About time

Over the years,the Congress has shifted several shapes to stay relevant,and discarded many old orthodoxies,but it has done so without openly questioning anyone in its pantheon. The successive generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family who led the Congress were out of bounds for rational disagreement or evaluation. However,now for the first time,could it be that the party is ready to acknowledge its missteps and place them in context? The fifth volume of its official history series,The Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation,deals with the period between 1964 and 1984,arguably the two most complex and troubling decades in its 125-year history. Naturally,Indira Gandhis ambiguous legacy dominates the volume.

One of the essays confronts the big question of Indira Gandhi and separatist blowback,discussing how the Congress under her watch deliberately encouraged the young Sikh fundamentalist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale for petty political ends,and ended up with a Frankensteins monster that ultimately turned on its benefactors. This is hardly revelatory,and concerns a safely distant past,but the fact that an official history with Pranab Mukherjee as its editorial board chairman is willing to venture beyond the usual pieties is a mark of the Congresss new maturity. In Samuel Johnsons words,the wonder is not that it is done well,but that it is done at all.

Even if this has been done unwittingly,snapping out of denial is a good move for the Congress apart from self-knowledge and clarity,it also has tactical benefits. The opinions expressed may be debatable,but the fact of allowing debate would allow the Congress to take on the questions of Sikh separatism,Operation Blue Star and the 1984 riots and come clean in a redemptive narrative. And for all those who seek to club it over the head by chanting 1984,it could create space to point out the difference between that incident and a sustained communal ideology. And in a larger sense,by dismantling old,static ideas about itself,the Congress can take credit for the long way it has come in economics and foreign policy,for instance. Does the party,fresh from its 125th anniversary celebrations,have the stomach for this self-appraisal?