Long live Indian National Congress (INC), let's hope it dies soon!

Several people have referred in the recent days to Gandhi's oft quoted idea that the Congress party be disbanded before Independence. I am sure it has been quoted many times earlier as well, in fact, Gandhi's words seem to be invoked in this country whenever something goes wrong as predicted. 

No one was predicting Rahul Gandhi to become a great leader, he had definitely improved from the previous avatar to the recent one. His recent poll campaign body language and articulation was definitely improvement from the previous years when he stumbled from one ignorant statement to another. He seemed far more confident than before as a Leader. However, 'leadership' was exactly what he denied while projecting himself as a leader all the time, causing confusion to rank and file of his party as well as that of his coalition. If anything was different from 2014, it was the re-packaging of Rahul Gandhi as a young political leader and contender for the top post in the country.

But his party is the same, consisting of growing old commission agents, small time bankers who amassed enough wealth to out grow local rotary club, ambitious bureaucrat / technocrat pursuing post-retirement opportunities, traders and contractors that had siphoned off money through government contracts for several generations of their families and second and third generation 'politicians' who have come to believe that being on Congress is the new zamindari system since generations.

Congress party resembles the Indian bureaucracy and vice-versa, in its structural mediocrity and functional inefficiency. There is this rare exceptional person who struggles to survive within the system and yet outshines the system's blinding defects sometimes, but, that is few and far between and never sustainable.

I do think the Congress party needs to dissolve itself on the fact of ever growing evidence that it has outlived its relevance by about 75 years. It was carried by the force of personality of Nehru and Indira Gandhi, integrity of Kamaraj and Shastri, loyalty of couple of generations of Indians and foolishness of subsequent generations.

Indian public are held to ransom by prominent political parties that hold control over the entire electoral discourse by strangle hold over all types of media houses. So, when a new imagination emerges, it can be destroyed by 2 or 3 big parties that already dominate the discourse. Not unlike Coke and Pepsi cola, the big political parties form a cartel and destroy new ones from emerging.

Globally too, we Indians love to ape the Americans. We need two political parties that resemble exactly the 2 american parties, we can also quickly pigeonhole them into the stereotypes of their american counter-parts. So, since over two decades of globalization, we have been slowly steering our ship towards the virtual american waters of public discourse. With increasing articulators for both parties coming from America, it helps for them to stay illiterate of Indian diversity if our parties took similar to American Presidential campaign kind of positions. It was evident when Rahul Gandhi kept inviting Modi for a face-to-face debate and Modi referred to his Parliamentarians as 'law makers' in his inaugural address to them. Our syntax is slowly turning American with the vicious casteism adding the additional dimension of discrimination as well.