As Tharoor contested and lost, recalling the days when Congress saw iconic presidential contests

The Congress may have seen a one-sided contest for its presidential polls, but the general belief is that having secured more than 1,000 votes, Shashi Tharoor put up a better show than expected against Mallikarjuna Kharge, who was known to have been the favoured candidate of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Ever since the days of Indira Gandhi, the family has called the shots in the party, initially because it could make the Congress win and, in recent years, despite the fact that it can’t make the party win.

Indeed, Rahul Gandhi is trying to claw back to prominence via the Bharat Jodo Yatra, but the impact of the Yatra on voters beyond the optics will be known only in 2024. We won’t know it in poll-bound Himachal Pradesh or Gujarat, as the Yatra isn’t going there.

The composition may not have been the same then, but Tharoor garnered more votes than Sharad Pawar once had. When Pawar contested against the party’s official nominee Sitaram Kesri, he secured 882 votes against Kesri’s 6,224. In the same election, Rajesh Pilot secured 354 votes.

In the last election for Congress president in 2000, Sonia Gandhi had bulldozed challenger Jitendra Prasad, who secured just 94 votes to Gandhi’s 7,448.

Kesri and Prasad had soon lost favour with the family and had been completely marginalised in the party. It remains to be seen whether the same fate will befall Tharoor or there will be a rethink by the party after two consecutive Lok Sabha defeats that have practically decimated it in electoral terms.

To be fair to the Congress, the BJP has never had a contest for the presidential post. However, its organising principle as a cadre-based party is different from that of the Congress. In the BJP, it is always the leader who can bring the party to power who has risen through the ranks. Be it Narendra Modi, who had a hardliner image in 2014 or Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had been unexpectedly announced by LK Advani as the face of the party in 1995, at a time when coalitions were the order of the day and the moderate Vajpayee was the only one who could weave a coalition to come to power.

In the Congress, on the contrary, the winnability principle was evoked for the Nehru-Gandhi family, till it could make the Congress win up to 2009. From 2014, despite the fact that the family has lost all traction with the masses — Rahul Gandhi lost his own family seat of Amethi to Smriti Irani in 2019 — the family continues to call the shots, something that opens the party to the charge of being dynastic first and electorally viable only later.

However, in the heyday of the Indian National Congress, it saw some keen contests. It is worthwhile to go back to them at a time when the public perception is that Congressmen lack a spine when it comes to taking a stand.

There were two contests for the Congress president’s post that were iconic, with grit and non-conformism written all over them.

The PD Tandon victory

In 1950, Purushottam Das Tandon, the Congress heavyweight from Allahabad who was mentored by Madan Mohan Malaviya and had the blessings of Sardar Patel for the top post, took on prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nominee Acharya Kripalani for the post of Congress president. This was a high-stakes battle to decide the course of action of the Congress post-independence. The Patel camp, which was more powerful after the socialists had left the Congress at independence, had views opposite to Nehru on policy matters. How serious the differences were can be gauged by the fact that the CWC under Pattabhi Sitaramayya had in October 1949 passed a resolution that RSS volunteers should be allowed to join the Congress. This was in keeping with the Sardar Patel line that these volunteers were ‘disciplined, patriotic’, but given to some extremism that could be mellowed down under the guidance of Congress stalwarts. However, Nehru was against this line, and saw the RSS as a ‘communal’ organization that needed to be marginalised, not mainstreamed. In November 1949, the CWC reversed its resolution under Nehru’s purported influence on the technical grounds that while all Congressmen can join the Congress Volunteer Corps, the latter does not allow members of other volunteer organisations to join it, and that this would create an anomaly if RSS volunteers were allowed to join the Congress.

Even on the question of refugees trickling down from East Pakistan in the wake of riots there in 1950, Nehru and Tandon did not see eye to eye. Tandon went to the extent of presiding over a session on refugees at a conference organized by Syama Prasad Mookerji, where the Delhi Pact, which Nehru had signed with his Pakistan counterpart Liaqat Ali Khan to ensure that both countries safeguard their minorities and put an end to migration of populations, came in for severe attack for its ‘soft’ approach to Pakistan.

When Tandon filed his nomination for Congress president, Nehru wrote to him to withdraw, as his views were perceived as ‘communal’. He also flagged the issue in a letter to Patel. But Patel continued to support Tandon, who did not back out. Finally, Tandon defeated Nehru’s nominee Acharya Kriplani by 214 votes. Nehru struck back at the Nasik Congress held soon after, asking the Congress to choose between Tandon and him. This put Tandon on the backfoot, and delayed the constitution of the CWC. But finally Tandon constituted a CWC with conservative Congress leaders. Nehru resigned from the CWC over the non-inclusion of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and secured a vote of confidence from the Congress Parliamentary Party as PM. In order not to make it a party-vs-government crisis, Tandon resigned and Nehru became Congress president.

The Gandhi-Bose controversy

If Nehru had staked his Prime Ministership to sideline the right wing in the Congress in 1950, his mentor Gandhi had staked everything to sideline the left in 1939. In the eye of the storm was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been president of the Congress in 1938 at Haripura, and wanted to be president again in 1939, at the Tripuri session of the Congress. He was the preferred candidate of the socialists and some communists, who felt that a more radical struggle to arouse the class consciousness of farmers and workers was required. Gandhi did not prefer this method, as he felt India could dislodge the British only if it reconciled the interests of all sections within. Bose openly questioned the anti-imperialist commitment of members of the CWC, most of them stalwarts in their own right.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya stood against Bose as Gandhi’s candidate, and was defeated. After this, Gandhi said that his conscience did not permit him to be part of a politics he fundamentally disagreed with, and he asked Bose to go ahead with a CWC of his choice, saying he rejoiced in his defeat. All members of the CWC, excluding Nehru and Sarat Chandra Bose, resigned. Bose found the creation of a new CWC difficult, even as Nehru tried to reason out with both Gandhi and Bose to bridge the gulf between them.

Finally, Govind Ballabh Pant, a supporter of Gandhi, moved a resolution that said India and Congress could not let go of Gandhi. This broke the back of Bose’ support base, as the Congress Socialist Party of Jaya Prakash Narain refused to vote for Bose against Gandhi. Bose was left with no option but to resign, and he soon formed the Forward Bloc. He was also bitter with Nehru for not supporting him, but Nehru said that while he knew Bose would defeat Pattabhi Sitaramayya, he had doubts whether he could defeat Gandhi himself.

Decades have passed since the movement called Congress became a party, and then a party looking towards one family for guidance. However, even as Tharoor decided to offer a glimpse of the original Congress, it is important to remember the heady democratic contests that once made the Congress what it was.

The author teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal.

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