Many have sworn there’s a new Sonia Gandhi of late. The lady of 10 Janpath has stepped out of the fortress more than once, in full media glare, to meet with potential allies. She has sat down to tea with Sharad Pawar and held on to her smile even as he refused to pronounce the Foreign Origins issue dead and gone. So when this Sonia effects a reshuffle in her party, we expect a bold new war team. We expect her to take a few risks and tread on some toes if she has to, yes, even on the eve of crucial polls, in order to send out a message with a flourish. After all, poll management is the new mantra and the political backroom is where much of the action is. This is the time to reinvent the party organisation to challenge the BJP’s smug fighters. To take on Pramod Mahajan, for instance, who mischievously suggests that post-poll is another day. His unsubtle suggestion is: both Pawar and the DMK will very soon find themselves in the NDA. Sonia’s cautious shuffle on Monday disappoints. Much like her belated courtship of allies, her organisational pottering is too little, too late. There is an effort to look younger, with Sonia accommodating her two now-fallen but still-glamorous chief ministers, Ashok Gehlot and Digvijay Singh, at the party’s centre. There is a token cutting down of Ambika Soni’s enormous clout, by tinkering with the states in her charge. But mostly, things remain the same. Soni retains her main job in the party’s media cell and the Congress president’s office, there has been no real enforcement of accountability for guiding her party to a debacle in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. In Uttar Pradesh, the party’s strategy continues to be one of hit and miss — it’s Birender Singh who is in charge now of the most crucial state. The party veterans are generally undisturbed, be it a Moti Lal Vora or Mohsina Kidwai.It will take more perhaps. It may well be that the Priyanka-Rahul roadshow makes a real difference to the Congress fortunes in the coming polls. But the party president needs to explore more imaginative ways of re-energising an outfit that has lost the will to power and the stamina to fight for it. And while she is reshuffling the organisation, how about a shake-up at the grassroots level as well?
