The evidence is piling up that if it doesn’t have its way within the Congress party, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is set to implement a scorched earth policy. In this 140-year-old party where Nehru has succeeded Nehru with monotonous frequency for over a half century, Rahul Nehru-Gandhi, officially appointed Leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha after General Election 2024 when Congress unexpectedly won 99 seats in the lower house, is reluctant to share power.
In 2022 when Shashi Tharoor, former UN Under Secretary-General and erudite author of 27 books on history, politics and miscellaneous subjects, and two-term MP from Trivandrum (Kerala), threw his hat into the ring to contest the post of President of the Congress, the dynasty mobilized against him and ensured that Mallikarjun Kharge, a nondescript party functionary from Karnataka, was elected party chief. Recently when Tharoor was selected by Prime Minister Modi to lead an all-party delegation to explain India’s strike against terrorist camps in Pakistan following the April 22 massacre of 23 Indians vacationing in Pehalgam (Kashmir) by Pak-based terrorists, mother-son took exception, proclaiming that Tharoor was not the Congress party’s choice. And now with the Kerala legislative assembly election scheduled for early next year, the Sonia-Rahul leadership has reportedly taken umbrage that Tharoor — a two-term MP — has expressed legitimate aspiration to lead the Kerala Congress in the assembly election.
Clearly the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which jealously guards the Congress as a family fiefdom rather than national political party, is aware that Tharoor, an articulate graduate of St. Stephen’s, Delhi and Tufts University (USA), accomplished raconteur and skilled debater, poses a threat to the under-educated, homespun RaGA as leader of the Congress. RaGa the latest Nehru-Gandhi ‘white’ hope, has learned nothing from post-independence India’s disastrous tryst with neta-babu socialism. Like his progenitors, he routinely trashes India’s best businessmen, promises to restore socialism and favours a caste census which will further atomise — instead of uniting — the country. And now the mother and son are hell-bent on hounding Tharoor — quite clearly the best man to lead the party in Generel Election 2029 — out of the party and into the willing embrace of the BJP. Clear evidence of scorched earth Plan B.
