CWC Recast: Will Mallikarjun Kharge follow Sonia and Rahul Gandhi or Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri?

Congress chief, Mallikarjun Kharge, has been a veteran warhorse, well-versed with Congress history, legacy and in-house stories. (Source: Reuters)

Would Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge utilise the 85th AICC plenary session at Raipur in Chhattisgarh slated to begin on February 24 as a mark of his decisive leadership for restoring inner party democracy or allow the status-quoist forces to dominate? At an informal level, Kharge has been told to usurp special powers given to the Congress president to nominate and handpick the new Congress Working Committee.

As per the Congress party constitution’s Article XIX, the Working Committee should consist of the President, the Leader of the Congress in Parliament, and 23 other members. Of them, 12 should be elected by the AICC and the rest should be appointed by the party president. However, under “special circumstances”, Kharge can be authorised by the outgoing CWC, currently called the steering committee, to bypass the election route and opt for nominations.

Why Elections?

If Kharge opts for nominations, he would be missing a chance to join the league of two non-Gandhi party presidents – Sitaram Kesri and P V Narasimha Rao, who  conducted CWC polls in 1997 and 1991 respectively. Kharge would also be frittering away a chance to create his own legacy and a place in the Congress history as nomination culture would effectively make him more dependent upon the Gandhi trio – Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi and in-house “rootless wonders” such as Randeep Singh Surjewala, Jairam Ramesh, KC Venugopal and the rest.

The term rootless wonder in the Congress circles is being used for “powerful leaders” who fail to read the pulse of the people; either they do not contest Lok Sabha, assembly polls or fail to get elected. The real trial of Kharge would begin after the Raipur plenary when party leaders having made the cut in the CWC or having missed a place at the CWC high table, would start playing games with consequences.

No Tharoor Too

It is intriguing to note that virtually nobody in the Congress is looking at the role of a principal dissident leader within the Congress – a role that is begging for rewards and promise. Equally telling are the pronouncements made by Shashi Tharoor who had contested against Kharge in the Congress presidential polls.

While ruling himself out as a contestant for a CWC berth, Tharoor had told news agency PTI: “I had made the point that elections are healthy for the party and participated in one election myself and now that I have lost, I don't think it is my business to tell the party leadership what to do,” and added, “I just feel that by having contested once, making my point and not winning the majority, or not even coming close to the majority of delegates, I have in a sense forfeited the right of demanding the same thing.”

By implication, Tharoor seems to suggest that a majority of Congress party delegates at the district, state and national level, have lost an appetite to force elections to various levels of the party hierarchy.

What’s Rahul’s Idea Of Reform?

This issue is worth introspection and deliberation for Rahul Gandhi, who had fancied himself as a party reformer. Rahul’s own promises at Jaipur in January 2013 seem hollow. It is an open secret in the Congress that about two dozen party leaders have been calling the shots for over two decades without a sense of accountability. The Congress has lost 39 out of 51 state assembly polls but not a single AICC general secretary was removed.

Other than the nomination issue, the Raipur plenary is also likely to see some constitutional amendments in the party such as making former AICC presidents, permanent members of the CWC. The move has reportedly been made to accommodate Sonia and Rahul but it is worth remembering that person-specific laws and regulations are invariably bad ideas. At the Burari AICC session 2010, the Congress had decided to increase the term of the Congress president to five years thinking that in Sonia and Rahul, the party had found ‘permanent’ leaders for the future.

However, within a decade, politics took such a turn that Rahul had to quit the office of the Congress president barely after 15 months and the rest of the term was dragged and filled in by a reluctant Sonia Gandhi as interim president. Interestingly, while there enough provisions in the Congress Constitution that authorise the Congress president to usurp powers given to the Congress Parliamentary Board (a defunct body since 1991), the CWC and other formal institutions, conversely, the party constitution has been used to empower the CWC to show even an elected president the exit door.

History Lessons For Kharge

For instance, Clause J of Article 19 was deftly used by Pranab Mukherjee to topple Sitaram Kesri for and on behalf of Sonia Gandhi on March 14, 1998 when 24, Akbar Road in New Delhi witnessed to a constitutional coup that saw the rather unsavoury exit of an “elected” Congress president and the appointment of Sonia Gandhi as party chief.

In 1959 too, the CWC was instrumental in making Indira Gandhi party president for a year when father Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister. Nehru had, in fact, feigned ignorance about the development and later lamented that as a Prime Minister, it was not a great idea to face the Congress president every morning at breakfast.

Kharge, 80, has been a veteran warhorse, well-versed with Congress history, legacy and in-house stories. He is aware that in politics too, every action has a potential for opposite reaction.

Rasheed Kidwai is a political commentator, author and visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.