Mani Shankar Aiyar: ‘Cong should be ready to not be INDIA bloc leader… There is competence in Mamata, others (to be its leader)’

Not only could he (Rao) have done things differently he should have done things differently. He decided to go on a path of appeasement. Appease Advani, BJP, UP chief minister, Sangh Parivar… appease them by bringing in sadhus and sants to talk to them, appease them by believing that the pledges they were making to the court would be held by them when in fact they were making pledges to their god.

*In the book, you have mentioned your time in the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress, and you also talk about pragmatism in Indian politics – regarding shifting of loyalties. Why do you think it has become a characteristic feature of Indian politics?

First, let me say that this entire matter has been dealt with in the chapter of my book called “Round Tripping”. Politicians and democracies often drift… For example, Winston Churchill… If defection was part of his life, then are you surprised it is part of minor politicians’ lives… There are changes that take place in circumstances, changes that take place in individual political ambitions, changes that take place in compulsions on policy and changes that take place about where self-interest lies. So all these factors come into play when a really good, highly regarded Congress leader like Jyotiraditya Scindia switches overnight to BJP. When you see so many Congress people these days finding that they don’t have a future for their personal ambitions… R P N Singh, Jitin Prasada, switching sides because their personal ambitions cannot be fulfilled on this side.

Mani Shankar Aiyar, veteran leader of the Indian National Congress and former Rajya Sabha MP, at his residence in New Delhi on 20 December, 2024. (Express photo by Chitral Khambhati)

Equally, you see there are many examples of people switching for ideological reasons… There’s nothing Bharatiya about defections. Maybe our style of defections is Bharatiya but these defections are part and parcel of democracy.

*You have also written about how Sonia Gandhi overlooked some clauses to reinduct you into the Congress. Why have you then found yourself so far away from the Congress and the Gandhis in the last few years?

It’s a good question…I have frequently been asked these questions (and I have) consistently replied that I really don’t know why.

I had given incidents that took place, such as my comments on how to tackle Naxalism, where my view is that we should use the Panchayat system under the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act…

Now over that I got very exercised when about 76 CRPF personnel were blown up by Maoist mines and I said this is not the way to tackle Naxalism.

We should go back to the Panchayats as envisaged by Rajiv Gandhi and when I said this the Home Minister at the time, Mr P Chidambaram got very upset and I think his being upset provoked Sonia Gandhi into speaking extremely harshly to me. I took it in my stride because I thought I’d clarify matters when I met her but it took about 15 years after that incident of her getting very angry with me on the phone for a one-on-one meeting and by that time 15 years ago was too long ago to waste my precious five minutes in asking her why did you scream at me. So, I haven’t found out.

I don’t know what it is that the Congress party dislikes about me but the fact is that at least on the surface the argument is made in two lines. One is a line that Sonia Gandhi made when she was asked by Saifuddin Soz, the then Jammu and Kashmir Congress president, to make me the AICC general secretary for J&K and his argument was that of all Congressmen the one who has the highest reputation as a friend of the Kashmiri people is Mani Shankar Aiyar. And Sonia Gandhi’s reply was, ‘How can I? He’s a loose cannon.’ So, on the one hand they regard me as a loose cannon, where I think in Gandhi ji’s and Nehru’s Congress loose cannons were regarded as very useful people… The current Congress wants conformism and how can a maverick be a conformist? That is one part of it.

The other part of it is that perhaps because Rahul Gandhi is 30 years younger than me, and because he knows that I was associated with his father, he thinks I belong to his father’s generation. But he is the leader of the Congress and I am a very humble follower. So I have no alternative but to accept the decree that I am too old to be an active politician.

So, I’ve become an active, if you like, public intellectual. But I haven’t left the Congress. And I’ll never leave the Congress, especially not to go into the BJP.

*You have mentioned in the book about the A K Antony committee formed by the Congress in 1999 after it suffered an electoral setback and you say that its recommendations were prophetic.

The A K Antony committee in 1999 was the first of three introspection committees that Antony successively headed. And appointed by the president, who for all three was Sonia Gandhi. She included me (in it). And we went all over the country talking to Congress people…

And apart from what we said generally, we analysed what had gone wrong in the 1999 elections in states. And then we came to certain conclusions, especially with regard to the organisation of the party and then with regard to the articulation of our policies…

We made the recommendations. The overall tone was that we should implement the Uma Shankar Dikshit report which had been commissioned by Rajiv Gandhi and which he got endorsed by the extended meeting of the Congress Working Committee in April 1990, which I attended.

The Congress believes that they wouldn’t have even got 44 seats (in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls) if the Gandhi family was not leading them. (Express photo by Chitral Khambhati)

*Can you talk about the Uma Shankar Dikshit panel report?

It was about the democratisation of the party. That there should be elections at every level. And that at every level active Congress people should be selected and trained in Congress’s ideology. How they should be informed about Congress policy…We should recognise that we are no longer in the 21st century the natural party of governance. Of course, one answer is to strengthen the Congress.

But my experience of the Congress in the 21st century after we did the first introspection report is that it’s a hopeless task. I don’t think it will reform itself. So is there a further solution? Yes. Alliances. After all the first UPA government was formed when the Congress only had 140 seats. But because we had a leader in Sonia Gandhi who was like a magnet attracting the iron shavings.

The important thing now is to do it in a much bigger scale and in a much more efficient way than a haphazard higgledy-piggledy manner we achieved in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where we (INDIA bloc) were only 10 seats behind the BJP. If the INDIA bloc had been more carefully and for longer cultivated and its internal integrity strengthened then even in 2024 Narendra Modi would have been history. Now he hasn’t become history.

*Do you think any other party could lead the INDIA bloc?

I don’t think it’s a relevant question. I think the Congress should be ready to not be the leader of the bloc. Let whoever wants to be the leader be the leader. There is competence in Mamata Banerjee… There is competence in others in the alliance.

So, I don’t care who becomes the leader because I think the position of the Congress party and of the Congress leader will always be a major one. It doesn’t have to be the only one. It will be the major one in the INDIA bloc. I am sure Rahul will be treated with even more respect than he would be as the president of the alliance.

*You have mentioned in the book about a letter to Rahul Gandhi after you were suspended from the party in 2018. You say the letter was characteristic of how Congress leaders begged their president for their rights. Why does the Congress have such a culture?

Let me put the whole incident. After my suspension, Priyanka had agreed to transmit a letter by me wishing Rahul on his birthday. I told her I can’t send the greetings directly because I am suspended. I showed the first draft of the letter to my wife who is not a Congress woman, but a sharp critic. She looked at it and said why am I cringing like this, and that I was 30 years older to him. I changed the text, and showed her my second draft. She was very dismissive. Then, I wrote a third draft and sent it.

Now to the second part of the question. Every single political party, organisation or NGO, has its own idiom and culture. For the BJP, you can’t write two lines without praising PM Modi… I regret to say we have had a similar culture in the Congress. And although it is not as slavish as it is in the BJP… He (Rahul) removed my suspension in August 2018. I think my letter may have had something to do with it. Although the tone was cringe, it was part of the party culture, and if one doesn’t like it, they are free to leave. And I wasn’t ready to leave.

As Nehru and Patel were described by the first biographers of Indian Independence as the duumvirate that ruled India, so also, I believe (Rahul and Priyanka) will constitute a duumvirate. Express photo by Chitral Khambhati

*In the book, you call the Gandhi family the “bonding adhesive” for the Congress. Do you think in the near future, if the party can’t achieve electoral success, the Congress should look for the top leadership beyond the Gandhi family?

Only if the conclusion is reached by the party that they are losing because of the Gandhi family. The Congress believes that they wouldn’t have even got 44 seats (in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls) if the Gandhi family was not leading them. They would have got four seats. Similarly for the Lok Sabha elections this year, they wouldn’t have got 99 seats. Because the party would have split.

Please remember that Rahul resigned in 2019 and said that no member of his family could succeed him. For three months, the party tried to find a leader… In the meanwhile, the G23 was raising issues of revolt. Whereas it was the white flag of surrender… The Gandhis are where they are because the Congress wants them there. The president is determined by the Congress… It is a democratic process. The party doesn’t believe that Rahul Gandhi is a liability. He is looked upon as an asset, and the BJP knows this. Whatever his deficiencies – speech, articulation – they keep on attacking him because he is the symbol of the Congress and they keep on attacking Nehru and Gandhis. I am convinced that if Gandhi disappeared from the scene, there would be so much faction fighting that we would disintegrate.

*Would Priyanka Gandhi have been better than Rahul Gandhi?

She is an MP of the Congress for the last six weeks. No, what I foresee as the future. As Nehru and Patel were described by the first biographers of Indian Independence as the duumvirate that ruled India, so also, I believe (Rahul and Priyanka) will constitute a duumvirate. And it will be this duo that will be the face of the Congress for the next 30 years. So I don’t see them as rivals… They have decided that of the two, the face of the family will be Rahul, but a major contributor will be Priyanka. Any attempt to separate them is bound to fail. In the future, we will have a Congress of Rahul and Priyanka.