Ah ! If only...
Ah ! If only......
Ah ! If only.........
These lines of 'Ifs' keep creeping into the mournful dirges of Congress. Its electoral fortunes have progressively downslided from hand-wringing defeats to outright debacles to writhing in death throes. The letter, N, national, in its 'honorific' ,INC, seems unwarranted. Indira is no more and the party's presence on the national governance map reduced to a rump.
As its threnody winds down to a diminuendo shriller voices of unease, with the conduct of its organisational affairs and dwarfisation, irrelevance in national polity looming on the horizon, are increasingly surfacing within its portals.
With economy in ruins, social fabric frayed, neighbours prickly and belligerent, Congress in opposition should have been salivating not shrivelling. That precisely is what dismays some of its seniors and confounds many party followers.
Their common refrain is that the party sports a lugubrious sense of torpor and nonchalance, lumbers around with drooping shoulders and cadaverous expression. No spirits ! No sense of destiny ! But above all, what confounds followers and critics alike is its dogged refusal to submit to an MRI scan. To sit in 'Santhara' is inexplicable when the climate for its redemption seems propitious.
The greatest theoretician of political power, Machiavelli, said
"At the beginning , a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose : but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure......( that is to say) when they are not recognized and left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure."
Congress must listen and submit to a full body scan. It must aspire not expire, for it holds aloft the reliquary of sublime foundational national values that suckle our youthful republic. An effete, toothless Congress would fail to safeguard this heirloom resulting in the concomitant debasement of democracy and the liberal spirits animating it.
