Celebrating the Congress Party Centennial

...Later she turned [Congress-I] into a captive party that was to come in handy in dynastic succession...

...He has since surprised his critics and, indeed, disarmed them, by turning out to be an adept and sincere politician...

...Rajiv Gandhi has to realize that words alone will not galvanize a long somnolent organ into action...

...Indira had shown some of her streak of cunning and ruthlessness in 1959, while serving as president of the Congress Party, when she manipulated the dismissal of the Communist government in Kerala State—the first in the world to install a Communist party by the ballot...

...He agreed with a Union minister, too, that many wearing Gandhi caps—the sign of a Congressman, now being sported by the new breed who don safari suits made of synthetic textiles instead of khadi—were "bogus" members whose sympathies with the policies espoused by the party were only skin-deep...

...And her popularity zoomed further in 1971 with the Indian Array's liberation of Bangladesh, which left India's most worrisome neighbor, Pakistan, severed in tw o and humbled...

...His successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, thus had the task of presiding over the unwieldy conglomeration of factions that the Congress was and, in many ways, still is...

...Darryl D'Monte frequently writes on Indian affairs for The New Leader...

...Nor did the man who welded the disparate Congress into a mass movement that evicted the British from India, Ma-hatma Gandhi, want it to survive...

...Congress became synonymous with fear, especially given the goons assembled under the tutelage of Indira's younger son, Sanjay...

...The Congress celebrations in Bombay were to be a kind of anointment of the young monarch...

...Two years later his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was nominated to the post upon the death of India's second Prime Minister, Lai Bahadur Shastri...

...Except for the brief period 1977-80, Congress has ruled India continuously...

...Riding on the tide of populism, Indira Gandhi took the Congress to new heights once she announced Garibi Hatao (Get Rid of Poverty) as her slogan...

...But age is not necessarily a sign of good health...

...When she called national elections in 1977 to secure a stamp of legitimacy, she was thrown out of power by the Opposition, who had formed the umbrella Janata (People's) Party under the benign guidance of the aging Gan-dhian, Jayaprakash Narayan...

...The more critical Indian Express likened the Congress centennial to Bombay's famousroadsidesnack, bheipuri, a spicy mixture that tickles the palate but lacks substance and nutrition...

...Now, facing the old guard bosses who wanted her to bend to their will, she outmaneuvered them by splitting the party and heading the "New Congress" formation that would become Congress-I (for Indira...

...Some 700 Opposition leaders were arrested, press censorship was introduced for the first time, and as part of a 20-point economic program young males were forcibly sterilized while the homes of the poor were unceremoniously bulldozed...

...Tradition, however, clashed head-on with the dynamism of Rajiv's brave new hi-tech world—his attempt to catapult India into the 21st century and the ranks of the developed nations...

...This left seasoned politicians rather cynical about the " new morality," which seems to place a premium on getting things done without knowing what exactly has to be done, or for whom...

...In fact, nothing less than a Rajiv wave is sweeping the nation, practically obliterating the memory of his mother—the very same lady about whom one of her sycophants once chanted, "India is Indira, Indira is India...

...The party continued to lumber ahead like an ailing dinosaur, harried by opponents big and small...

...Congressmen from far-flung rural areas, in their obligatory khadi (homespun suits, encouraged by Gandhi as a symbol of opposition to British mill-made textiles), flocked to the most modern metropolis in the country and were mesmerized not by their 40-year-old leader but by the trappings of "modernity" they saw in the city—high-rise office complexes, fast-food outlets, 20 flavors of ice cream...

...Sanjay Gandhi was seen as the architect of this recovery and his mother became increasingly reliant on him, although he was as impatient with democratic procedures as he was ignorant of political realities...

...Nehru held the party together as Prime Minister by virtue of his immense charisma...

...A cast of several thousands gathered in the last days of 1985 in Bombay, the commercial and industrial capital of India, to commemorate the centenary of the Congress Party...

...Few political parties anywhere can lay claim to such longevity...

...The vivisection of the party was a traumatic event in the life of the nation...

...Firm as his resolve may be, the Prime Minister needs a political apparatus that will carry his message to the corners of this diverse nation...

...In one of those abrupt changes of dynastic politics that still characterize the Indian subcontinent, Indira then drafted her reluctant older son, an airline pilot, as her chief aide...

...That kind of stuff makes good copy and good headlines for newspapers, but it cannot serve as a sensible blueprint for action...

...Indira Gandhi in her own way reduced the party to purely an instrument of personalized power," it further noted...

...No less a sympathetic supporter than the daily Times of India felt constrained to dub it a "failed extravaganza," and went on to say: "Mr...

...If it is good that self-congratulation has been banished from the Congress Party, self-chastisement is not a sufficient replacement by itself...

...Even among those who remembered that its future should not be equated lock, stock and barrel with that of the nation, there was a sense of shock at the breakup of an age-old institution...

...Never before has a Congress president spoken so harshly of the party's failings...

...The Bombay gathering ultimately resembled a fiesta, therefore, not a serious stock-taking...

...Janata, whose main constituent was the Hindu chauvinist Jana Sangh Party, proved a much more motley assemblage than Congress, enabling Indira and Congress to confound all the pundits and bounce back into power in the 1980 elections...

...He also laid the foundations of a modern industrial society wedded to a Soviet pattern of state-owned enterprise...

...Nothing of the kind happened...

...In addition, Congress-I has emerged from his brief year in office stronger than Indira could have conceived, winning a massive mandate in the' 8 5 elections and enjoying at present the backing of almost the entire political spectrum...

...He saw it as a force whose only task was to wrest freedom for the country...

...Consequently, while Rajiv delivered a frontal attack on the old ways of the party, they milled around the busy shopping districts, clutching mementoes of the future...

...Even the Opposition genuflected before her...

...After her November 1984 assassination, Rajiv Gandhi stepped into the office of Prime Minister as if he were to the manner born...

...The alarm proved premature...

...In June 1975, confronting charges of corruption in Parliament and a High Court ruling voiding her own election because of irregularities, she declared the notorious national emergency that took the Congress Party to the lowest depths it has ever reached in its century-old history...

...One of Indira Gandhi's slogans was "The Government that Works," and Opposition leaders made much capital out of the perennial breakdowns in public life...

...The organization was formed in the city in 1885, thanks to the initiative of none other than an enlightened Englishman, Alexander Octavio Hume...

...Both showed in his speeches, especially in his inaugural address when he lambasted everyone in sight or out of sight...

...Specifically, Rajiv has negotiated settlements with the Sikhs and Assamese, who were raising the flag of rebellion on the western and eastern borders, respectively...

...That job done, he wanted it disbanded...

...Power, however, went to Indira's head...

...Fortunately for the Indian people, he died in an air accident shortly afterward: Had he lived, there is no telling what indignities he might have heaped on the poor in cities and countryside alike...

...The problem, though, was that Rajiv neglected to put forward a program for reforming the party...

...the participants of various hues, he felt, should join together in new groupings according to their ideologies...

...Somewhat similarly, her son has tried to clean up much of the corruption in the country and streamline services, yet he still doesn't have a clear idea of how to introduce structural changes in the Congress party that would result in its functioning as a modern political force, instead of merely achieving a consensus between different communal and social factions...

...A party that just nods its head was bound to develop an atrophied mind and limbs...

...It cost the party over $12million, an enormous sum at a time when the nation is caught in the grip of a severe drought...

...Gandhi himself, after independence, chose to keep aloof from politics...

...When he died in 1964, the country could not easily find anyone to fill his shoes...

...He frankly admitted it has lost touch with the "toiling masses...

...Rajiv Gandhi is new to the management of the country's affairs and he is a young man in a hurry...