Regardless of the outcome of the floor test today, the crisis triggered by events in Jharkhand has by general consensus been deemed resolved. Indeed, the turbulence in that new and small state framed unsettling constitutional and legal-institutional questions with profound implications. But those questions — be it the role of governors and speakers, or the exact location of the lines separating the legislative domain from the judicial — are not such that can all be confronted and answered in one fraught moment. They will require a less polarised politics, a less divided deliberative space. Yet, one set of questions cannot wait for more amenable times.The Congress cannot defer its moment of reckoning. The serial impropriety committed in Goa, first, and then Jharkhand, has not merely resurrected old ghosts of an older ’70s authoritarianism. If that were all, the problem would be easier for the party to deal with. The Congress must do something far more arduous than disproving old spectres. It must prove that it has not entirely lost its responsiveness to the present — and the ability to change with its demands. In recent days, Congress spinmeisters have sought to concentrate all the blame on the “advisers”, a band of men and women who presumably fall between the Congress president and the party and government. This effort to extricate the High Command from the mess down below is disingenuous. But it does renew the urgency to shine the light on the Inner Circle where crucial decisions of national significance are apparently made and unmade. The Congress’s Inner Circle is not the Congress’s internal matter and the blunders in Jharkhand only spotlight that conviction. They also highlight yet again the problems faced by an old-style party, with its bulky layers of courtiers and sycophants, in times when the intensifying political competition calls for an organisation far more fleet-footed and modern, with an ear to the quick-changing realities on the ground.Nowhere is the yawning disconnect more evident than in the Congress’s souring relationships in the UPA. While the famous May 13 victory was in large part due to some wise alliances, the mess in Jharkhand and also in Bihar has shown that the process of dissembling has begun in the coalition that the Congress made. Be it a truculent Laloo Prasad Yadav, justifiably miffed by Congress’s confusions s-a-vis partnership with the RJD in Bihar and Jharkhand, or Shibu Soren, left in the lurch after having been helped along to the altar, Sonia’s party has been busy making enemies out of friends, apart from stepping over lines of political and constitutional morality. It has been a hectic few days for the Congress. The soul-searching must start now.
