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The law of averages and Sonia Gandhi

More than the company he keeps, a politician is known by the calibre of the decisions he or she takes. Public opinion, after all, revolves as much around these decisions as it does around that unquantifiable element called charisma.

When Congress president Sonia Gandhi entered the electoral fray, after months of harrowing indecision over her moves, and led her party into electoral battle, all that she had on her side was untested charisma, and busloads of hope. Through the year, as she threw herself more and more into managing her party's affairs, putting it across to an apparently unstoppable Bharatiya Janata Party in the north, displaying sagacity in the selection of those who will lead her party's government in these states, it seemed that she not only had detected what ailed her party, but was also intent on not repeating her predecessors' mistakes.

These mistakes were many, but in my opinion, the prime among them was an excessive desire on the part of those at the helm of affairs, to involve themselves with every element of decision-making, to an extent that there was little initiative or effort coming from the state units of the party. It did not help the local satraps any, that the Gandhi ran the Congress party like its fiefdom, or that it reduced the local units to a state of enslavery and dependence worse than that suffered by a drug user.

With the kind of decisions she took soon after the assembly election, like allowing the local legislature party units to elect their own chief minister, and involving the other leaders of the party in decision-making, with her general emphasis on consultations with her party colleagues, Sonia did give the impression that she was keen on turning a party supine after years of subordination and ingratiation.

But there is something called the law of averages that lays even Sachin Tendulkar low, so Sonia cannot hope to be the lone exception.

And the law of averages, in my opinion, came into play with the Congress president, when she decided to go against the grain of the party and back the Rabri Devi government in Bihar. Whatever be the compulsions that were presented before her to take this precipitous path, it is clear that Sonia's luck has run out with this single decision.

Forget all other factors, like the need to contain the BJP or the need to unite and galvanise the Opposition. The fact remains that this decision of Sonia's is bad for the Congress party, in that it is the very antithesis of what she set out to do, when she decided to take over the party from a lacklustre Sitaram Kesri.

If memory serves one right, she had then declared that reinvigorating the party in the two crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar would be her prime responsibility. In these two states, the Congress had been done in a by a series of factors, not the least of which was the alienation of its traditional votebank.

The subsequent disenchantment among the so-called Third Front was precisely because of this insistence by the Congress president that she will not play ball with any other political party, and she will make the Congress the pivot of political realignments once again. The two Yadavs, in whose interests it was to keep the Congress as the junior partner, were naturally miffed, but they could do little but chafe as the Congress routed the BJP in Rajasthan, MP and in Delhi.

Clearly, the Congress's fortunes were on the upswing, and there was no need for the Congress president to play Laloo's game, by deciding to vote against the motion on President's rule in Bihar.

By taking this decision, she has done irreparable damage to her party, and given the lie to her party's various statements an policies. First, she had made the ouster of the RJD government in Bihar an article of faith in her part's manifesto during the last Lok Sabha election. Two, she had spoken about restoring her party to its former glory, on its own. Three, her party had taken the stand, soon after the Narayanpur massacre, that the Rabri Devi government had lost the moral right to rule.

Naturally, Bihar Congressmen can't but wonder if riding on Laloo's pajama strings is the same as riding to power on their own, if the Congress president was suffering from any delusion or confusion about the ideal route to power.

What has happened is a familiar story: the wily Laloo Yadav has run circles around an inexperienced Sonia Gandhi. Very cleverly he has interposed the Bihar issue as one between the BJP and the Congress, and has turned around the issue of non-governance of Bihar into one of containing the BJP.

The Congress's loss from supporting the Rabri Devi government is two-fold. One, it will relegate the party to a situation from where it will find it hard put to make a fight of it on its own. Two, given the extent of anti-Laloo feelings elsewhere in the country, where at best he is the butt of jokes, associating with such an administration as his, is not going to rub off favourably on the Congress party. It is a double-whammy for Sonia.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy