Critical Year for the Gandhis if They Want to Retain Grip Over Congress

Judging by the mood in the Congress, the message for the family is loud and clear: deliver or perish.

Image of Priyanka (L) and Rahul Gandhi (R) used for representational purposes.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/ The Quint)

The year of reckoning has arrived for the Gandhi family. Seven state Assembly elections are due in 2022. The Congress is the main challenger in five of them (Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat), the defender in the sixth (Punjab) and in the seventh (Uttar Pradesh), Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is conducting an energetic campaign to retain a toehold by bagging her party a "respectable" score in double digits.

Since the Congress is a marginal player in UP, the real test for the Gandhis lies in the other six states. And judging by the mood in the party, the message for the family is loud and clear: deliver or perish.

Rahul Gandhi's Abrupt Foreign Trips

Surprisingly, one person who seems to have missed the writing on the wall is the heir apparent, Rahul Gandhi. Barely had the winter session of Parliament ended when he rushed off to an undisclosed destination somewhere abroad.

The speculation in Congress circles (who are always the last to know the whereabouts of their would-be president) is that he has gone to Italy to spend New Year’s eve with his ailing grandmother. And as usual, no one knows when he will return.

Defenders of Rahul Gandhi say it’s been a family tradition to vacation in the Christmas-New Year week. Jawaharlal Nehru did it. So did Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. But Rahul Gandhi seems to have taken the meaning of vacation to a whole new level.

Just before the winter session, he was away somewhere abroad for around 40 days. He returned on the eve of the session. And now he’s gone again, necessitating the postponement of a rally in Punjab’s Moga, from where the party had hoped to kick off its poll campaign in the state.

The two trips are among several that Rahul Gandhi took last year. His frequent absences prompted Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, increasingly a stringent critic of the Gandhi scion, to mock him as a non-resident politician.

Since there is rarely any explanation from the Congress for his trips abroad, his behaviour feeds into public perception, fueled by the BJP’s constant attacks on him, that Rahul Gandhi is not a serious politician.

Can Congress Survive Another Round of Losses in 2022?

Contrast his now-you-see-him now-you-don’t appearances with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s larger-than-life carefully choreographed events.

With the help of a fawning media, these events play out in a loop on television and linger on in public memory to the exclusion of everything else. They make Modi look omnipresent while Rahul Gandhi does his vanishing trick.

The dawn of 2022 amid speculation about their leader’s whereabouts has deepened apprehension in Congress circles about the party’s fate in this challenging year. Can it survive yet another round of losses after a disastrous performance in 2021?

It has become almost imperative for the future of the Gandhi-led Congress to retain Punjab and win back Uttarakhand even if it loses Manipur and Goa and barely registers on UP map. These five elections are first up in early 2022.

The results will determine what happens next in the party. To put it simply, if the Congress wins these two states, the Gandhis may live to fight another day. If it loses, the defeat could trigger the disintegration of the party.

Signs of Simmering Rebellion

The signs of a simmering rebellion are already there. Ghulam Nabi Azad is stoking unrest in the Jammu & Kashmir unit of the Congress. His loyalists have started a campaign for a change of guard in the state while Azad has been holding rallies and public meeting independently of the party. Many in the Congress believe that Azad is on the verge of starting a regional party in his home state. He is just waiting to see which way the wind blows in the upcoming five assembly elections.

In Haryana, senior leader Bhupinder Hooda has been chaffing at the bit for several years. He almost floated a regional party in 2019 before the Assembly polls that year. He was stopped by Sonia Gandhi’s late troubleshooter Ahmed Patel who brokered a deal, allowing Hooda to lead the Congress campaign. It is widely believed that Hooda may have won the state for his party had he been given a free hand earlier. He too is waiting and watching in the wings.

DK Sivakumar in Karnataka is another potential rebel. Although he is a family loyalist, he is a leader to reckon with and has been displaying signs of restlessness at the manner in which the Gandhis are frittering away the party’s chances in the state. Elections are due in Karnataka in 2023. Not very long to go.

These are obvious weak links. But there is trouble brewing in virtually every state with the Gandhis either making poor and unpopular choices to lead the Congress or dithering in taking decisions to stabilise their rocking boat.

Will Congress Go Into Polls Without a Chief Ministerial Face?

What has surprised Congress circles the most is the cavalier manner in which the Gandhi family has dealt with internal strife in states like Punjab and Uttarakhand which should have been poll-ready by now. Tensions between Punjab Congress president Navjot Singh Sidhu and Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi are rising with Sidhu taking regular pot shots at his own government.

Amid the infighting, there is now talk that the Congress will go into the election without a chief ministerial face, although it has a sitting CM. The inability of the Gandhis to sort out differences has undermined the confidence of party leaders who privately concede that they have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Punjab.

The Congress in Uttarakhand is shaky too with its tallest leader Harish Rawat on the warpath because he feels he is being undermined by the family. Apparently his tensions with the Gandhis date back to the time when the late Jitendra Prasada challenged Sonia Gandhi for the post of party president in 2000. Rawat seemed to be wavering in his support for Sonia Gandhi because of a long standing friendship with Prasada, whose son Jitin has now switched to the BJP.

Uttarakhand Heading the Punjab Way

It’s a different matter that Rawat eventually joined the Sonia camp but they say in the Congress that the family has a long memory which is why the Gandhis have never looked on him favourably. He was overlooked for the post of CM twice till finally the high command couldn’t ignore him and anointed him CM in 2014.

Much to Rawat’s chagrin, there is no word from Gandhis on who will be the CM candidate in the upcoming polls. As a result, Uttarakhand, another state that the Congress was poised to win, seems to be heading the Punjab way.

This is a critical year for the Gandhis if they want to retain their grip over the Congress. It’s about time they woke up and smelt the coffee.

(Arati R Jerath is a Delhi-based senior journalist. She tweets @AratiJ. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)