Opinion Mani Shankar Aiyar writes: Kharge’s win must not mean that winner takes all in Congress

Kharge is an experienced politician, experienced mostly in undergoing personal defeat. He has thrice been in the running for Chief Minister of Karnataka and has thrice had the cup dashed from his lips. He, therefore, knows a thing or two about losing. And one hopes that will stand him in good stead in determining the long-term future of the aspirant he has so definitively defeated. His defeat could not have been a surprise to Tharoor for Shashi always knew that he was the dark horse — and dark horses do not win except in fantasies or a miracle. He entered the fray not in the expectation of winning — indeed, in the expectation of certain defeat even before Kharge became a candidate — only to show that a contest is possible and necessary. With party satraps — the one exception being Kamal Nath of Madhya Pradesh — failing to give Tharoor a fair opportunity of appealing to the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) delegates who constitute the electoral college, it is quite extraordinary that over a thousand of them actually voted for the candidate who was destined to lose. In that sense, Tharoor has made his point.

Next arises the question of the future of the thousand or so delegates who voted for the loser. The optimal path would be to reconcile them to the outcome by being assured that their vote for the loser will not be held against them. This, of course, will be the theme of the rhetoric around the victor. But it is action on the ground that will determine whether the losing faction will feel slighted or reconciled. What happens in mature democracies is that it is not regarded as “disloyalty” to the party to persist in the contest even after the voter signals his preference for the other side. Once the contest is over, the over-arching need of party unity takes over.

That is not the traditional practice in our political parties. Certainly, during the freedom struggle, when the Congress was more a national movement than a political partisan, the party generally made the loser the second in command, as witness Sardar Patel becoming deputy PM to Jawaharlal Nehru. But ever since the turbulence that accompanied Indira Gandhi’s falling out with the Syndicate in the late sixties, the party has been apprehensive of the national leader and the party president being out of sync with each other. In 1969, that led to a split in the party and the emergence of irreconcilable differences between the winner and the loser. But 2022 is not 1969. The Kharge-Tharoor contest was not a battle of the titans. It was a friendly contest in which the winner represented continuity and the loser represented change. The outcome is that we will have both continuity and change. To ensure that this is so, Tharoor’s political future is in the new president’s hands, but more importantly, so is the party’s future. If the elections are not to leave a trail of bitterness, Tharoor deserves an appropriate role, perhaps as a key member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC). That would make the election a friendly contest rather than a fight to the finish.

The opportunity to test this will arise when the new president convenes the All-India Congress Committee by the spring of 2023. If Kharge decides to hold elections to just under half the membership of the CWC, one would, of course, expect to see Tharoor contest and seek to win around 325 votes of the over 10,000 votes that will be cast by the 1,100 AICC members. That would automatically ensure that his voice counts in the highest council of decision-making within the party. If, however, Khargeji decides to continue the past practice of the president nominating all 20 members of the CWC (plus the president) the litmus test would be whether or not he includes Tharoor. What will eventually happen is hidden at the moment. But given Tharoor’s qualities of head and heart that have spiraled him to the point of securing nearly 1,100 votes from PCC delegates, one hopes that in the larger interest of the party, Tharoor will be duly accommodated.

The party is now back to the position it has held through most of the last century when the national leadership of the party was distinct from the presidency of the party. For three decades, from 1919 to 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was clearly the national leader even when he relinquished his primary membership of the Congress. Others were in succession president of the Congress from Motilal Nehru in 1919 to the Mahatma in 1924 and on to Acharya J B Kriplani on the eve of Independence. The election of Purushottam Das Tandon, a right-wing and disturbingly religion-oriented activist in 1950, disrupted continuity and threatened the party’s core principles of secularism and pluralism.

Tandon, therefore, lasted only till July 1951, when the entire (elected) CWC resigned rather than continuing to serve under Tandon’s presidency. That was the context in which Nehru restored the tradition of the leader being the face of the party and the president its administrative head with the second heaviest political clout. I expect Khargeji sees his presidency as U N Dhebar did in Jawaharlal’s time. No one wants a repeat of the disharmony between S Nijalingappa and Indira Gandhi that split the party 55 years ago.

The writer is a former Union minister