Everyone knows Sheila Dikshit has been told she’s under watch. The stern admonition for Delhi’s high profile chief minister came not from Delhi’s alert citizenry, nor from any vigilant Opposition party. By all accounts, there seems to be no reason for terrible discontent in the former while the latter is still fumbling for its own raison d’etre. It came, instead, from quarters far more blithe and arbitrary: the high command of her own party. The nearly week long public turbulence in the Delhi unit of the Congress party that culminated in a very popular chief minister being loftily permitted to keep her office, but only barely so, showcases the Congress culture in all its unembarrassed, undemocratic ways.Of course, the high command has a story to tell: it stepped in because Dikshit’s government wasn’t carrying the party along. And hadn’t she stormed out of the DPCC meeting a few days ago? There simply must be greater discipline and coordination between party and government, and the newly set up coordination committee will ensure just that. The high command may even have a point there. But the problem is that the latest episode of the Delhi Drama seems of a piece with a persistent pattern. For a reminder, rewind to December 15, 2003. The leader who had just steered her party to a successive Congress victory in Delhi, defying incumbency, and flaunting incumbency, at a time when the Congress had lost the simultaneously held assembly elections in three other states, was belatedly named the party’s leader by the high command that took many long days to wave aside the jealous objections of petty detractors. In that moment, it had seemed such a travesty that the Congress should run down its one government and leader that had done it so proud.The message that was sent out on that day in December is the same that has just been rubbed in again over two years later in Delhi. In the Congress, legitimacy and power flow from the high command. No elected leader, popular in her own right, must forget that. If she does, the high command and its hangers-on will “educate” her in crude ways.
