It’s a time of reckoning for the leadership of the Congress party. The seeds of corruption which blossomed into the toxic undergrowth that now threatens to strangle this 134-year-old political party, were sown soon after independence under the leadership of the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — the over-indulged son of a wealthy Allahabad lawyer. Instead of building on the time-tested free enterprise and trade culture of the subcontinent, Nehru inspired by Soviet propaganda, led the newly-independent nation down the socialist path.

Inevitably, with sweeping discretionary powers invested in the country’s politicians and bureaucrats, the fence soon began eating the crop, torpedoing the grand Soviet-style five-year plans elaborately written by Nehru’s heirs. Worse, abuse of office, corruption and extortion of money for official favours became a way of life in socialist post-independence India.

But as is becoming clear, some exposés were the mere tip of the vast corruption ice-berg solidified by the Nehru-Indira Gandhi dynasty which has ruled Congress and the country for over 55 years. And while thousands of the nomenklatura have disappeared into the woodwork with their ill-gotten gains, nemesis has caught up with the leaders of this now moth-eaten political party which was roundly trounced in the general elections of 2014 and 2019.

Currently over a dozen Congress leaders are charged with grave corruption offences. Among them: former Union finance minister P. Chidambaram, party president and vice-president Sonia and Rahul Gandhi (National Herald case), Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath, former Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, former civil aviation minister Praful Patel. These cardboard caesars misused the discretionary powers invested in them under the socialist economic development model.

The saving grace of post-independence India ruined by Nehruvian socialism is that although they grind slowly, the wheels of justice grind surely.