If senior Congress leader Oscar Fernandes — experienced, and loyal to the party’s embattled first family — has made public remarks suggesting that Priyanka Gandhi play a more prominent role in party affairs, it may be inferred that he has Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s permission. It also goes without saying that Mrs Gandhi would have consulted her daughter Priyanka, as well as son Rahul, before giving Mr Fernandes the go-ahead to signal the forthcoming arrival on the scene of yet another Nehru-Gandhi scion.
Priyanka, of course, needs no introduction. But her political ventures have so far been confined to doing some political sprucing up in the parliamentary constituencies of her mother and brother, who were busy touring the country. It has been conjectured for some time that the public projection of the politically more glamorous Priyanka might put her older brother in the shade.
Evidently, the argument doesn’t impress the Gandhis themselves, for it is quite inconceivable that Priyanka’s projection — Mr Fernandes’ effort may be deemed to be official in all but name — would be permitted without both Sonia and Rahul seeking it. We are speaking here of a close-knit and extremely circumspect family, which is constantly in the public glare that is not of its own making.
Since the Congress’ abject defeat in the Lok Sabha polls, there has been not a little confusion within the party’s organisation as well as its parliamentary party. There is a sense among many that the party gave up without a fight under Rahul’s stewardship of the campaign, though defeat may have been pre-ordained after a 10-year stint in power.
But there’s also another strand to the narrative. Some of Rahul’s ideas — aimed at democratising the Congress — decidedly hurt the settled second-tier leaders in the states and also a handful of first-tier ones who are inured to the party’s traditional patronage-dispensing style politics, and saw Rahul’s effort at democratising candidate selections at the constituency level with some alarm.
Thus, there’s also a sense that a certain amount of intra-party undermining was also afoot during the Lok Sabha campaign. Everything thus cannot be laid at Rahul’s door. Many have questioned Mr Gandhi’s decision to tinker with the old way of doing things while elections are on. Fair enough. But when, if not at election time? Elections, after all, are the occasion to get a turnover of faces which in the Congress, arguably more than in other parties, signify dynasts. The issue is a fraught one.
Can Priyanka cope? Of course. The party needs a new binding force and symbol, and Rahul, it is clear, does not hanker after office, his uncharacteristic aggression in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday notwithstanding.
