Rehash artist

Congress dissident-in-chief Jitendra Prasada’s open letter to Congress workers and office-bearers across the country is his boldest strike yet. With this missive, Prasada’s campaign of backroom manoeuvre and veiled tactic against the party’s leadership, read 10 Janpath and coterie, assumes a more public profile. For the rest, though, the four-page letter contains nothing that is either new or insightful. Prasada’s laments about the decline in Congress’s fortunes — the shrinking of electoral base, the diminishing of intellectual resources, or the blurring of ideological vision — are a generalised rehash of an old list. By way of prescription, he offers only the unexceptionable platitude. The party, he says, must heed the voice of the Congress worker at the grassroots. In the absence of a more rigorous critique of the party’s decay, and a more arduous working out of an alternative programme, Prasada’s revolt is just another shot fired in the ongoing clash of personalities set off by the party’s organisationalpolls. It is unlikely to herald an agenda for change.

In fact, Prasada’s letter brings into focus the magnitude of the Congress’s crisis. The vacuous leadership and the equally sterile challenge are both part of the same problem. It is not just that the party has touched new levels of atrophy under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. The problem also is that the dissidents have failed to project a credible alternative. Cast in the role of Brave Rebel, Prasada makes an extremely uneasy fit. Though he is the most vocal malcontent, Prasada cannot be accused of great credibility within his party or without. No political heavyweight, his influence is confined to sundry pockets of his home state, Uttar Pradesh, where as UPCC chief he once contributed to his party’s free fall into political oblivion. Also, the former Rajiv Gandhi loyalist is not entirely incapable of performing a last-minute climbdown in his confrontation with Sonia Gandhi. Even as he all but throws his hat in the ring for the post of Congress chief, speculation is rife that he may settle for a CWC berthinstead. Basically the problem is this — the invocations of the "ordinary Congressman" at the "grassroots" ring just as hollow and just as false when they come from Prasada as they would when deployed by Sonia Gandhi and her courtiers.

Even as leaders within the Congress perform this swordplay in the dark, neither side is able to seize the echoes of the very real discontent that simmers within the party today. The Congress’s primary membership has been reduced by more than half; the active membership list is similarly depleted. These waning figures testify to the complete lack of enthusiasm for membership drives at the ground level, especially in non-Congress ruled states. As leaders outnumber workers, and as decision-making on crucial issues is hijacked by a select few, the party has been denuded of all energy and vigour. The truth is that the Congress needs a complete overhaul but Jitendra Prasada is not the man for the job. For all his posturing, Prasada is only Her Majesty’s Opposition, not an alternative.