Rahul should go to jail, help Congress rejuvenate

In April 1917, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had gone to Champaran to conduct a survey on the plight of indigo farmers. The British administration sensed trouble due to Gandhi’s rising popularity and ordered him to leave the place for violating the prohibitory orders. He disobeyed. In a court, he was offered bail which he refused. The magistrate was forced to free Gandhi and suspend the trial indefinitely.

Cut to October 1977, the then Union Home Minister Charan Singh had ordered the arrest of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on corruption charges. When the CBI swooped down on 12 Willingdon Crescent, she asked: Where are the handcuffs? She chose to walk into the police vehicle.

Now, Rahul Gandhi has an opportunity to relive those two moments and prefer to go jail after being prosecuted for his remarks against the surname Modi during his 2019 election campaign speech.

Rahul Gandhi is no comparison to either Mahatma Gandhi or Indira Gandhi. But he is to be blamed squarely for the Congress party’s rout and the current state of affairs. Now, it is his responsibility to pave the way for the rejuvenation of the grand old party. He should take the defamation case as a godsend opportunity and play the victim card and hero.

Congress MP Sashi Tharoor described the defamation case and self-goal by the BJP. So, let the Congress take full advantage of it. Several journalists, newspaper editorials and non-BJP politicians have all described the two-year jail term for Rahul Gandhi as an extremely harsh one using the law of the British era.

A side effect of the Surat court judgement is that it could open a plethora of tit-for-tat cases as politicians and certain TV debate commentators keep flinging allegations. The ruling dispensations could continue to misuse the law to settle their scores with opponents. If BJP files cases in courts for comments made by the Congress leaders, nothing prevents the Congress from doing so in the states ruled by it. Hence, now there is an increasing chorus for repealing the law that is bound to be misused. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said his government has scrapped 2,000 odd obsolete laws to ensure ease of doing business. It is time the government worked on repealing many British relics and ensure ease of delivering justice.

BJP might go head-over-heels to annihilate the Congress or any regional party to facilitate its smooth electoral victories. But as we discussed in earlier columns, it does not have to worry about its electoral fortunes since a united opposition to it is still a far cry. Moreover, with its vast rank and file as the world’s largest political party with 180 million members as compared to 18 million of the Congress, the BJP has an unparalleled field force to mobilise the voters.

Obviously, the BJP grew at the cost of Congress. From the Congress-mukt Congress to now Gandhis-mukt Congress, the BJP has been on an aggressive drive. The Congress has almost given up offering little to no plausible resistance. As we discussed in the last column, the loss of the North-Eastern States to the BJP is the height of political surrender, that too after the reasonable response to Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra.

But the Surat verdict has created new political opportunities for the Congress. Now is the time for wisemen to come the aid of the party! And for the wiser men, it is high time they allowed the party to start regrowing.

The Congress and the opposition have to be pragmatic and agree on a common minimum programme. It is a cliché but they have no alternative if they have to survive the BJP’s onslaught. Other than making political statements to criticise the BJP’s alleged vindictive policies, conducting walkouts in legislatures and photo-ops in Parliament compound, they all need to reinforce contacts with the people with a united voice. No single party, including the Congress, has the wherewithal to do this on its own. Remember, it was a united Janata Party that had effectively fought against Indira Gandhi in the 1977 elections. The present opposition has to keep the Janata Party experiment and learn lessons from its disintegration and be mature and careful enough not to repeat the blunders. This calls for some sagacity and sacrifices on part of everybody concerned. And everybody has to be concerned in the interest of democracy. All know but they have to agree and a single party is not in the interest of the nation.

Apart from the Janata Party, the united opposition has many lessons to draw from the experience over the decades. They should not be reduced to ‘khichdi’ that Indira Gandhi used to refer to her opposition. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra was a good experiment until it was pulled down by a BJP-engineered rebellion by Eknath Shinde. The main grouse that the Shinde faction had was lack of inner-party communication under the leadership of Uddhav Thackeray. This kind of a folly must be avoided at any cost.

One might say, I am giving a political text book type rules. But the fact is that the opposition has one last chance now to ensure a strong, credible opposition. Defeating the BJP at the Centre is still a far cry, unless the Congress manages a miracle, an Indira Gandhi type political tsunami of 1979-80.

So, to begin with, let Rahul Gandhi go to jail, play the victim-of-vindictive politics card and allow Congress to recharge itself. The rest of the non-BJP parties too must grab the political opportunity to put up a united fight. Rahul Gandhi has been Narendra Modi’s biggest asset and TRP. It is time Rahul grew beyond this status by drawing lessons from his grandmother and helps revive the Congress and unite the opposition.

(The columnist is a Mumbai-based media veteran now running websites and a youtube channel known for his thought-provoking messaging.)