In an exceptionally well-analyzed piece, Bhupendra Chaubey questions whether Sonia Gandhi is a dictator.

Is the Congress party a dictatorial party? That’s the question that has been troubling me lately… But why do I ask if the Congress is a dictatorial party? The question is what is dictatorship. In simple terms something that someone wants to do not giving a damn about the realities or the consequences. That’s exactly what the Congress wants to do in UP. Or should I say Sonia Gandhi wants to do with Mulayam Singh Yadav. The Congress president wants Mulayam ejected out of his chief ministers chair in UP. Whatever be the cost.

Chaubey has used Sonia’s rivalry with Mullahyam Mulayam as a sample to illustrate his thesis that the Congress party is dictatorial, which is clearly not synchronic with the title of his article. Or, is it?

Call the Congress party dictatorial, or call Sonia dictatorial, they’re equivalent. This proves Chaubey’s thesis. In the hoary post-Independence history of the party, the Congress has been and remains a Gandhi-Nehru fiefdom–except perhaps for the lull during the Narasimha Rao period.

The genesis of the Congress party’s dictatoral ways lies squarely with Nehru, a true-blood Communist dictator. Elaborating his definition of democracy in the Glimpses of World History, he says

I have referred to democracy as ‘formal’ in the preceding paragraph. The communists say that it was not real democracy: it was only a democratic shell to hide the fact that one class ruled over the others…. According to them democracy covered the dictatorship of the capitalist class. It was plutocracy, government by the wealthy. The much-paraded vote given to the masses gave them only the choice of saying once, in four, or five years, whether a certain person, X, might rule over them and exploit them or another person, Y, should do so. In either event the masses were to be exploited by the ruling class. Real democracy can only come when this class rule and exploitation end and only one class exists. To bring about this socialist State, however, a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary so as to keep down all capitalist and bourgeois elements in the population and prevent them from intriguing against the workers’ State. That is the theory. In practice the Communist Party controls the Soviets and the ruling clique of communists controls the party. And the dictatorship is as strict, so far as censorship and freedom of thought or action are concerned, as any other. But as it is based on goodwill of the workers it must carry the workers with it. And, finally, there is no exploitation of the workers or any other class for the benefit of another. There is no exploiting class left. If there is any exploitation, it is done by the State for the benefit of all.

The legatine parallels are visible: Nehru surrounded himself with weaklings so he could emerge the tallest, he didn’t think twice before sacrificing Krishna Menon–his protracted comrade and confidant–over a blunder of his own making, he treated corruption nonchalantly, and watched silently when hundreds of Chitpavan Brahmins were murdered by Congress party workers in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi’s murder.

Fast forward to a few decades to understand how the dictatorial legacy has grown.

Indira Gandhi officially declared herself a dictator: does it really matter whether it is called Emergency, Rule by Decree or whatever else? Under her, corruption became an official religion years before she declared the Emergency. Within hours of her death, Congress party murderers workers butchered thousands of innocent and helpless Sikhs–descendants-in-spirit of the workers who killed Chitpavan Brahmins.

No dynasty can eternally breed successive generations of powerful people. The flame that blazed brilliantly in Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s generations was ashen in Rajiv Gandhi’s time. Although Rajiv inherited his grandfather’s dictatorial tendencies, his party and/or his personal “charisma(?)” was not strong enough to carry the weight of dictatorship. His rule was notable for botch after miserable botch: One of which persists till date.

Don’t blame Sonia for what she has inherited. Why am I reminded of this:

Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.

Cross-posted on INI Signal