Since Mrs Indira Gandhi founded the party CONGRESS-I, one reality has been salient-the INC is a proprietary company and all its shares are held by the Gandhi family who constitute its board of directors,The Grand Old Party (GOP) founded by A.O. Hume in 1885 and headed by legendary figures such as W.C. Bonnerjee, Dadabhai Naoroji, Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Mahatma Gandhi,Netaji Subash Bose, Sardar Patel, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru and a galaxy of names that resonate in our history. Actually, the party Sonia heads was set up by Indira Gandhi in 1969 when she split the GOP and created the Indian National Congress (Indira), which confirmed its dominance by sweeping the 1971 general elections. Indiras new Congress marked its new politics by dismantling the old decentralised Congress. This was made apparent by the marginalisation of the first line of the party leadership-Morarji Desai, K. Kamaraj, Biju Patnaik, Atulya Ghosh and S.K. Patil-in the 1967-69 period. Jagjivan Ram and H.N. Bahuguna staged a coup of sorts when they founded the Congress for Democracy , After the elections in 1978 Karnataka chief minister D. Devraj Urs he split the party and took away luminaries such as Y.B. Chavan, K. Brahamananda Reddy and names that are familiar even now-A.K. Antony, Sharad Pawar and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. in the 1989 Pranab Mukherjees creation of the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress (1986-1989), In 1996, Raos manoeuvrings led to the exit of G.K. Moopanar and P. Chidambaram into a breakaway Tamil Maanila Congress. The wily Rao soon began to assert his own authority which saw the exit of Gandhi loyalists like N.D. Tiwari, Arjun Singh and K. Natwar Singh who formed INC (Tiwari). Parallel to this was the revolt of Madhavrao Scindia, who founded his own Madhya Pradesh Congress party. the main challenger of the Congress legacy and efforts such as the creation of the Nationalist Congress Party by Sharad Pawar and YSR Congress party of Jaganmohan Reddy are expressions of frustration of Congressmen who find it difficult to swallow the Gandhi hegemony, rather than genuine revolts.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:30:23 +0000
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