03-24-2006, 06:05 AM
<b>Gandhi's 'dysfunctional' party </b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>India may be the world's biggest democracy, but most of its political parties have little democracy to show for in their functioning and decision-making. </i>
<b>Leading this pack of what political scientists call the "leader-centric, leader-driven party" is the country's Grand Old Party, the Congress which has been mostly ruled by the Nehru-Gandhi clan</b>.
When the present edition of the Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, talked about updating by ordinance or decree a law that bans MPs from holding other salaried public positions, the main opposition BJP party screamed that the Congress had not changed its spots.
The BJP saw it as a move to exempt Mrs Gandhi from the law.
<b>Congress is the party responsible for imposing India's only post-independence emergency, suspending civil liberties in the 1970s with a host of draconian measures. </b>
So changing a law without consulting the parliament had a dark sense of déjà vu about it.
Buckling under pressure, and again attempting to take the higher moral ground, Mrs Gandhi has now resigned from parliament - because she holds another position covered by the law - to take the wind out of the newly-energised BJP's offensive.
Avoidable
The Congress leaders have been again praising their "sacrificial leader" who can do no wrong.
But for others, the kerfuffle could have been easily avoided and deftly managed if Ms Gandhi had more independent and thoughtful advisers.
Was she right to resign?Â
<b>Analyst Mahesh Rangarajan says: "The Congress party is in a state of disrepair. It urgently needs to be modernised." </b>
This is a paradox of sorts - a party which is credited with shedding old socialist shibboleths and ushering in modern economic reforms in India is itself a sclerotic, archaic organisation without real inner-party democracy.
Coterie
<b>To many observers, the political culture of the Congress party is steeped in a single minded, unthinking and embarrassingly sycophantic dynastic "follow-the-leader" ethos. </b>
Congress members thronged her residence in Delhi
The picture, they say, is of a leader guided by a coterie of crusty, trusted - and usually spineless - political associates who control access to the leader.
<b>In this suffocating culture, even clerks and secretaries who work in the leader's office rise to de facto powerful positions, controlling people's access to the leader, and cutting deals.</b>
Not surprisingly, the argument goes, political strategising by such a coterie always works towards pleasing their leader at all costs - and sometimes settling scores with their individual adversaries.
When they botch up, it is the Congress party leader who usually has to clear the mess up. That seems to be what happened with Sonia Gandhi on Thursday.
<b>Analysts in Delhi wonder why the Congress party think-tank failed to see the consequences in modern India of trying to bring in an ordinance on MPs holding other jobs without consulting parliament. </b>
<b>"They started something without realising that it could engulf them," says political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta. </b>
Television news programmes are being leaked "information" that Sonia Gandhi never favoured such a change to the law and had spoken against it at a late-night party meeting on Wednesday.
So was she kept out of the loop by the coterie of advisers who went ahead and pushed the law?
Or did Mrs Gandhi lend her support to test the political waters, and, when she found it could singe her and her party, did she perform a second "sacrificial" act to deflate the opposition? (She famously sacrificed taking the post of prime minister after winning the 2004 elections because her "inner voice" told her not to take the job.)
Or is there a genuine communication gap between the leader and party minions?
'Mysterious'
Nobody really has a clue about where the truth lies.
<b>"There is an aura of total mystery of how Sonia Gandhi operates and communicates within the party. She is the mysterious single leader," says Mahesh Rangarajan. </b>
<b>All that people know is she meets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh every Friday in Delhi to discuss government. </b>
Sonia Gandhi is such an enigma that the opposition BJP also seems to have failed to read her mind.
The BJP was expecting the law to come in and push Mrs Gandhi into a corner, but she seems to have turned the tables and done the unexpected again by resigning as an MP.
<b>The only non-Gandhi Congress Prime Minister, the late PV Narasimha Rao, once wrote that democracy in India is a recent tradition after centuries of monarchical rule. </b>
With the exception of cadre-based parties like the main opposition BJP and the Communist parties, most parties are leader-centric, and suffer from a lack of healthy intra-party democracy.
In Congress, for example, real democracy is equated with dissension and splits.
<b>Until modern India rubs off on Congress's political culture, the party - and its leader - may well continue to get embroiled in such wasteful controversies</b>.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Leading this pack of what political scientists call the "leader-centric, leader-driven party" is the country's Grand Old Party, the Congress which has been mostly ruled by the Nehru-Gandhi clan</b>.
When the present edition of the Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, talked about updating by ordinance or decree a law that bans MPs from holding other salaried public positions, the main opposition BJP party screamed that the Congress had not changed its spots.
The BJP saw it as a move to exempt Mrs Gandhi from the law.
<b>Congress is the party responsible for imposing India's only post-independence emergency, suspending civil liberties in the 1970s with a host of draconian measures. </b>
So changing a law without consulting the parliament had a dark sense of déjà vu about it.
Buckling under pressure, and again attempting to take the higher moral ground, Mrs Gandhi has now resigned from parliament - because she holds another position covered by the law - to take the wind out of the newly-energised BJP's offensive.
Avoidable
The Congress leaders have been again praising their "sacrificial leader" who can do no wrong.
But for others, the kerfuffle could have been easily avoided and deftly managed if Ms Gandhi had more independent and thoughtful advisers.
Was she right to resign?Â
<b>Analyst Mahesh Rangarajan says: "The Congress party is in a state of disrepair. It urgently needs to be modernised." </b>
This is a paradox of sorts - a party which is credited with shedding old socialist shibboleths and ushering in modern economic reforms in India is itself a sclerotic, archaic organisation without real inner-party democracy.
Coterie
<b>To many observers, the political culture of the Congress party is steeped in a single minded, unthinking and embarrassingly sycophantic dynastic "follow-the-leader" ethos. </b>
Congress members thronged her residence in Delhi
The picture, they say, is of a leader guided by a coterie of crusty, trusted - and usually spineless - political associates who control access to the leader.
<b>In this suffocating culture, even clerks and secretaries who work in the leader's office rise to de facto powerful positions, controlling people's access to the leader, and cutting deals.</b>
Not surprisingly, the argument goes, political strategising by such a coterie always works towards pleasing their leader at all costs - and sometimes settling scores with their individual adversaries.
When they botch up, it is the Congress party leader who usually has to clear the mess up. That seems to be what happened with Sonia Gandhi on Thursday.
<b>Analysts in Delhi wonder why the Congress party think-tank failed to see the consequences in modern India of trying to bring in an ordinance on MPs holding other jobs without consulting parliament. </b>
<b>"They started something without realising that it could engulf them," says political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta. </b>
Television news programmes are being leaked "information" that Sonia Gandhi never favoured such a change to the law and had spoken against it at a late-night party meeting on Wednesday.
So was she kept out of the loop by the coterie of advisers who went ahead and pushed the law?
Or did Mrs Gandhi lend her support to test the political waters, and, when she found it could singe her and her party, did she perform a second "sacrificial" act to deflate the opposition? (She famously sacrificed taking the post of prime minister after winning the 2004 elections because her "inner voice" told her not to take the job.)
Or is there a genuine communication gap between the leader and party minions?
'Mysterious'
Nobody really has a clue about where the truth lies.
<b>"There is an aura of total mystery of how Sonia Gandhi operates and communicates within the party. She is the mysterious single leader," says Mahesh Rangarajan. </b>
<b>All that people know is she meets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh every Friday in Delhi to discuss government. </b>
Sonia Gandhi is such an enigma that the opposition BJP also seems to have failed to read her mind.
The BJP was expecting the law to come in and push Mrs Gandhi into a corner, but she seems to have turned the tables and done the unexpected again by resigning as an MP.
<b>The only non-Gandhi Congress Prime Minister, the late PV Narasimha Rao, once wrote that democracy in India is a recent tradition after centuries of monarchical rule. </b>
With the exception of cadre-based parties like the main opposition BJP and the Communist parties, most parties are leader-centric, and suffer from a lack of healthy intra-party democracy.
In Congress, for example, real democracy is equated with dissension and splits.
<b>Until modern India rubs off on Congress's political culture, the party - and its leader - may well continue to get embroiled in such wasteful controversies</b>.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->