Cong resurrection improbable in near future if not impossible, claims book

PTI, Jan 7, 2024, 12:47 PM IST

The India of the last decade has left the Congress-run India so far behind that it has become an existential crisis for the party to resurrect itself enough to even remain as principal opposition, let alone return to power, claims a new book.

In ”What If There Was No Congress: The Uncensored History of Independent India”, political communicator Priyam Gandhi-Mody takes a look at how different India would have been, if there was no Congress at the helm for the most part of the last 80 years.

The book, published by Rupa, revisits some of the key events that shaped India’s political history over the last 80 years – Partition, Kashmir, governance, scams, democracy and its interruptions, economic policy, intellectual colonisation and foreign policy – and also seeks to provide a roadmap to the India of tomorrow.

”The people of the country continue to choose progress over corruption, truth over manufactured lies, security over terrorism and growth over stagnation. In my opinion, the Congress’s resurrection is improbable in the near future, if not impossible,” Gandhi-Mody claims.

She says when Prime Minister Narendra Modi posed a question ”What if there was no Congress in India?” in the Winter Session of Parliament in February 2022, the intellectual community, historians and the social media armies of India among others were forced to delve into seeking answers, some with the intent to support his thoughts, some to oppose and the rest to troll.

The author says the Congress had ”played a crucial role in the Indian freedom struggle; however, its leadership also made some missteps that resulted in the Balkanization of undivided India”.

She wonders what would India of today be like had Mahatma Gandhi’s call for disbanding the Congress been heeded? ”To understand why the Mahatma may have left behind this final guiding light, I have set out on an endeavour to understand the circumstances and undercurrents around the time of Indian independence that followed hundreds of years of colonial rule,” Gandhi-Mody says.

She adds her book is an attempt to understand the methods of working of the Congress in its current state to analyse why Gandhi’s final words seem to indeed be prophetic.

According to the author, she has attempted to study historical events from four lenses: Partition, territorial integrity, economic policy and governance.

”Each lens makes one section, at the beginning of which I have laid out a background of events that took place immediately preceding and succeeding Independence. These have formed the basis of policy-making over the last 75 years and continue to dominate political dialogue even today,” she writes.