Ramchandra Guha also says unless the president of the Congress bestowed the post on Nitish Kumar, there “is no future for him, or for Sonia Gandhi in Indian politics”.
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar comes out after a cabinet meeting at old secretariat in Patna on Wednesday.
The “terminal decline” of the Congress party can only be revived by a leadership change, says historian and biographer Ramchandra Guha, who suggests that the party’s top job be handed over to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.
Stressing that it was his “fantasy”, Guha said on Tuesday if there was a “friendly take-over” of the party by the JD-U leader, it would be a match made in heaven.
“For the Congress is a party without a leader and Nitish is a leader without a party,” Guha said at the launch of the 10th anniversary edition of his book ‘India After Gandhi’.
Nitish Kumar, he held, was a “genuine” leader.
“Like Modi, he has no family burden, but, unlike Modi, he is not a megalomaniac. He is not sectarian and focuses on gender, which is rare among Indian politicians. So there are things about Nitish that were appealing, and are appealing,” he said at the function in New Delhi.
But, he said, unless the president of the Congress bestowed the post on Nitish, there “is no future for him, or for Sonia Gandhi in Indian politics”.
The 131-year old party, the columnist-author believed, could not be a major political player anymore, and could at best move from its present 44 seats in the Lok Sabha to 100.
“Now, if they have a new leader or leadership tomorrow, things could change. Two years is a long time in politics,” he added, referring to the 2019 parliamentary polls.
He said the decline of the Congress was also “worrying”, because a single party system was not “good” for democracy.
“Single party governance made even the great democrat Jawahar Lal Nehru arrogant; it made the instinctively authoritarian Indira Gandhi even more authoritarian. So what will this do to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is something that I have started thinking about,” the author — known for critiquing both the Left and the Right — said.
India had failed to emulate the stable two-party model of western democracies, Guha said, adding that the importance of two-party rivalry in states should not be undermined.
