They say the Congress picked up the gauntlet at Shimla. Sonia’s party declared its readiness for elections, anytime, anywhere. It announced its willingness to strike bargains with other political parties to defeat the BJP and allies. It asserted it will lead any prospective coalition and its leader will be prime minister. Something significant happened at Shimla. There is also a more sober reading of the Congress’s chintan at Shimla: The party spelt out no notable change on the coalition or leadership issue. It has always been pragmatic about alliances in the states — in Kerala, Maharashtra or Bihar. And Sonia Gandhi is undisputed leader of the party anyway. The media’s obsession with these two issues may have obscured a less spectacular repositioning: A new focus on the rural economy. Or the proposal, if half-baked, on reservations in the private sector. But one thing remains exactly like it was before the Congress went up the hill to Shimla. The Congress president continues to be off limits for the media. Sonia Gandhi refuses to be publicly interrogated. She grants audience to handpicked journalists in private. But she continues to shirk a full-bodied encounter with the fourth estate. Five years after she ousted Sitaram Kesri to take over the party and as the Congress positions itself for Elections 2004, Sonia is mostly silent or invisible on the public stage. It isn’t just that she is yet to give a proper interview or hold a full-fledged press conference. Not even the news junkie will know exactly what she thinks on the major issues of our times — Ayodhya, liberalisation, Uniform Civil Code. So what’s new? Hasn’t it always been so? And then, who can deny that Sonia Gandhi appears transformed in other ways. From the shrinking bahu, persuaded to step out of her fortress to campaign for a haemorrhaging party in December 1997, to the self-assured party manager who consults extensively but clearly enunciates that ‘‘ultimately, the decision is mine’’ — she has undeniably lowered the veil. Far enough to take the fizz out of the demand that she should meet the media face to face? Loyalists and Congressmen will tell you Sonia Gandhi has grown on the job. Always a good listener, now she participates in closed-door discussions. She has presided over more manhours of consultations than partymen remember a Congress president doing in their lifetime. In public, she reads from prepared scripts with much more feeling. Congress watchers pronounce her style understated and consensual, with an instinctive feel for the middle ground. And then the clincher: It is in her watch that the Congress has grown from a party with five chief ministers to one with 16, after all. By all accounts, Sonia Gandhi has matured as party president and led the Congress to a string of electoral victories in the states. So is the demand for a fuller public outing a dispensable one? The fetish of a class, brought up in the TV age? Must she submit to grilling by television, for the consumption of this gluttonous audience? Can’t she call the bluff of a self-important class that seeks political clout disproportionate to its numbers? Why can’t she skirt the press conference and the TV studio, en route to prime ministership? How accessible, how open to questioning, is Mayawati anyway? Jayalalithaa? It is telling that the Congress president, the Leader of the Opposition and Prime Ministerial Candidate, should be able to shirk a more robust engagement with the media. And even more telling that hardly any penalties appear to be attached to her doing so. Sonia is pilloried by her critics far more persistently for having been born someplace else, than for actively barricading herself from public contact. This is a sad comment on our democracy. It speaks of more than just one leader’s disrespect for the media. It speaks of the Congress, once a mass movement, turning into a closed shop. On all major issues today, the Congress is generally reactive, generally inarticulate. And this is far more pronounced at the national level than in the states where some Congress chief ministers take the initiative sometimes. Over the years, it even seems the Congress has decided upon ambiguity as political strategy. It calculates there is a payoff in it; silence helps encash it. But that Sonia’s silence should provoke only the passing public fuss speaks of something larger. It speaks of a shared disrespect for the media’s role — of asking questions and enforcing accountability. To an extent, this is because the media hasn’t really lived up to its mandate. There has been a proliferation in the technologies of mass media in recent years, but there’s been a shrinking of the public space. Be it television or print, more TV than print, the mass media is abdicating its role of neutral arbiter and alert questioner. Even the adversarial bouts set up between journalist and politician have become theatrical, formulaic. They have lost their power to subvert or their capacity to provoke. But the larger portion of the blame must go to a political culture in which democracy is still seen as electoral democracy. In which the voter must keep her date with the politician at the hustings and both can refuse to be on speaking terms in the years in between. In such a political culture, politicians are allowed to cocoon themselves in incestuous, narcissistic worlds. They can cultivate inaccessibility to the media and through it to the people. Till the next hectic round of election rallies begins. Sonia Gandhi refuses to speak to the media because she calculates there’s no big price to be paid for the refusal. Of course, once she is in government, if she is in government, she may change her mind. She may realise it is pragmatic to keep the English-speaking media on her side. The opinion-making classes have nuisance value and indulging them makes for smoother governance. In the end, the thaw may be a pragmatic one. But for now, the enigma triumphs over the democratic imperative to engage. Finally, just a thought. Is it possible that Madam’s lack of a public persona may actually count at ground level? And that it accounts for at least some of the difficulties a party of 16 chief ministers faces in making a credible bid for the Centre? As they prepare for 2004, Congressmen could do worse than ponder this question.
