I saw in Rahul Gandhi’s Cambridge talk a 1915 Congress moment: Shruti Kapila
Easy to mock Rahul Gandhi at Cambridge, but he's right in remaking Congress as party of protest not power
Of all the barbs and brickbats that came flooding on my various digital endpoints last week after I held a conversation with Rahul Gandhi in Cambridge, one hit hard. Trolling in India is an industrialised and monetised activity and its ability to distort truth in this instance was neither the first nor will it be the last. Though vexatious, trolling only proved that the Cambridge conversation had indeed rattled the Congress leader’s political opponents.
Which one's? Those within his party? Nobody else opposes him because he is doing such a swell job at fucking up his own party.
A series of WhatsApp messages from a friend in Delhi did though get under my skin. Now, this is a friend who has been hospitable to me, and this friendship has given me reason to believe that the city is not all toxic.
Kejriwal rules it. I suppose this lady hates him as much as she hates Modi. But she thinks Rahul is cute. Good for her. The lad is the Indic equivalent of the brainless blonde.
The friend is no Right-winger but proceeded to prophesise that Rahul Gandhi and the Indian National Congress were two different and even antagonistic entities that would only end very badly. Mansplaining Kapil Sibal’s departure as a smoking gun of the Congress party’s doom, it was infuriating to be patronised but touching to see that Sibal still evoked such sympathy for his tawdry need of office. He had only repeated older Congressmen (men underlined) who too had predictably landed similar taunts and prophecies on my phone.
Akhilesh did well in the recent U.P polls. Priyanka bombed. If Sibal gets into the Rajya Sabha on a Samajwadi ticket then he gains face. He has won. Meanwhile Congress C.Ms who have been forced to accommodate Gandhi loyalists rather than give tickets to their own people will feel miffed. The question is whether those loyalists will actually get the seats or whether legislators will defy the party line. This is a repetition of 1969. If Congress CMs break away, then what is left of the Party? Rahul may not be returned from Kerala. Sonia can't last forever. Priyanka may already have fizzled out. Without safe Rajya Sabha seats, the Gandhis may be out of politics for good. Rahul may protest this as much as he likes in between foreign trips. But who will take any notice of him?
As ever, when faced with political prophecies, history, to my mind and habits, offers the best instruction and fortification against political astrology and fantasy.
Her mind is shitty. I say nothing about her habits. But her articles in Print.in have shown an astonishing lack of political nous.
On his return to India in 1915, after two long decades in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi encountered a shambolic, faction-ridden Indian National Congress with as many self-appointed leaders as causes and convictions ranging from other-worldly spiritualists to rigid Marxists.
This is nonsense. Congress had no Marxists. Annie Beasant wasn't 'other worldly'. She had led the Byrant & May matchgirl strike. Gokhale's 'naram dal' had previously been at daggers drawn with Bal,Pal & Lal's 'garam dal' but that animosity was dying down. The very next year, Jinnah brokered a deal with the Muslim League. Congress was coming together though, the two Home Rule Leagues (of Tilak and Beasant respectively) were doing the heavy lifting.
He found the Congress largely occupied by lawyers and the party still reeling from its original split a decade earlier in 1907 over the twinned themes of religion and violence alongside the spectacular failure of its mass Swadeshi movement.
The partition of Bengal was reversed. Surely, that was a success?
Gandhi was already an international public figure by then thanks to his iconic Satyagraha in South Africa on the issue of racialised identification for Indians there.
He said Indians should cheerfully and voluntarily carry a pass. Then some Indians beat the shit out of him. He changed his mind.
By then, Gandhi had also encountered in London the garam dal (or ‘extremists’) and hot-headed young men given to the temptations of violence, including and above all, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
But, before that, Bhai Parmanand came to see him in South Africa. A little later Gandhi embraced celibacy just as Lala Hardayal, another leader influenced by Parmanand, did. Like Savarkar, Parmanand was sentenced to jail under very harsh conditions whereas Gandhi got simple imprisonment and early release.
Gandhi’s idiosyncratic manifesto Hind Swaraj published in 1909 was addressed to his volatile critics both inside and outside the Congress who had found and labelled him slow, weak and all too tame.
It was addressed to the few people- mainly in South Africa- who, like him, could read Gujarati and had little knowledge of the world. To give an example, Gandhi says in that book that Japan had become a sort of colony of Britain!
By 1940, no less than Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had labelled Gandhi the Fuhrer since, according to Jinnah, the Mahatma commanded total authority in the Congress without holding a single party office.
But Govind Vallabh Pant, Congress Premier of U.P, had previously said 'Italy has its Il Duce, Germany has its Fuhrer, India has the Mahatma.' Hitler did hold office. He was first the Chancellor and then the President of Germany.
Jinnah was correct to recognise that the ascendancy of the Congress was equal to the authority of Gandhi.
This is not a grammatical English sentence. Ascendancy refers to relative position- x is ascendant over y. Authority either exists or it doesn't. It is not a relative term. Congress had won elections and formed governments in some Provinces. It had some authority which it gave up on what Jinnah called the 'day of deliverance'. Gandhi may have had some authority over the Congress Party. But it may be truer to say that his financiers had ascendancy over him. His crackpot schemes were money-pits. He had to keep his donors sweet.
Gandhi had effectively transformed a moribund party into the largest and most powerful machine of protest in the world.
But that protest failed. It turned out to be easy to jail its members and ban the thing. As Nehru says, once the threat of property confiscation was on the table, Congress's financiers turned coy. Spontaneous protest can bring about political change. A vast 'machinery' of protest is useless because those who pay for the machine are vulnerable to expropriation.
Turning his back on well-heeled if articulate lawyers, Gandhi painstakingly built a wide social coalition of the peasantry, Muslims, women, and the labouring poor across the country and its regions.
Which failed almost immediately.
This was achieved over the course of three major protest movements — one a decade — punctuated as these were by smaller satyagrahas and long spells of retreat and even silence, to say nothing of prison sentences. Gandhi attracted back to India men such as N.S. Hardikar (from America) who founded the Seva Dal in 1923, a Congress volunteer body created two years prior to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
By Hegdewar, a pal of Hardikar's from Medical College.
Overturning its annual ritual of tamashas usually held in colonial cities like Bombay or Calcutta,
or pre-colonial cities like Allahabad, Pune, Lahore, Nagpur, Lucknow, Amraoti etc.
Gandhi converted the Congress into a body of unlimited membership marked by everyday voluntarism and sacrifice.
He promised to deliver Swaraj within 18 months if one crore Rupees was collected. He failed.
The party membership price came down to an anna and shrill debating gave way to active mobilisation.
Which soon turned into active communal violence.
Lean in its bureaucratic structure and in devolving the work of a shadow government, primarily to Jawaharlal Nehru,
There was no 'shadow government'. Nehru wasn't an administrator. His dad had formed the Swatantra Party with C.R Das to enter the Legislatures but this proved futile because it was purpose was to prove the thing futile- i.e. the thing was stoooooopid. There was a Congress machinery which Patel may be said to have presided over.
Gandhi ensured that the transition from protest to power at Independence for the party was seamless.
Kapila is from Punjab. Partition and ethnic cleansing represents 'seamlessness' for her.
This transition to power was, however, arguably despite Gandhi.
It was inevitable. The Brits wanted to devolve power. Then the Japs and the Americans ensured that they had no choice in the matter. Gandhi was irrelevant. India got what Burma and Sri Lanka got at the same time.
It is indeed a fact that Gandhi held no office in the Indian National Congress.
He was a former President of it.
It is now a standard question asked on the Indian history undergraduate paper here at Cambridge: whether the Congress became a mass party because of or despite Gandhi?
The answer is that Khilafat was a well-financed mass movement which coopted Gandhi who could then take the reins of Congress by promising to deliver Swaraj through a Congress-Khilafat combine. Everybody rushed to get a membership card in the hope that they'd make lots of money once the Brits left.
Realists and hard-nosed purveyors of power dismiss his role as a cynical Machiavelli, just the way Jinnah did.
Whereas the truth is he was a crack-pot who needed money for his stupid schemes. He had to pretend to want Swaraj because he was peddling khaddar as true Swaraj.
Idealists and those interested in explaining changed rules of the game — rather than simply accounting for institutional power — credit Gandhi for transforming Indian politics and ushering in decolonisation and Indian democracy.
The First World War put paid to Emperors and Empires. Gandhi may have prolonged British rule in India by 20 years but the truth is India would have remained dependent on the UK for naval protection and military and other assistance in the same manner as Egypt, which became formally independent in 1922.
In short, it is precisely because he was of the Congress but not beholden to it that Gandhi emerged as the superman of Indian politics.
Gandhi was President of Congress in 1924.
That he was frail, not a hectoring strongman in a hurry and dare I say, an effeminate
but not, hopefully, a catamite
Gandhi’s politics of patience and sacrifice continues to both inspire and divide.
Whom? Anybody who matters? No. We have seen three big 'Gandhian struggles' in the last decade. The Lok Pal thing helped the BJP and launched Kejriwal's career. The anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh helped the BJP though Kejriwal was the bigger winner. The farmer's agitation helped Kejriwal in Punjab and didn't hurt the BJP in U.P. What was the outcome of all this protest? We will have a choice between guys who can recite Hanuman Chalisa at the drop of a hat.
In declaring a mass protest movement as the only option to revive and remake the Congress, as he did at Cambridge, Rahul Gandhi openly seeks inspiration from the Mahatma.
This would be like Enoch Powell going to Delhi in 1948 and saying 'we Brits must launch a mass protest movement to restore British rule so I get a chance to be Viceroy.' Incidentally, Powell spoke Urdu. The fact is Rahul could have been P.M. Manmohan would have stepped aside for him with tears of gratitude in his eyes. But Rahul was gunshy. Three people surnamed Gandhi had been assassinated in a manner beneficial to Congress's electoral fortunes. Rahul may be stupid. He isn't crazy.
It would be foolish to compare the two men. What, however, certainly bears comparison is the state of the Congress in 1915 and in 2022.
The guy who was president of Congress in 1915 was made a Lord. He joined the Imperial War Cabinet and took part in Peace talks. In 1920, he became Governor of Bihar and Orissa. But for his poor health, he might have in the running for the office of Viceroy. My point is that the Congress moderates could have got what Britain gave Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan in 1922. Khilafat was foolish- the Turks didn't want a Caliph. But Khaddar was even stupider than Khilafat.
Few, it would seem within the Congress, have realised that it is no longer a party of power.
Except in Rajasthan and Chattisgarh. That's a combined population of 100 million.
The noisy and unseemly jostling for berths in the Upper House, or the staking out of family fiefdoms, or mobilising of factions and generations — all such shenanigans belong to a bygone era when the party and its leadership could afford to run its complex structure through accommodation.
Kapila does not understand what is happening. The Gandhis want Rajya Sabha seats for their own loyalists. They see a future where Rahul is unelectable to the lower house. They need to assert control rights over the Party's share of Upper House seats. The problem is that some rich people want a Rajya Sabha seat and legislators like cash. The Gandhis, no longer being able to catch votes, may be disintermediated. Why buy an MP when you can be an MP?
The search for patronage, and internal party offices by Congress members is suicidal, both individuals and the party.
Kapila don't spik Inglis gud- innit? Congress needs a good PM candidate and a good, Prashant Kishore type, strategist. The dynasty could keep control of the Party even if it starts winning elections.
That those seeking such petty goods articulate these demands with lashings of grand ideals and purpose, gives it the definite appearance of a tantrum thrown by a child whose toys have been taken away.
Rahul does come across as a child. But he didn't want the toys when they were offered to him. He should have nominated someone else for the top job while talking about 'grass roots work' and grand 'vichardharas'.
Whether it is the carping of the older gentlemen of the G-23 faction or the fulminating commentariat’s total fixation with him as the prime suspect, both confirm Rahul Gandhi’s leadership, if only perversely.
No. What everybody is saying is that Rahul isn't leading shit. His Mummy remains the 'interim' President.
My Delhi friend’s scornful WhatsApp messages to me confirm it again.
Kapila is saying, 'Rahul is actually running everything. His Mummy has checked out.' Maybe this is true. But why is the boy hiding behind his Mummy's saree?
The hollow juggernaut that the Congress party today is can only be remade as a party of power by mass protest.
Very true! India can only rejoin the British Empire if Boris Johnson puts on dhoti and prances up and down Rajpath calling for mass protest against Priti Patel and other such Gujjus who are running things all over the place.
For that, it will have to swap the search for influence and individual careerism for an arduous commitment to resistance.
By courting arrest and going to jail and then begging to be let out coz their Mummy is ill or their dog is looking poorly or they really really need a quick foreign holiday or three.
The internal psychodrama is now a totally boring but entirely damaging distraction.
Nonsense! It is entertainment. Older people thought politics was all about intrigue of this sort. Ik tamasha hua, gila na hua- we enjoyed the spectacle though no 'protest' was actually made. The BJP refuses to provide this type of entertainment. Kejriwal simply chews up and spits out anyone who goes against him. Mamta is even more fierce. Only Rahul, that moon calf, can provide us with this sort of slapstick comedy.
Protest will radicalise the origins of the Congress for a new if dangerous era.
Kapila believes in backward causation. If BoJo puts on dhoti and goes on bhook hartal at Jantar Mantar he will radicalize the origin of British Raj. This will put Priti Patel's nose out of joint. She will say he is an illegal immigrant and bite his face off.
What is clear is that in affirming his conviction in political protest, Rahul Gandhi has realised that what is at stake is the future of India’s identity over and above that of the fortunes of the Indian National Congress.
Rahul refused to step up to the place- i.e. take the office of PM and enter the 2014 elections as 'Mr. Clean' or 'Youth ki avaz' or some such shite. This meant India's future identity would be that of a Hindutvadi nation where anyone can rise by merit if they are patriotic and uncorrupt.
As for the INC, sooner or later it will have to enter a coalition with a credible PM candidate. Once back in power, it may be better at fund raising or intrigue than its partners and thus reestablish hegemony. A party with 45 million members can't be written off completely unless of course Rahul takes fewer foreign holidays and really devotes himself to 'protest'. Then it will disappear. On the other hand, after BoJo is chucked out of Number 10, he will certainly succeed in radicalizing the origin of the British Raj and launching a mass movement to bring back the Viceroy. Except, Ind's new imperial master will turn out to be...Kejriwal's moustache! There have been a lot of rumors that Moustacheji is unhappy with Kejriwal's authoritarian methods. That is why Moustacheji joined BoJo's satyagraha in Jantar Mantar. Now he is reluctantly taking over the job of Viceroy because Kejriwal is constantly agitating his Lok pal rather than stroking his moustache as is right and proper.
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