The irony of a 114-year-old party, with a formidable record of taking on the might of the British raj, now reduced to genuflecting before the dynastic appeal of the Nehru-Gandhis, is all too obvious. Sonia Gandhi's 52nd birthday, celebrated earlier this month in an orgy of flowers and ladoos, saw veteran party workers and formerministers, queueing up outside 10, Janpath with their pathetic little bouquets in a bid to catch The Leader's eye. As Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh put it so succinctly, ``Sonia does not have to be afraid of anyone. The only person who matters is Soniaji.'' The fact, however, is that Sonia Gandhi may well have reason to fear Soniaji, or at least the ``Soniaji complex'' because it is, by its very nature, ephemeral. Today, despite Sonia Gandhi's professed concern for open debate within the party, there is just no evidence of it. Dissent is driven underground, and waits for an opportune moment to surface. The party is weakened in the process.

Displays of sycophancy are, however, not confined just to the khadiwallahs. Atal Behari Vajpayee's 75th birthday celebrations, alas, betrays the same servile culture. While one Delhi MP even decked his constituency in lights and flowers for the occasion, the Gujarat Chief Minister, not widely known for his social concern, launched three welfare schemes tohonour the Prime Minister. Why he had to wait for the PM's birthday in order to provide self-employment schemes for youth or to develop his cities, is anyone's guess. In this surreal world, unfettered by spinal columns and independent thought processes, today's kings can find themselves as tomorrow's cabbages. Congress king-makers like Arjun Singh, K. Karunakaran, Pranab Mukherjee and Jitendra Prasada have built up leaders like P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri, and shed them just as quickly in their bid to find favour with yet another dispensation. Similarly Vajpayee, although he still gets the mandatory bows, is no longer projected as India's man of destiny -- as his spin doctors had so assiduously projected him last year. Sycophancy then does nobody any good in the long run -- not the choir singers, not the leaders, and certainly not Indian democracy.