Kesri’s karma

This old man was always in a hurry. Defying the limits of biology as well as the gravity of politics, he aspired to reclaim the natural righ...

This old man was always in a hurry. Defying the limits of biology as well as the gravity of politics, he aspired to reclaim the natural right of his party. But as he leapt forward, the party marched backward. Now, at last, Sitaram Kesri has come to a halt and left the wreckage of the Congress to the redeemers-in-waiting.

In his new title as the ex-president of the Congress, Kesri has every right to look back with a sense of rare achievement: an apparatchik of Gandhian parody, a trusted sevak of the first family, Kesri has the distinction of inheriting a massive organisation and ruining it with the energy of his ambition. When power defied his dream, he sought to govern India by supporting a government of his natural enemies. Kesri’s dream was steadily consuming his reason, also his party. Perhaps, the Congress under him was not exactly lending an external hand to the secular governments of both Deve Gowda and I. K. Gujral.

It was an assassin’s trick. The fall of two prime ministers and a prematureelection — wasn’t Chacha’s marksmanship a tribute to stability and secularism? And the hand itself was withering away as Kesri faced the day after: a disillusioned India burdened with another election. As Kesri goes, it is the frustrated retreat of a lonely demolisher.

Story continues below this ad

For, the Kesri interlude in the evolution of the Congress party marked a defining shift in the destiny of India’s GOP. He was a leader who fantasised to be the Leader. An old retainer of the dynasty and a trusted keeper of the accounts, he came to capture the vital centre of the party after the quiet, silent exit of Narasimha Rao. If Rao’s ruling philosophy marked middle-path stagnation, Kesri’s klutzy haste inaugurated the suicidal phase of the Congress. Popular rejection and defeat didn’t stop him from subordinating an organisation of tired metabolism to his hallucinations. It was the hallucinatory politics of Kesri that waved the idiotic pages of Jain Commission as a death warrant to the Gujral regime. The old man sought to postponecertain death by invoking the dead Leader. It turned out to be his own political death warrant.

The arrival of the First Widow said it all. Kesri has never been a leader, like many leaders in the Congress. A party punished by Kesri’s bad karma has to some extent been saved by Sonia Gandhi’s marital status. It also meant: the aesthetics of Sitaram Kesri is independent of the people. His constituency existed only in his ancient mind wracked by unreal hopes. True, nobody mistook him for a mass leader. He thought Sonia masses. But the Leader’s widow was campaigning for a party mismanaged by leaders who have swayed only the masses of the party offices. This old man wanted everything free. He was the author of this election. That is, the author of his own political obituary. And in what a hurry!