Silver tickets

There is little doubt that Margaret Alva’s outburst of anger at the Congress’s ticket-distribution system was carefully timed and even more carefully calibrated.

There is little doubt that Margaret Alva’s outburst of anger at the Congress’s ticket-distribution system was carefully timed and even more carefully calibrated. Alva isn’t a stranger to the pushes and pulls of internal Congress politics: she began her first term as AICC joint secretary in 1975. So the fact that nominations for the Rajasthan assembly elections were handed out to “relatives” in spite of whatever good intentions were previously aired about nepotism would not, under normal circumstances, have shocked her quite as much as it did. So we can be sure that this isn’t just the pique of a mother whose ambitions for her son have been frustrated. More: we can be sure that, whatever lies behind it, whatever the initial bad press, it’s actually good news for the Congress.

Yes, this provides an opportunity to revisit that old, old narrative of the Congress as a family-run, nepotistic machine. And yet part of what can be taken away, even immediately, is positive: the spectacle of Rahul Gandhi once again expressing his displeasure

at the closed nature of our politics — taking on the same issue, but from a perspective diametrically opposed; the discovery that, while the Rajasthan Congress may have handed out tickets to relatives, the Karnataka Congress may actually have not.

In the longer term, this is a moment for the Congress to take stock of the members of its Rajya Sabha-ist elite who start shooting themselves in the foot when things turn against them, as Alva seems to have done. It is a fact now well understood that national elections are won at the state level; by canny alliances, and by parties with a strong grassroots regional presence, as well as state-level leaders permitted — incentivised, even — to build vote-getting empires. The Congress party’s structure works to undermine precisely that dynamic: it is no coincidence that in places where such leaders have been permitted a relatively free hand, such as YSR in Andhra Pradesh, it has succeeded; and in places where state-level leaders have been crushed by a Delhi-centric hierarchy, such as in Karnataka, the Congress has been humiliated. Alva has been a large part of this process, squashing political initiatives in Punjab, Haryana, and especially Maharashtra. For the Congress the Alva case should be about more than just disciplining Margaret Alva.