How to Revive the Congress Party

As the Congress Party reels from defeat to defeat in national and state elections it must address urgently – and frankly – the issue of what must be done for its political revival.

 

From my outsider vantage point the following four steps are essential to revival:

• Set out clearly a set of political and social values that appeal to people all over the country. That means setting aside mincing calculations of community and caste and returning to the original big tent concept that made the old Indian National Congress a powerhouse.
• Learn from the BJP-Modi success in articulating an aspirational agenda for an electorate hungry for leadership. This does not mean using social media and the cunning manipulation of communal hostilities; it means setting out a vision that people all over the country can identify with and convincing them that Congress will live by it. 
• Take on the task of political opposition not just in legislative bodies but in social and political processes on the ground. This will attract to the Congress those who the BJP offends and alienates; it will give the party strong roots in local politics.
• Promote every kind of political excellence within its ranks regardless of communal-caste calculations. The Indian electorate has shown time and again that it can recognize and will support merit in its leaders, regardless of identity politics.

The overall success of this effort will depend entirely on the vision and quality of the people who lead it.

 

If the Congress sticks to Rahul Gandhi and his coterie for leadership it has no hope of success, for they have shown themselves to be without political capacity. At the very least, the party should give Priyanka Vadra a far more visible leadership role while trying to distance her from Robert Vadra's problematic reputation.

 

Ideally, the party should put its most attractive leaders in the limelight and give primacy to those with the best political track record.  

  

 This approach can energize all those not enamored by the BJP, and could create a “Congress wave” when the incumbency factor begins to work in its favour.

 

 

The Nehruvian-Hindutva Tussle Over History

Subramanian Swamy’s call for the burning of “Nehruvian” history books and the riposte from Congress leader Digvijay Singh reminded me of the nursery rhyme battle between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Their combat is over the rattle of history not its substance. 

The truth lies neither in the vilification of Nehru and his acolytes nor in their celebration.

Much as it will stick in BJP throats to say it, Nehru was a patriot who spent almost his entire life in the service of India. And though it will be wormwood and gall for the Congress to admit it, he was an intellectually shallow snob who betrayed Mahatma Gandhi in the final run up to the transfer of power, and all of us in the course he set for independent India.

As young people today will understand little of all this, I give below a short summary of what actually happened, with some notes on its current relevance.

Jawaharlal Nehru was the treasured son of a rich lawyer in Lucknow who, one urban legend had it, sent his shirts to be laundered in Britain. Born to luxury, spoiled rotten as a child, Nehru himself was sent to Britain early, first to school at Harrow and then to Cambridge. He was the quintessential “Brown Sahib,” with an intellect shaped by a fey upper class socialism that had little to do with  working class realities.

For all his elite education, Nehru had little understanding of his own country or the world: while dismissive of the religion that has been India's saving grace over the millennia, he saw the corrupt and violent communist revolution in Russia as the door to a brave new world.

He returned to India at a time when Mahatma Gandhi was revolutionizing the Congress and became, with some energetic pushing by his father, one of the Party’s bright young leaders. His primary rivals in the party, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Subhas Chandra Bose, earned their own limelight and either could have given Nehru a run for his money if they had stayed with the Congress; but neither did.

Nehru thus became the only leader of his generation with national appeal, his stature enhanced by the perception that he was Gandhi’s political heir.

That status was not based on ability. Vallabhai Patel, the hard-eyed Gujarati lawyer whose unmatched organizational skills had made him the “Iron man” of the Congress, was unquestionably a far more effective leader.

But Gandhi had made the shrewd calculation that Nehru's cultural commonalities with the British were an essential bridge during the transition of power. In that he was entirely correct, but the expectation that the younger man would eventually follow his path proved disastrously wrong.

Weeks before independence Nehru stumbled into a British honey trap baited with Edwina Mountbatten (whose extramarital affairs were notorious), and was thereafter a British stooge. He asked Louis Mountbatten to stay on as independent India’s first Governor-General, appointed him chair of the cabinet committee dealing with the “tribal invasion” of Kashmir, and after Indian forces routed the Pakistanis and had them on the run, froze their advance and referred the matter to the United Nations.

After independence, Nehru set India on a course towards a "socialist pattern of society." Ironically, that involved committing enormous flows of public money to large projects that profited a small business elite; it would be four decades before the Panchayat Raj provisions of the Constitution would be minimally funded.

It was a comprehensive betrayal of Gandhi's legacy.

Hindutva betrayals have been even more profound, for they involved the assassination of the Mahatma and the undermining of Indian democracy.

The man mainly responsible was Vinayak Damodar Sarvakar, an erstwhile votary of violent revolution who the British tortured into collaboration at the Andamans “Cellular Jail.”

They released him early from a 50-year sentence after he wrote the tract Hindutva, arguing that Muslims were second-class citizens in India, entitled to exist only as a submissive minority. 

After release in 1924 he lived in a pleasant bungalow the British provided in Ratnagiri, and three years later, took over as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, a proxy British organization formed at about the same time as the Muslim League.

As the head of the Mahasabha Savarkar assembled a gang in Pune that included Naturam Godse and Narayan Apte, the men who killed Gandhi in 1948. Beginning in 1934, Godse made several unsuccessful attempts to kill the Mahatma but revealingly, he was never taken into police custody or put under any kind of watch. Even after a bomb went off at Gandhi’s prayer meeting a few days before the assassination the police acted as if they had no knowledge of him.

(It should be noted that this history of assassination attempts demolishes the claim that Godse killed the Mahatma in flaming anger at the atrocities suffered by Hindus during Partition. It makes clear that his gallows speech was pure humbug.) 

Another indication of a British hand in the plot was Apte’s refusal, at the height of the Great Depression, of a full-time job in the Royal Indian Air Force. The most likely explanation is that he was already fully occupied -- as a British agent.

All this is of more than historical interest because the extremist Hindu elements brought to life by the British continue to thrive with murky support from unidentified sources.

Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare’s investigation into that nexus was cut short when he was killed in the September 2008 attack on Mumbai, giving rise to a widespread belief that the attack was primarily aimed at eliminating him. It is alarming that Mrs Karkare, who had been vocal about a conspiracy to kill her husband, has just suffered a brain hemorrhage and is now in a coma.[I understand she has died.]

Also fueling dark speculation is the strange matter of the Home Ministry files the Modi government destroyed within weeks of taking power. Corridor talk has it that the files related to the Mahatma’s assassination. The government assured parliament that was not the case, but it is necessary to ask if that denial covered mention of Narayan Apte in personnel records. Did the destroyed files show government financing for B. S. Moonje, the medical doctor from Nagpur who served with the British Army in the Boer War and in 1925 established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)? Does the denial cover records of payments to thugs engaged in the “communal riots” that led to Partition?

These uncomfortable questions indicate that the increasing challenges to Indian democracy are not all contemporary: they also emerge from our cloak and dagger history.

What Now for India?

I was dead wrong about the outcome of the elections, but not in my trepidation about what is happening in India.

A great flood of money has washed through our electoral system, empowering forces that are rooted in the divisive communal politics the British introduced during the colonial rule and have fostered through proxies since independence.

Where that money has come from and what it will require the new government to do should be of acute concern to Indians.

All indicators signal that we are headed for a period of undisguised crony capitalism that will see foreign interests in the driving seat, acting through major Indian corporations.

Those alliances are by no means secret, and some are notorious, especially RIL's hookup with BP that has given the most predatory of the energy majors a role in the pricing of our sovereign natural gas resources.

The association of the TATAs with British interests dates back to the opium trade era of colonial rule, and its diversification in recent decades seems to have included, most obviously in the controversy over the allocation of 2-G spectrum licenses, a shadowy role in launching the corruption scandals that tarred the UPA government in its final years.   

The Ruia Brothers of ESSAR and the Vedanta-Cairn India combine also have an earned notoriety.

Beyond the interests of these usual suspects, we can definitely expect the new government to push for foreign/private investment in the Defense Sector, and the forging of an Indian "military-industrial complex."

Such a combination of forces first emerged in the United States after WW-II, and during the Cold War it spread to all major industrial countries, including supposedly "Socialist" countries.

Once created, the arrangement has proved impervious to democratic control, for it thrives on creating and manipulating violent international confrontations, using intelligence agencies subverted from their legitimate roles. "National security" is used to trump all efforts at democratic control. 
 
On the social front, we can expect to see big business profit from an unprecedented alienation of land from small farmers and inattention to environmental concerns.

The outlook overall is thus grim indeed for India, unless by some miracle Narendra Modi in power jettisons those who financed his rise and implements a truly democratic and indigenous agenda. 

The Congress in Opposition

The prospect described above offers the decimated Indian National Congress a golden opportunity to rebuild itself as a broad-based representative of national interests.

If a BJP government follows the negative trajectory described above, it will have to step rough-shod over the interests of millions of Indians, especially small farmers and the economically powerless. It will have to misuse the intelligence and police services.

If the Congress sets out to give a voice to those injured by such policies, it can expect to reap a rich dividend at the next general elections.

To do that, it will have to organize a national network to report on what is happening, and perhaps start its own media organizations to provide fair coverage.

At the very least it should have a website to publicize what is happening in the country.

Intelligent use of social media -- which it seems to have not done at all this time around -- should help the rebuilding process.

The Long View

In the long view of history, the particulars of who, what and why of this election are likely to disappear in the face of one overwhelming fact: a single political party has once again become the representative of the nation as a whole. 

The fact that regional caste-based politics have been shown the door is a major positive development. 

The end of the myth about a "Muslim vote bank" is also something to applaud. 

Perhaps that will begin the process of bringing to an end the regressive idea that religion can be the basis for electoral politics, allowing organizations such as the RSS to reinvent themselves and become truly national in identity and purpose.

 

BJP, Congress or Aam Admi?

As any writer who is not independently wealthy I write for hire. Not as a journalist but as an expert consultant.

My specialty for many years has been international cooperation for development, a field at once richly satisfying -- because it is about hope and aspiration -- and deeply disheartening in the venal cynicism of its theorists.

Consider, for instance, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted as an afterthought by the summit-level meeting of the UN General Assembly at the cusp of the 21st Century.

Advertised as measurable targets for “development,” they were actually little more than a diversion, drawing attention away from such grim realities as the global black market that sucks out ten times more from poor countries than they get as "aid." 

“Halve poverty levels by 2015” was the lead MDG.

It did not say how that should be done, or at what cost.

In China, which has made the most rapid progress in reducing poverty, it was done by massive foreign investments that made the country the “workshop of the world.”

But the costs have been terrible.

A team of Chinese scientists reported earlier this year that air pollution in the country had become so bad that it was blocking out the sun and reducing plant growth. They compared it to “nuclear winter,” when the debris thrown into the atmosphere by atomic bombs is projected to make photosynthesis impossible.

And that’s not the worst of it.

China’s progress has been built on sand.

When the financial crisis of 2008 and the “Great Recession” that followed in Europe and North America threatened to collapse its export driven economy, Beijing spent half a trillion dollars to prop up growth.

Most of the money went to build infrastructure.

They built highways, bridges and tunnels with few users, a pricey super-fast railway and huge airports with little air traffic.

Most of all, they built housing. There is now an apartment for every family in China. But most are unoccupied, for they are priced too high and are in areas where there is no economic activity to support an urban population.

All across China now there are not only millions of unoccupied buildings, there are entire ghost cities.

Even that is not the worst of it.

China’s booming “development” created a crony capitalism that allied predatory wheeler-dealers with the Communist power structure. They took land forcibly from poor farmers, forcing millions to become migrant workers in factories thousands of miles away from their homes.

There are now over 200 million migrant workers living on slave wages in urban areas. While the workers languish in poverty, Party flacks and their business cronies grew enormously rich.

China's growing army of millionaires and billionaires are estimated to keep much of their wealth in other countries and some 80 per cent are reported to have established foreign residency rights.

Narendra Modi is a votary of this model of “development,” and it has enamored Indian Big Business.

It has blinded business leaders to his violent communal record, bully-boy rhetoric and capacity to corrupt and misuse the Intelligence and Police services. One of them hailed him as "King of kings" at a recent conclave that was an unmitigated abomination in a democracy.

Quite obviously, no Indian in her right mind should vote for the Modi-led BJP.

Congress is a better choice in that it is not openly communal and is more aware of the poor and middle class. But in seeking to woo Big Business away from Modi, will it offer – has it offered – the same kind of crony capitalism?

Despite the rhetoric of its election platform, there is little reason to believe that the Congress has a view of development much different from Modi's. Its much touted Land Bill will raise the cost of appropriating land, but will do no justice to the farmer.

Expropriating land to benefit the rich will very quickly begin to destabilize the balance of castes in rural areas that is the bedrock of Indian political stability. It will feed and expand the insurrections that now ravage tribal areas. The country could quite easily slip into the state of general civil war that preceded colonial rule.

Is there a way to avoid this prospect?

Yes, but to see the way the Indian political elite must heed the first teaching of the Hitopadesa and let fall the veil of greed that now prevents them from seeing the true wealth of the country, its people.

“Development” does not mean highways and dams and skyscrapers, and flashy dressers calling each other “Dude;” it means that everyone in the country is fed, educated and profitably employed.

Can we have that without industrialization and Big Business?

Yes. In fact, the technology of the Information Age is making Big Business obsolete.

The capacity to identify and cater to niche markets through the World Wide Web has the potential to make small scale artisanal production competitive with mass produced goods. That will destroy the primary reason for the mass market and giant corporations.

The nature of industrial production is also undergoing fundamental change. The combination of off-grid renewable energy and 3-D printing has revolutionary implications.

It means we can have top quality industrial products made in remote rural areas. When the best educational services and cultural products are also available online in rural areas, the pressures now causing rapid urbanization will disappear. As rural development accelerates, population growth will decelerate very rapidly, and that will change all other economic projections.

We are facing a future when there will be no reason for massive energy and raw materials supplies to be concentrated at points of production. There will be nothing to drive predatory exploitation of natural resources. The corporations of the future will be flat networks of entrepreneurs, each grounded in his/her own community and meeting real human needs.

The rather confused vision of rural development set out in Arvind Kejriwal’s book Swaraj could help bring such a future to life – if the Aam Admi Party can convince the Indian voter that it is capable of governing.

Coverage of Sunanda Pushkar's Murder

The Press coverage of Sunanda Pushkar’s murder was pretty much obliterated on television by the Aam Admi Party’s shenanigans in New Delhi.

For the most part, the story was reduced to television crawlers highlighting a statement by the victim's 21-year old son that his mother was too strong to commit suicide and that he did not think Shashi Tharoor could have harmed her.

In print, the coverage was decidedly odd.

On 21 January, a Zee News story by Sushmita Dutta had the following lead: “Hours after the autopsy report of Sunanda Pushkar was out and given to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate Alok Sharma by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) stating drug overdose may have caused her death, Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor got a clean chit into the matter based on a witness testimony, police sources said on Monday.”

A Reuters story on the 22nd put the story in the following context: “The drama around Tharoor comes after a series of scandals that have dented the idea of a rising, confident India. The image of an economic juggernaut was undermined last year when growth fell to its lowest in a decade. Politicians have been dogged by allegations of corruption on a spectacular scale, and a grisly gang rape in Delhi at the end of 2012 that sparked huge protests has marred the "Incredible India" slogan meant to draw tourists from around the globe. Even a former Supreme Court judge has been probed over alleged sexual harassment and one of India's most powerful journalists was arrested last month in another sexual assault case.”

The story (without a byline as published), said that “Tharoor may survive politically. He has received backing from the leader of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, and sympathy from many politicians. One TV channel called him the "Comeback Kid" for his ability to bounce back from reverses.”

Also on the 22nd, a PTI story was headlined “Shashi Tharoor inseparable, no question of resignation: Congress.” It noted earlier reports that the BJP's Kerala unit had demanded Tharoor’s resignation and that Congress ally NCP had said he should keep away from his ministerial responsibilities until the investigation was over. Congress spokesman Randip Surjewala had told reporters the NCP suggestion “could be personal opinion of NCP leader D P Tripathi. ... Tharoor is in a responsible ministerial position. He is also an inseparable part of Congress. There is no question of his resignation.”

Neither Reuters nor PTI mentioned in those stories what the Economic Times noted in the penultimate paragraph of its small take on the 22nd: that the autopsy report submitted to the investigating magistrate “mentioned more than a dozen injury marks on Pushkar's hands and a minor bruise on her left cheek which could be due to the use of ‘blunt force’". Citing “poisoning” as the cause of death, the magistrate had “asked Delhi police to further investigate the case, including the possibility of suicide and murder.”  

It seems to me the injuries sustained by the victim -- lacerations on the wrists and bruises on her upper body and neck -- are conclusive proof of murder. 

Much of the Press coverage seems to be avoiding that and looking towards a swift finding of accidental drug overdose that will allow business as usual. 


I have known Shashi since he was a child and find it hard to believe that he is capable of murder; but there is no escaping the conclusion that Sundanda Pushkar was forced to ingest the two dozen anti-depressent pills and alcohol that ended her life. 

There are two pointers for those investigating the case. 

One is the Pakistan angle -- his wife thought Tharoor had been having a "rip roaring affair" with Lahore-based journalist Mehr Tarar. Both the principals have denied this, but clearly there was some to and fro across the border. Was the murder to blot out any possibility of an embarrassing security leak? If so, the murderers would be under the authority of the Home Ministry, which is reportedly seeking to hurry the investigation to an end.

The second lead is the fact that  Sunanda Pushkar was preparing for tell-all television interviews about her involvement in the IPL scandal that led to her then boy-friend Tharoor's resignation from the External Affairs ministry. The couple had hotly denied reports they cleared some $15 million from that deal. Whose ox would have been gored if she had revealed another reality?

All this should make quite clear that the investigation into the murder cannot be rushed to a conclusion, and that an independent inquiry is essential.

Pending a resolution it is indefensible for Tharoor to continue in a position of influence in the government. 

Which Congressman?

A couple of days ago I voiced the suspicion that someone in the Intelligence Establishment was leaking copiously to Arvind Kejriwal.

He told the Press on Friday that the source was a "senior Congressman."

Not a single reporter present asked who. More interesting, no one (at least none that I watched) tried later to guess who it might be.

The opportunities to do so were ample, for the Congress top brass convened as if on cue for a day-long retreat.
 
It was as if Someone Up There had arranged a game of Clue. Was it the Finance Minister in the Library with an Axe? The Minister for Human Resources with a Rope? 
It could be the former Home Minister. After all, he was a former lawyer for Enron. And he did try to sneak in a central police force that could have gutted constitutional structures and Indian democracy. Also, if the challenge to his last election in Chennai goes wrong, he could be headed for the exit anyway.

But I doubt it. My bet, purely on a hunch and a bizarre exchange on Headlines Today, is the Human Resources Minister, bushy-browed verse-monger Kapil Sibal.

Which of the numerous bizarre exchanges on Headlines Today?

The one in which Rahul Kanwar, talking to Sibal in the immediate aftermath of Kejriwal's allegations about Robert Vadra, said to him in high glee words to the effect: "So what now for you? Prime Minister?"

Sibal, also in high spirits, stayed silent but cackled like a hen.

Now, it could be I was tripping on too much soda water and imagined the whole thing, but I swear that's what came down the pike.

It set me wondering. Does HRD cover Intelligence? If it does, could my speculation be right after all?