provide space for a new crop and ended up with progenies of the satraps from another era. They all ended up profiting with the Congress party’s surprise win in 2004 and a repeat in 2009; UPA-I and II, indeed, were not due to the Congress party’s resurgence in any sense but by default. The two UPAs, then, were run by a bunch of supermanagers, to borrow a term from Thomas Piketty, a class that emerged in the 1980s; Piketty unravels the nexus between the arrival of the supermanagers, riding on claims to meritocracy and rampant inequalities in the share of national income across the world.
The point is those who were upset, within the Congress party and outside, with Rajiv Satav have their own reasons. These are like the supermanagers of the post-1980s who managed to capture such positions in the party and in the regime between 2004 and 2014 thanks to the privilege of being sons or daughters of former satraps of the party and having been able to study abroad because their parents had a lot of money and thus claim positions in the name of meritocracy as could the supermanagers.
I will rely on what Piketty and his collaborator, Abijeet Banerjee revealed about what this class of supermanagers managed to do in India; they ensured obfuscation of data on tax and this helped cover up inequalities in share of national income. Likewise, we seem to have among us a whole battery of consultants who would not want interrogation of some parts of the Congress party’s recent history when the party compromised on a whole lot of its values; the scandalous business deals involving sale of airwaves (spectrum), the way the supermanagers handled the campaign for an Ombudsman (Lok Pal) – its peak being the Baba Ramdev puppet show orchestrated by the meritocracy in the cabinet – and several such facts cannot be obfuscated if the Congress is keen on introspection.
It is no surprise that Rajiv Satav has provoked many who were ministers in the UPA-II to react. The reactions are not unnatural and do not warrant any serious attempt to seek explanation. But then, the reaction from the experts who have assumed the role of consultants and supermanagers seem to suggest a motive.  That they are upset with the choice of people with whom Rahul Gandhi has been talking in the past few months; he is talking to those who have researched and written about the problems with the inequalities in the world of capital since the 1980s and spoken straight about the need to change this course. They are ones who recommend such measures as the NREGA or the RTI, important markers of UPA-I and measures that the UPA-II simply did not emulate from.
The supermanagers had taken over the UPA-II and those who were their consultants are unhappy that Rahul Gandhi is not talking to them; and since he is not talking to them, they call him arrogant.
As for the Congress party, it may learn from its own history. The party went in to rope in meritocracy into managing its affairs in the early 1980s; it did not help the party retain its core – the poor and the marginalized – and the time-servers simply left for greener pastures. Rahul Gandhi’s cabal, if there is one at all, may help themselves from this lesson from history. Rajiv Satav, from what I learn, belongs to a generation that could have done well for itself by staying away from the Congress. The Congress party was on a course of decline by the time he turned twenty years of age; he did not study abroad; he is among those who worked their way up in the party and his point that the UPA-II is interrogated makes immense sense.   


V.Krishna Ananth (August 5, 2020)

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