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Journalism of Courage
It might be difficult to remember for much of the electorate,but not too long ago the Indian National Congress was the party of government across the North,from Orissa through plateau,plain and desert to Gujarat. In the late 1980s,political news from a swathe of states was usually about factional sniping or corrupt satraps drama that played itself out far from election meetings or the floor of legislative assemblies. The Congress consequent slow demise is thus indelibly associated with names of those satraps. Two of those names are back in the headlines: J.B. Patnaik,and Jagannath Mishra.
Congress supremacy in UP and Bihar is as dead as baggy jeans,just another fading memory of a fashionably derided decade. But when Jagannath Mishra last ruled in Patna,that would have been difficult to foresee. His dethronement by Lalu Prasads Janata Dal began the process that results in Amar Singh today being able to declare only half-humorously that the Congress can take Rae Bareli and Amethi in UP,what could they do with anything else. Anywhere else the terrible memories associated with that defeat and the fact that none of Mishras three innings as CM,the first starting in the sepia-tinted pre-Emergency period,was particularly distinguished would keep him out of active politics. In India,and in the Congress,that sort of past is never a problem: hence reports that he is close to being welcomed back to the Congress fold.
