Any upward movement for Rahul Gandhi needs to be duly sanctioned by the collective leadership of the Congress in order to have any value
The announcement by a Congress spokesman on Tuesday that AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi is “number two” in the party is a shade unorthodox. At any rate, such declarations have never before been made in India’s first party with a history going back a century and a quarter.
The question here is not whether Mr Gandhi has what it takes to lead a party such as the Congress. Probably he does. At any rate, he seems to have done well on the learning curve on the whole and, arguably more than others in the Congress, he seems to have a better idea of the party organisation across the country. No less significant, it may also be argued that when the Nehru-Gandhis are not at the helm, the party’s
voting percentage drops.
Even considering all this, however, the announcement appears at variance with the demands of organisational ritual and protocol, or for that matter inner-party democracy. It is not clear if the declaration came in the nature of off-the-cuff remarks in the process of answering tricky media questions (this is not unknown), or if these were well-considered and authorised.
Given the way the Congress works, not many will be surprised that Mr Gandhi’s name is coming to the fore in a context such as this. But if the idea is to officially declare that the Gandhi scion is officially next in importance only to the Congress president, his mother, then it may have been more appropriate for the Congress Working Committee to have met and placed the matter on the record.
We are in uncharted waters here. It is not very material what the procedure adopted was when H.N. Bahuguna, whose return to the Congress after diversions into CFD and the Janata Party, was rewarded with the newly created position of secretary-general by no less than the stalwart figure of Indira Gandhi. Subsequently, Kamalapati Tripathi and Arjun Singh were made working president in response to political necessity. The point to consider is none of them was the son of the party leader of the day. Mr Gandhi is already the effective top guy in the party for all practical purposes.
Indira Gandhi was not anointed the party’s boss by her famous father, and came to the top two years after his death. Rajiv Gandhi became the boss after the tragic assassination of his mother. Sonia Gandhi came to the fore long after Rajiv’s heart-rending assassination when a desperate Congress beseeched her. Rahul Gandhi is one among the party’s many general secretaries. Any upward movement for him needs to be duly sanctioned by the collective leadership of the Congress in order to have any value, even if the reward is well-earned and merited.