“You don’t learn from
successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you
only learn from wounds and scars, mistakes and failures, and that is the truth”-
Jane Fonda
.
Wise words, but how
many of us learn from our mistakes and failures? We are too full of our own infallibility that
when we fail, we attribute it to machinations, intrigues, conspiracies of others,
in particular, of all those who are ranged against us. The courage to honestly admit our own
responsibility is not given to most of us- maybe one comes across occasional exceptions
as great as Mahatma Gandhi who was candid to accept his earlier mistake of
refuting Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s
death when at a later date he came to know that Bose had died in a plane crash.
This is true of our politicians who in victory hail themselves and in defeat
blame others. To err in politics is human; to acknowledge one’s error is almost
divine. But who wants to be divine? Better to err and be human and still better
to fix the blame on others. Did Hitler have any regrets over what he did to the
Jews? Hitler had NO regrets. He never expressed any regrets for ANY of his
crimes. On the contrary, in the last days of his life in the Bunker, he became
increasingly arrogant and said that the Germans had shown themselves unworthy
of him and his leadership! In other words he committed suicide claiming that
he'd been too good for the Germans. Nathuram Godse in his last speech said “I
have no guilt, no regret” in assassinating Gandhi since he was convinced that
he could do no wrong and Gandhi could do no right. It is a fact that in most
elections the ruling party gets defeated for its mistakes though it refuses to
accept them and seeks to attribute its defeat to the false propaganda of the
opposition. Nowhere is this truer than in the crisis in Indian National
Congress today as its soul searching exercise for its electoral debacle
excludes its own causative responsibility.
It is time for the INC-
better known as the Congress to learn from its mistakes and from the scars of
the 2014 polls. Congress that once
boasted of stalwarts like Jawaharlal
Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Rajagopalachari, Ambedkar, Chintaman
Deshmukh, John Mathai, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Gopalaswamy Iyengar to name a few in its ran has now been reduced to a pathetic organization
that could not even garner 1/10 seats in the parliament to gain respectability as an Opposition party. Congress, thanks to
the relentless attacks by the opposition and the Media has become the whipping
boy today buffeted and pounded by a large section of the Indian polity. If it
raises its voice on any issue that is questionable, the ruling party smirks
saying “Look! Who is calling the kettle
black?” As it turns out, it has no chance of recovering its lost ground as its
name has unfortunately become synonymous with corruption. It is also seen as a
spineless party bending backwards to pay obeisance to the mother-son duo at its
helm. For all its talk about self
introspection, Congress has found no answer except that it had not developed the
communication strategy so successfully handled by the BJP through its social
media. In an oblique way it is an affirmation of Narendra Modi’s christening of
Manmohan Singh as Man Mouna Singh.
Any government in power
for two terms each one of five full years is bound to commit mistakes though the
final scorecard will show how well it
batted for the entire period. The UPA I and II to its credit remained not out
at the end though badly bruised and hurt by the pace and fury, guile and googly
of the media and opposition. Though Man Mohan Singh carried his bat home as PM,
his team’s final score was too low, not to be overrun by the opposition. Its batting
prowess despite heavyweights was brittle and all his cabinet men and women
could not put UPA together at the hustings.
What went wrong? Who
were the players who performed poorly and who was its coach, mentor and
strategist who contributed to the failure of the execution of some of its well
thought out plans like Aadhar, GST, Land acquisition Bill, FDI in Retail business- to name a few of its development policies? None of the plans
could be executed as they were stalled by BJP when it was in the opposition. It is true a lot of corruption was exposed by
the Media and the opposition- the AAP in
particular- but it is naïve to say all the men and women of Man MohanSingh were
dishonest and corrupt. Just as a drop of venom can poison water in a well, a
Kalmadi and a Raja can corrupt the entire government and the party. In that flood
of charges, Manmohan, Mukherjee(fortunately left in good time to become
President), Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, et.al were washed away. People were brainwashed into
seeing Corruption, Corruption everywhere/ Not one Congressman to be spared.
The main reason has
been and is the inability of the Congress to touch base with the people in
India. The Ministers and the spokespersons were fluent in English more than in
Hindi and they could never be near the BJP which articulated well with the
masses in their own language. If Modi is clean, so was Manmohan Singh. If
Jaitley waxes eloquent about his incorruptibility, so were Chidambaram and
Kapil Sibal. If Sushma Swaraj washes herself off the Lamo episode, Salman Khurshid
should not be found fault with embezzlement of public money. Still corruption
stuck to Congress. What was most tragic was the mother-son duo leading the party could not articulate either in Hindi or in
English and lacked the mercurial skill
to debate issues.
The entire Congress,
humiliated and vilified knows that it is the end of the road for it unless a
miraculous savior emerges. But no savior can emerge so long as the spineless
party clings to the apron strings of the mother and pulls at the jacket hem of
the son. The mother has had her good innings and she revived the Congres sin
2004 after it was out of power for more than nine years. In halting English and
in Italianized Hindi, she spoke and was heard because there was an aura of
clean politics about her. Her astuteness in denying the Prime Ministership in
2004 raised her stature still higher and the Congress looked up to her as its
savior. Language and Italian origin were
no longer a barrier in commanding respect
and acceptance from the party and to a large extent from the nation and despite
the Mumbai terror attack a few months before the elections, Congress rode back to power in 2009 under her
leadership.
By 2014 she had run out
of steam and had also done incalculable damage
to her clean record by giving unto her maternal insticts of
seeing her son as the Prime Minister. Her
promoting her son has been the undoing of the Congress. Unlike Indira Gandhi, known
in her early days as the ‘gungi gudiya’ butwho rose to become the most powerful woman of the world, Rahul baba could not rise
up as a strong man, leave aside as a charismatic leader. If Congress is in such
a pathetic state, it is due to the inability of the motherand son to provide the
leadership to confront Modi, a powerful orator, who could with nonchalance
spread caustic attacks on them with a swipe at their effort to
perpetuate dynasty rule.
Sonia can never be an
Indira Gandhi who strode as the only Man in the cabinet. Rahul has not matured
though he has been in politics for more than a decade. He makes the right noise
at the wrong time and the wrong noise at the right time. As recently as
yesterday Rahulism reached all time low when he equated Rohith Vemula with Mahatma
Gandhi without understanding that the Mahatma was assassinated for his plea for
Hindu-Muslim unity while Rohith took his life conceding defeat to forces that
were hostile to the dalits and disadvantaged students.
Mere attack cannot be a
strategic weapon even in war. Attack has to be a planned and well nuanced
strategy. It has to have a direction, a futuristic design and a roadmap for
victory. Congress under Rahul( Sonia is silent these days) does not offer any
alternative while it attacks the government for all its policies-good, bad and
indifferent. Unlike the British Parliament( on which our parliamentary
democracy has been modeled) the opposition does not function as a shadow government
and does not have a vision that could be an alternative to what it perceives as
a wrong policy of the ruling government . Till now Rahul has not spelt out any
single economic or foreign policy or defence strategy . No
roadmap has been drawn as to how to mesh industrial growth with economic
uplifting of the masses, how to synergize tradition with modernism, science
with religion, pluralism with freedom to follow one’s own faith and above all
democracy and the right to freedom with duty and responsibility. The Congress party has till today shown a bankruptcy of idealism and vision and
all the leading intelligent and educated men and women in the party follow
Rahul only in blasting the ruling government for anything and everything
without any new idea of governance. This was what the BJP did to UPA but they
won the election and are in power with promise of the manna to the starving
millions- promises that has not been possible to implement. But only highlighting BJP's failure and not searching for answers to their own failures spell doom
for the future of the Congress party. The mahagatbhandan(the big coalition)
that was a success in Bihar is more due
to the frustration of the people with the BJP over the last eighteen months of
its governance and the persent thinking in the Congress to replicate it in other states may at best keep BJP out of
the fray, but does not guarantee an alternate policy to build a new strong India.
It is time Congress
relies on others outside of the Gandhi family to draw a blueprint to bring in just, dynamic and good governance that is adequately short sighted to have long distance
vision and equally long sighted not to
miss the vision for the here and the now. It should shed its reliance on
just the mother and son and cast its net wide to rope in new and fresh talent
who understand the wisdom of Gandhi in keeping the windows open and letting in
fresh breeze without being blown away.
If the Congress fails
to address itself to a new policy for a robust 21st C India , it
has to abdicate its position as a strong and positive opposition and possibly get wiped off the face
of Indian political map. For the next three years, it should function as a
shadow government and make itself credible in the eyes of the people as a progressive
alternative to all the negative views it has against the present government. Let
the Congress learn from its mistake of servile dependence on one family, let
the Congress learn from s failure to know where it had faltered and let
Congress learn to be pro active and positive rather than remain retroactive and
negative. Let Rahul grow mature and wise to be deserving of the PM's chair.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to
continue that counts”- Winston Churchil.
Hope Congress shows courage
to walk without crutches and glean victory from the jaws of defeat.
.
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