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Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)
Spare a tear for poor Rahul. When he does not speak, he is attacked. When he does speak, he is attacked. When he does not act, he is attacked. When he does act, he is attacked. When a party General Secretary urges Rahul to speak on topical issues, he is attacked. When that General Secretary speaks up on his own, he is attacked. That, I suppose, is the nature of the political beast, but it would help rational discourse if prejudice and polemics were to be leavened by at least a measure of understanding.
Rahul Gandhi is not the leader of our Party. He is the Deputy Leader. Therefore, he has to live with the team his mother has formed around herself so long as his mother remains head of the Party. After all, she is his mother - and, by definition, there is always a generation gap between Mother and Son, any mother and any son. It is a generation gap I have to personally acknowledge, for I was an associate of his father's, am indeed a few years older than his father. There are thirty years between my date of birth and Rahul's. How can there not be a generation gap between us? Would I consider people born in 1911 as belonging to my generation - or as old dodderers? As Wordsworth sang long ago, "The Child is Father of the Man". So, it is entirely normal and natural that Rahul should feel more at home with his generation than with mine. That would be true not only of Rahul but of everyone born in the '70s.
Yet, the fact that thirty years separate us does not mean that he regards me as an alien or I that he is ET. On the contrary, there is the comfortable feeling of handing on the baton to capable hands, that change may come but continuity will be maintained. It is that spirit that must animate any organisation that has a history of 129 years behind it and at least another 129 years ahead of it.
Generational conflict has always been inherent in the dynamic of the Indian National Congress, the most celebrated example of it being the battle royal between Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal, over Dominion status or Poorna Swaraj as the objective of India's Freedom Struggle. Motilal thought it more practical to limit his demand to Dominion status. His son thought otherwise. Jawaharlal was abroad through much of 1927 when his father was drafting the Congress' alternative constitution to the Simon mission, that is the all-British mission set up by the British government to consider ways of moving towards a greater measure of self-government for Indians.
While the Congress Party as a whole boycotted the Simon mission carrying black flags and shouting the slogan, "Simon, Go Home", Motilal Nehru got on with drafting the Congress' alternative constitution to the Simon mission's. When Jawaharlal returned from Europe just in time to attend the 1927 Madras session of the Congress at which his father was elected President, he was infuriated at his father's draft restricting the Congress demand for Independence to Dominion status. He and his generational colleagues (including particularly Subhas Chandra Bose) pitched into an open fight with Motilal over the "Nehru Report", an argument that became so raucous that Motilal was obliged to beg Gandhiji to come out of retirement in Sabarmati ashram to mediate between Father and Son at the 1928 Calcutta session.
Gandhiji agreed - but on condition that he alone would decide who would be the next Congress President in succession to Motilal. When the time came, Gandhiji named Jawaharlal but restrained him from pursuing the demand for Poorna Swaraj by one full year to give Gandhi the opportunity of trying to persuade the British to see sense. It was only when the Brits did not relent that Jawaharlal was permitted to proclaim Poorna Swaraj as the goal and raise the flag of Independence on the banks of the Ravi outside Lahore on 26 January 1930.
That is the Congress tradition of fostering generation change through constructive dissidence. And thus is it that veteran Gandhians (Rajaji, Rajendra Prasad et. al.) gave way to younger Nehruvians soon after Independence; that Nehru's closet associates, the Syndicate, had to abdicate to Indira's generation; that many of her associates bowed out when Rajiv came to office. Such change will take place when Rahul becomes President of the party. Till then, however, the old and the new will co-exist, and together but in their separate ways work towards the revival of the Party after the shattering defeat of May 2014.
Inevitably, some of the young and not-so-young are impatient and some of the older ones reluctant to declare their innings closed. But none of this amounts to revolt or split. All it means is that the 70s generation is progressively taking over from the '40s and '50s. But Rahul will need a few veterans. They might have a second innings. That is the way of all flesh. There is no crisis, only change becoming of a party that has served six generations of Indians and has the inner strength and resilience to survive setbacks to continue indefinitely as the natural party of governance. The present is an aberration as was 1977 and 1989. We'll be back with some of the old and many of the new.
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