I must admit that Yogendra Yadav’s recent snub to the Congress by normatively beseeching its demise struck me as a surprise. Like many others, I failed to appreciate the depth that it is coming from, until I read his opinion piece in the Indian Express. Neglecting the fear of being name-called a ‘Congress-sympathizer’, I would want to place my defense for the party and what it stands for, in spite of not being associated with INC in any tangible or intangible form.
Burdened by arguable legacy, Congress often finds itself in an uncomfortable spot, when it comes to defending itself. What this creates is a ubiquitous confusion about what Congress actually stands for. My intention here is not malignant to the least, owing to the regard that I hold Yogendra Yadav in. The response instead is borne out of an emotive reaction, as I fail to understand, if there can be any reason, which can be divorced from the intentional field of a subject. Needless to say that for what Mr. Yadav himself offers his subsequent rationale, as it appears to me was also an instantaneous paroxysm.
My defense here can be abstracted from what the 2019 general election results will unravel. Since the consideration is about the Congress, I believe that whatever position Congress will find itself in, post the results, it will be playing its crucial part in strengthening the democracy. Anybody who is serious about the threat to the core constitutional values in the present times should in my opinion eschew the temptation to break the morale of the role each one is playing in their own right and with their own might. However, it does open the room for articulation, for which Mr. Yadav cannot be thanked enough.
We live in a time of sophistry, where things can be successfully argued both ways and any value judgment has become futile in absence of an intellectually secure objectivity. The only justification for a debate left is winning it. If we fail to cast a look at Congress in the light of this chaotic relativism of our age, we will miss the alternative that Congress offered in these five years; as a stream, so to say, for many to just remain afloat. Whether or not it resonates with the people is a separate debate. And if it is not, we are insisting on Congress to become exactly what it is fighting against. Nietzsche puts this danger best, when he says, “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
Dismissing the alternative that Congress presented to the electorate without providing any alternative oneself is pernicious to say the least. Such cynicism can have its place in a world where conventions become extremely rigid, not when there is an utter disregard or more rightly, a colossal distaste for conventions. Between the polar ideologies that on one side seem to be convinced about what is right and those who have always been aware of what is not; Congress offers a breather. The centrism of Congress creates the space of harmony in which justice can prevail. Walking the middle-path is extremely difficult and challenging, as both sides see their enemy right behind you. It is easy to pick your hypocrisy as you are continually swinging and equally simple to point out your weakness, while you are pragmatically balancing between idealism and realism. To my mind, in it lays the uniqueness of Congress that it presumably derives from the culturally rooted philosophy of India’s antiquity.
This centrism of the Congress is the much-needed instrument for the republic, if only to facilitate the demarcation that mindless dwindling is not the same as an aware commitment to the middle-path. Congress as claimed by Mr. Yadav is not an obstacle to building an alternative in Indian politics. If history is anything to go by, Congress has rather created a fertile ground by merely existing. What is more, who can deny drawing strength by the sheer presence of Congress, if nothing else, to voice their dissent in the past five years?
As far as the death of Congress is concerned, if we spare a silent look at the existence of Congress and try tracing its ontology, we find ‘nothing’. In that restricted sense, Congress was and is already dead and it is precisely its ‘metaphysical death’, which fuels the political life of India. Just because somebody cannot see, does not mean that the choice is not there. The existence of the Congress party is necessary to keep vitalizing the democratic space, to restore sanity and justice as well as to occupy the position of a strategic adversary to fascism in us all.