Why Did Sonia Gandhi Become Congress President?

Sonia Gandhi became Congress president after PV Narasimha Rao served as the party chief for five years from 1991 to 1996, and Sitaram Kesri held the job from June 1996 to February 1998. It has been pointed out that Kesri was pushed out in an ignominious manner by the Gandhi groupies. Kesri would have lost any way, and if he had been allowed to linger he would have perhaps tried to split the party and carried away with him a small group. So, the political bouncers played their role and Sonia Gandhi was made the president. 

The point to be noted is that she did not stake the claim and that it was some of the top leaders, including Sharad Pawar, no acolyte of Nehru-Gandhis, who facilitated the Gandhi takeover. So the accusation hurled at her by those who hate the family domination of the party that she grabbed the top post. She did not. Nor was it a job done by the family retainers.

Somewhere the party leaders seem to have felt they need Sonia Gandhi to lead the party. There was a need to connect to Rajiv Gandhi, to Indira Gandhi and perhaps even to Jawaharlal Nehru. There had to be a slightly broader ideological justification for choosing Sonia Gandhi, representative of the Nehru-Gandhi clan, and those who put Sonia Gandhi in the party president’s seat felt that there was one. They felt that Narasimha Rao moved away from the national commitment to pluralism, secularism and to an extent even to socialism. They would not have minded the ideological deviation if the deviation had given them electoral victory. They were worried because they lost the election. 

And it seemed Sitaram Kesri was too small for the big job. He seemed good at threatening and bringing down prime minister Deve Gowda but he did not have anything more than political banditry to show for himself. It is a matter of curiosity that both Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot contested the presidential election against Kesri and they lost. It seemed that Kesri would run as it he pleased and there was the danger that members of the Congress party never revolted against an incumbent. The party leaders felt threatened by Kesri and they felt that he would be capricious and he did not have either skills or the vision to carry the party. The coup against Kesri and the installation of Sonia Gandhi was the work of the senior Congress leaders.

So what did Sonia Gandhi bring to the table? She brought the familiar phrases that described the Congress vision – with all its hypocrisy and inherent flaws – of secularism, whatever that word meant. Sonia Gandhi, either on her own or at the behest of her advisers and companions, put her best foot forward. She gave a poignant, personal touch when she confessed in her acceptance speech that she came to the country as a bride, became a mother and then a widow, passing through the phases of life, among the people of her adopted country. Then she went out to the widows of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and told them that she understood the pain, sorrow of being a widow.

It is surprising as to why the other leaders in the party could not bring to their task the sophistication of speech and gesture to their task which Sonia Gandhi displayed with such ease.

Sonia Gandhi did not do everything with that same grace which she displayed during her confession and then in her meeting with victims of Delhi riots, but she went about the job to the best of her ability. The party was of course willing to follow her. She could name the party functionaries and who should be chief ministers in states. But she did not do it all on her own and according to her own judgment. She knew that she was not capable of making those big decision depending only on her own counsel. So she consulted widely on all major decisions.

She made mistakes too, and big ones at that. The attempt to overthrow the Vajpayee government in 1999 was one such. She walked into the trap and she realised that she did not have the support of the allies. As she sat in the opposition she waited and learned. She did not create too much havoc on the streets as many of the Congress supporters wanted her to do. Meanwhile, she worked at winning the state elections so that by 2003 there was an impressive number of 16 Congress chief ministers.

And in early 2004 she worked on coalition partners, from Ram Vilas Paswan to Lalu Prasad Yadav to Sharad Pawar to Karunanidhi. And the Congress managed to forge a coalition in the summer of 2004. After the election victory, she took another careful step of choosing Manmohan Singh as the prime minister. She remembered her failure in 1999 and she did not want to take the risk, She remembered that Pawar walked out of the party because of the possibility of she becoming the prime minister.

The purpose of Sonia Gandhi staying Congress president seemed to be to help the party win elections in the state and at the centre and choosing the people to fill the position of prime minister and chief ministers. In theory she could be prime minister despite threats from BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharati threatening to shave off their locks. But she realised that she should not cross certain red lines, the Lakshman rekhas, if she is to exercise power and command the obedience and compliance from the other leaders. She has stayed within the bounds she has drawn for herself as Congress president and it seems to have worked well for her as well as for the party.