Distantly Close | One Sibal won’t make a summer

The official’s sardonic tone was hugely misplaced, more so because Sibal, a weighty advocate rated among the country’s foremost parliamentarians, ended his association with the Congress way more soberly than another party veteran, Sunil Jakhar. The Punjab leader had vent spleen repeatedly in public before crossing over to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

One isn’t counting here the exit of Gujarat’s Hardik Patel, a laterally inducted freshman who also marched out within days of the party’s Udaipur brainstorming session meant to set its frayed house in order. His parting-fusillade against Rahul Gandhi was reminiscent of the acerbic idiom of the BJP’s Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who rebelled after the 2014 Lok Sabha debacle to help his new party subsequently steal the whole of the Northeast from under the Congress’s nose.

One can argue with some conviction that Sibal’s decision to re-enter the Rajya Sabha as an Independent Member of Parliament (MP) supported by Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party has left scope for a future rapprochement. But the Congress leadership’s couldn’t-care-less approach to losing precious human resource in a torrent does not bode well for a promising tomorrow. Irony dies many times over when rootless loyalists question outward bound leaders’ mass base amid serious questions about their own masters’ dwindling charisma.

It’s shocking to see the party founded in 1885 miss the wood for the trees in not recognising that politicians serve multiple roles and purposes: Electoral, tactical, organisational, parliamentary, and technocratic. Members such as Sibal, or for that matter P Chidambaram and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, fell in the category of those who could defend the party in courts and represent it forcefully in legislatures. Often compared with the Congress’s Pranab Mukherjee, the BJP’s main battle tank, the late Arun Jaitley was a better-rounded politician and organisation person. But the Sibal-Chidambaram-Singhvi trinity matched his wits every step of the way in the Rajya Sabha. Their debates were of a high order; a definitive silver lining in a grimy phase of our parliamentary system.

Akhilesh’s support for Sibal: A leaf out of Mulayam’s textbook

For his part, Akhilesh Yadav has taken a leaf out of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav’s political textbook in accommodating Sibal on the latter’s terms of being an Independent voice unencumbered by party positions in Parliament. At his prime, the senior Yadav showed similar regard for former Prime Minister (PM) Chandra Shekhar, who he’d help get elected to the Lok Sabha from Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia.

As was often the case in that era of politics, they kept their friendship despite charting different political paths after the abrupt demise of Chandra Shekhar’s short-lived, Congress-backed regime in 1991. “Mulayam didn’t just help him for old times’ sake. He did so to ensure the presence in the House of a leader who spoke his mind on big issues facing the country,” recalled Narbadeshwar Rai, a veteran journalist and a long-time associate of the former PM. Chandra Shekhar led a small party in the 1990s, but was respected for his plain speak across political divides. He firmly believed a leader’s task was to lead rather than be led by public sentiments on key national questions that are best left to debate, discourse and resolution in democratic institutions.

Chandra Shekhar’s cerebral combat with his close friend, the BJP’s Bhairon Singh Shekhawat (on the majority community’s duties towards religious minorities) at a meeting of the National Integration Council under the then PM, VP Singh, is the stuff of political folklore. He said the Hindu majority not only has to safeguard but also provide leadership to the Muslims as their political elite chose Pakistan over India during the Partition.

The purpose here isn’t to place Sibal on the same pedestal as the veteran socialist who, as a member of the original Congress ginger group called Young Turks, fought the influence of monopoly capital tooth and nail as a party person and a parliamentarian before joining the fledgling Janata Party as its president on being imprisoned in the 1975-77 Emergency period. Unlike the jurist-politician who, as a vocal member of a recently minted ginger group of 23, battled an electorally enfeebled yet organisationally entrenched Gandhi family, Chandra Shekhar fought the all-mighty Indira Gandhi; getting elected against her wishes to the Congress’s central election committee in 1971. The intra-party challenge he mounted to her came barely a year after he told a gathering of Congress colleagues that “the party was free to change its leadership if it felt that it could not deliver the goods.”

In a replay of the Chandra Shekhar act of five decades ago, Sibal too asked the Gandhis to vacate leadership positions to give “someone else a chance” after the party was pulverised in the February-March elections to five assemblies. In vastly different circumstances dictating their politics, they acted similarly by refusing to be the leadership’s choirboys.

One Sibal can’t make a summer

The purpose of this anecdotal interlude is to underscore the need for sending erudite, independent thinkers into our elected forums where debates are restricted by political/electoral expediencies of parties big and small on issues of grave concern and import. Those in the Opposition are unwilling or seem incapable of standing up to popular opinion to show the flip side of the ruling dispensation’s take on a host of religious, cultural, economic and national security questions. Leave alone a counter, they haven’t yet authored a cogent corrective to the BJP’s Hindutva.

The result of it is the near-total absence of an alternative narrative for rallying people. The Congress is failing as the principal Opposition, and so are the regional outfits with the exception of Mamata Banerjee who not only wove compelling arguments but had the Bengal electorate lapping them up in the assembly polls she resoundingly won.

One swallow, or Sibal, cannot make a summer in such an overwhelmingly grim ambience. The polity needs more people of heft and learning in Parliament who aren’t held back by organisational whips while stating their piece. The indirectly-elected Upper House is the best platform where a team of public intellectuals can be assembled, their re-election guaranteed by parties, for debating matters beyond conventional parliamentary barricades.

The project is worth serious experimentation. Sibal will need more shoulders to the wheel to realise Majrooh Sultanpuri’s famous lines: Main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e- manzil magar, log saath aate gaye aur karwan banta gaya (I began the journey by myself, others joined along the way to make it a caravan).

HT’s veteran political editor, Vinod Sharma, brings together his four-decade-long experience of closely tracking Indian politics, his intimate knowledge of the actors who dominate the political theatre, and his keen eye which can juxtapose the past and the present in his weekly column, Distantly Close

The views expressed are personal