The day after is always a difficult moment to negotiate. The euphoria of a famous victory can wilt under the unremitting light of a many-layered reality, the heady surge of having achieved power can be quickly replaced by the intractable complexities of actually exercising it. The Congress party, and the woman who is its president, is at the moment experiencing just such a moment.The scenes outside New Delhi’s 10 Janpath are at present tumultuous. Indeed, they should be so, as party workers and supporters — denied the scent of power for eight long years — celebrate together the achieving of it in a carnival of their own making. Yet they also remind the disinterested observer of the family-centred politics of the Congress and the attendant dangers it holds. If such politics gets too obsessive, if it comes to define party functioning, it could prove to be both retrogressive for Indian democracy and counter-productive for the party that has just been elected to pilot it. If Sonia Gandhi wishes to modernise the Congress, she would have to address this ceaseless bowing and scrapping, this mind-boggling backbending. She would have to muster the confidence to give her party colleagues the confidence to function as autonomous beings, responding to the needs and hopes of their respective constituencies and taking responsibility for their decisions. The Party High Command, ritually invoked whenever a crucial decision has to be reached — be it the appointing of the chief minister in Andhra Pradesh or the conceptualising of a coalition government in Karnataka — must now find a way to declare itself redundant.This is not to say that the Congress’s top leadership should not be involved in party affairs as enabler and guide, it is to argue that this should be accomplished in a manner that promotes inner-party democracy rather than stifle it because inner-party democracy complements and furthers democracy in the public sphere. Sonia Gandhi has indicated that her instincts are those of a democrat. With her renewed mandate from the people, she will now have a chance to prove it through her political practice.
