Notwithstanding the huge fluctuations in the Congress’s fortunes at the Centre, the old practice in relation to state chief ministers continued and was consolidated after Sonia Gandhi became Congress president a decade ago, and even more so after 2004 when her position became even stronger because she forswore the office of prime minister. Nothing illustrates the state of affairs better than the plight of luckless S.M. Krishna. Deservedly described as an “excellent” chief minister, he was unsurprisingly banished to the gilded cage called Mumbai’s Raj Bhavan. When the assembly elections in Karnataka could not be postponed on any pretext, the Congress “high command” felt that Krishna was needed in his home state. It is also characteristic of the party that his actual return was unduly delayed. Worse, seven other state satraps had by then ganged up on him.

Is it too much to hope that the committee the Congress president is to appoint — because the party has at last stumbled on the conclusion that its grassroots organisations need to be “revitalised” — would recommend the rescinding of practices that have become wholly out of date besides being counter-productive? What was feasible in the time of Indira Gandhi is not at all practicable now. She could appeal to the electorate across the country over the head of the party and could stage a spectacular return to power, with a two-thirds majority in Parliament, just 33 months after reaching her nadir. Now the Grand Old Party of the freedom struggle is a shrunken shell of itself. Indira Gandhi did not allow her senior colleagues — such as Yeshwantrao Chavan, Jagjivan Ram and Swaran Singh — to travel to states other than their own. It did not matter. But what difference has been made to the elections in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat last year and in Karnataka now by the rallies of Sonia Gandhi and road shows of Rahul, to say nothing of the prime minister’s brief appearances?

... contd.