Look who8217;s talking

It is not as if the Congress has suddenly discovered a need to spruce up its image. The case for the exercise has, in fact, been reinforc...

It is not as if the Congress has suddenly discovered a need to spruce up its image. The case for the exercise has, in fact, been reinforced a bit more with every addition to the party8217;s long list of electoral reverses. The past responses of the party to this enforced recognition have, however, been different.

It was, for example, an attempt to smarten up the image, more than anything else, that was attempted when it was entrusted to an advertisement agency in the days of Rajiv Gandhi. The code of conduct for Congressmen and Congresswomen, prepared and prescribed by the new-found Ethics Committee of the party under its perennial Mr Clean, A.K. Antony, falls in another category altogether.

This is nothing less than a harking back to the Gandhian heritage of the Congress, if one were to go strictly by the letter of the document. It deserves to be welcomed as a sign of belated realisation about the moral dimension of the repeated popular verdicts on a party that had ruled the country unchallenged for threedecades after Independence.

The ineffectiveness of the overtly Gandhian part of the code as an image-mender should be self-evident. The use of certified khadi, the first of the seven deadly virtues prescribed for party persons even before the adoption of the current code, has not exactly served the intended purpose. The 8220;livery of freedom8221; has, for long now been identified in public mind with trappings of abused power. Claims of such special Congress attributes as abstinence from liquor, too, lost credibility long ago. The popular perception of a 8220;Congress culture8221;, proudly flaunted by its practitioners once, has increasingly become one of a contradiction in terms.

Especially since the birth and growth since the seventies of a Youth Congress of criminally lumpen sections that have at times embarrassed even a cynical leadership. The damage done to the image during the declining phase of the Congress raj was so grave that even years in the Opposition have not sufficed to repair it to any significantdegree. It is a far from convincing attempt that the code makes to extend the Congress ethics to the contemporary era.

The scam-ridden days of the party on its way to political doom contain a salutary warning. The commands against corrupt practices are hardly being issued, however, to party cadres and netas8217; waiting to carry them out. And the directive to uphold the dignity of women and not to discriminate against them, to give them 8220;freedom to choose8221; and 8220;to excel,8221; would be widely expected to fall only on deaf years.

Which brings up the point that it is not only this party that needs image-mending of an effective kind. It is not the khadi-clad politicos alone who have an unsavoury reputation to live down. Saffron politics can no longer be claimed to stand for greater virtues and values. Nor can politics of other hues. Codes of conduct can indeed help all of them, but only if these do not appear to the people as merely exercises in hypocrisy.