There is a common fallacy in India that the Congress party headed by Sonia Gandhi is the descendent of the Grand Old Party (GOP) founded by A.O. Hume in 1885 and headed by legendary figures such as W.C. Bonnerjee, Dadabhai Naoroji, Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru and a galaxy of names that resonate in our history.
Actually, the party Sonia heads was set up by Indira Gandhi in 1969 when she split the GOP and created the Indian National Congress (Indira), which confirmed its dominance by sweeping the 1971 general elections. Indira's "new" Congress marked its new politics by dismantling the old decentralised Congress where local and state units had considerable autonomy and replacing them with loyalists. Since then, the Congress has operated as a family-run concern of the Gandhi family.
This was accompanied by a similar effort to take over the country-banks were nationalised, the bureaucracy and the judiciary asked to be "committed" to the government, which meant the party, which, in turn, meant Indira Gandhi.
Several years ago, this point was rubbed home to me by no less a person than general secretary Digvijaya Singh who said just as I served in my media company owned by a proprietor, so did he work in a party which belonged to the Gandhis. "Those who don't like this arrangement can go elsewhere," he observed genially.
The proprietary nature of the party was made clear in 1974 itself when Indira appointed her younger son Sanjay as her heir apparent. Since then, barring the phase 1991-1997, there has never been any doubt as to who is the boss.
This was made apparent by the marginalisation of the first line of the party leadership-Morarji Desai, K. Kamaraj, Biju Patnaik, Atulya Ghosh and S.K. Patil-in the 1967-69 period. It is not for the want of trying. Jagjivan Ram and H.N. Bahuguna staged a coup of sorts when they founded the Congress for Democracy before the 1977 elections, but they gained little.
After the elections in 1978, Karnataka chief minister D. Devraj Urs thought Mrs Gandhi's era was over and he split the party and took away luminaries such as Y.B. Chavan, K. Brahamananda Reddy and names that are familiar even now-A.K. Antony, Sharad Pawar and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. But, they could never match Indira's hold on the voters. Revolt after revolt made it clear that insofar as the voter was concerned, there was only one Congress, which was the INC(I).
The third phase of permutations and combinations were the outcome of the decline of the Congress, following its defeat in the 1989 general elections, with one significant side-show-Pranab Mukherjee's farcical rebellion which led to the creation of the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress (1986-1989). This was a complicated phase which saw P.V. Narasimha Rao assume the leadership of the party and the government in the wake of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination.
The wily Rao soon began to assert his own authority which saw the exit of Gandhi loyalists like N.D. Tiwari, Arjun Singh and K. Natwar Singh who formed INC (Tiwari). In 1996, Rao's manoeuvrings led to the exit of G.K. Moopanar and P. Chidambaram into a breakaway Tamil Maanila Congress.
It was as a TMC member that Chidambaram first took office as Union finance minister in United Front government headed by H.D. Deve Gowda. Parallel to this was the revolt of Madhavrao Scindia, who founded his own Madhya Pradesh Congress party. Sitaram Kesri sought to stabilise the party after Rao's exit, but to little avail and beginning 1997, Sonia Gandhi moved to retake control of the party which she did after being elected president in 1998.
Since then the BJP has emerged as the main challenger of the Congress legacy and efforts such as the creation of the Nationalist Congress Party by Sharad Pawar and YSR Congress party of Jaganmohan Reddy are expressions of frustration of Congressmen who find it difficult to swallow the Gandhi hegemony, rather than genuine revolts.
Since Mrs Gandhi founded the party, one reality has been salient-the INC is a proprietary company and all its shares are held by the Gandhi family who constitute its board of directors, all the other party institutions are, as the Indian phrase goes "elephant teeth"-for show, rather than for any real work.
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