PRIYANKA Gandhi is the brand new Congress MP being watched with interest and hope. She won the by-election from Wayanad in Kerala with a massive majority and she has to hit the ground running. India is in ferment.

Nehru wrote the lines above the masthead of National Herald, the newspaper he published from Lucknow: “The nation is in peril. Defend it with all your might.” The lines remained around for months after the 1962 China war had ended. The peril this time around is domestic. Would Priyanka Gandhi be equal to the task?

There aren’t too many choices around in any case. Could she lean on her ability to communicate with ordinary men and women as seen in recent election campaigns to join the battle or perhaps even lead it? Recalling the family tragedy of assassinations she frequently resorts to may need to be abandoned for a wider aperture on the life-threatening crisis India is facing. Sympathy is needed by the masses just as sombrely.

Priyanka seems to have the talent to stabilise as well as energise the Congress party, which has hit the panic buttons with baffling defeats suffered in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections. A detailed and objective analysis of the BJP’s sweep in Maharashtra indicates a concerted tinkering of the mandate, with money power, polarising lies and suspect EVMs.

Therefore, strategies for ‘winning elections’ may not be the immediate task before the youngest member of the Gandhi trio in parliament.

Priyanka Gandhi seems to have the talent to stabilise as well as energise the Congress party.

Ensuring that elections, which are the heart of democracy, are not stolen as is evidently happening has become an existential challenge for the party and the country alike. Reinforcing electoral probity no longer seems feasible to be left to the state machinery, including the election commission. It would require nothing short of a mass movement to put Indian democracy back on its feet.

The compulsions for clinging to power are immensely high for the ruling establishment. Foreign interests, too, are inevitably going to be ranged to subvert the people’s will, particularly given India’s lead in shoring up the BRICS path to sovereignty and equal opportunities to the Global South.

The notorious maidan events used to derail and manufacture false outcomes would not be too difficult to stage in a fractured polity that India is being turned into. The need to stem the rot is therefore equally paramount for the people and for the parties that still believe in the future of a sure-footed democracy. Do Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi find themselves equipped for the enormous challenge? While the jury is out, the Gandhis may wish to cast an inward gaze to see if they have the intellectual depth, experience and fortitude needed to lead a virtual second independence movement, short of which Indian democracy looks doomed.

Sonia Gandhi retired to the Rajya Sabha in April, leaving the responsibilities of daily combat in the Lok Sabha to her children and their feckless allies. For a country as large and complex as India, it does seem odd that the main opposition group struggles to find talent outside the Gandhi family. Ideally, the catchment area for talent should be more widespread.

It is a given that it’s there, but it needs to be ascertained in the course of the struggles ahead. It needs to be stated though that without the presence of the Gandhis at the helm, the party could disintegrate, ripe to be cannibalised by wily interests in no time. Who can forget the chilling phone call in which a leading tycoon was heard describing the Congress as his shop. Fortunately, many unidentified agents of business houses the late Rajiv Gandhi had warned of have been eased out from the party, but others have curiously stayed on.

Rahul has made his mark as a forceful leader of the opposition, targeting issues of corruption and crony capitalism with conviction. He has embraced the farmers’ struggle against the vagaries of a free market economy. The farmers are not asking for anything more than what farmers in advanced capitalist countries get as subsidies.

Rahul Gandhi has also become an articulate advocate for a greater share in political and economic governance for lower-caste groups, the OBCs, who comprise over half the population. If Priyanka and he succeed in galvanising the party, to capture the imagination of the masses as is thought they could, the Gandhis would earn the gratitude of compatriots who are groping in the dark for relief from Narendra Modi’s unending misrule.

Modi’s contempt for India’s democracy and its founding fathers is legendary. According to him, there was only darkness before him. Nehru had messed up the country with misplaced liberalism and imported science. Gandhiji has been reduced to a symbol of cleanliness drives that show leaders sweeping perfectly clean footpaths. Under Nehru, no one knew about Gandhiji, Modi claims. It was Richard Attenborough’s award-winning movie that familiarised the world with Gandhi. The Indian military was a battalion of losers before Modi staged cross-border raids to discipline an erring neighbour. He also got Sheikh Hasina to stop mentioning Indira Gandhi’s name when he went to Dhaka to celebrate this or that event.

At home, Muslim-bashing is peaking. The supreme court has allowed zealots to dig up mosques and Sufi shrines to claim alleged remnants of demolished temples. The pervasive rot can be arrested in a democracy. But free and fair elections are the nub. The Congress evolved as a successful movement under Gandhiji’s watch. Nehru groomed it into a party. But he gnashed his teeth to put up with party satraps whose power came from the fact that they were deeply communal, incorrigibly feudal, unscientific and also corrupt.

The US indictment of Gautam Adani was not needed to feel the stench. The filth is pervasive. And it’s protected by the system that subverts democracy by rigging elections. Who could clean the swamp? Priyanka? Rahul?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 3rd, 2024