President's post: Sonia to break her own record

EW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi led a galaxy of leaders on Thursday to propose Ms Sonia Gandhi’s name for the Congress president’s post.

The announcement of her election, a mere formality, will be made on Friday evening.

Ms Gandhi will take over the reins of the organisation for the fourth consecutive term. She already enjoys the distinction of being the longest-serving Congress president in its 125-year-old history. Also, Ms Gandhi would be looking forward to cementing her party’s position as the most-dominant political outfit in the country.

Ms Gandhi’s fourth stint as Congress president is likely to be formally kicked off at the party’s plenary session, likely to be held in Mumbai towards the end of the year. The party’s supreme decision-making body — the Congress Working Committee (CWC) — will be disbanded on Friday after the announcement of the election result. “The Congress president can have a steering committee till the plenary session. One of the items in the plenary will be the election of the CWC members,” central election authority chairman Oscar Fernandes said.

It’s testimony to her grip on the party apparatus that there was a scramble among Congress leaders to propose her candidature.

An unprecedented 56 sets of nomination papers were filed on her behalf, each carrying the names of 10 proposers. One set of nomination paper, filed by the party’s Chandigarh unit, was declared invalid as it bore the names of only nine leaders. The remaining 55 forms were found to be in order by the central election authority chairman. And such is her hold that, barring the presidential contest held in 2,000, when the late Jitendra Prasada threw his hat in the ring, no one has had the courage to challenge her candidature.

That Congress could regain its status as the largest and the most-dominant political party in the country, after being down in the dumps for almost a decade-and-half, is thanks largely to the efforts of Ms Sonia Gandhi. She took charge of Congress in 1998, when it was struggling to stay afloat as a cohesive entity. The central leadership had become so weak that its authority was being challenged by several state-level satraps. Its clout had diminished considerably in quite a few states, and was overtaken either by BJP or sundry regional outfits. The prime examples were Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

It refused to see the writing on the wall and shunned the politics of alliances. By contrast, BJP was quick to realise the importance of forging state-level alliances. Ms Gandhi, who till then had remained content with being a traditional Indian daughter-in-law, preferring to stay away from public glare, was, in a sense, forced by circumstances to take up the challenge of reinvigorating the party. The task was by no means easy. The country was then run by Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a colossal political figure who, over the years, had acquired a larger-than-life image.

Ms Gandhi’s first few years as Congress chief were marked by a string of setbacks. But she remained undeterred, and worked silently to strengthen her party. Shedding her party’s conventional stance towards alliances, she got to the business of making friends. Her strategy worked wonders, and by the 2004 general election, Congress had found coalition partners in states such as Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and West Bengal. In Haryana, Congress co-opted the Haryana Vikas Party found by Mr Bansi Lal.

The Congress president, however, played her masterstroke soon after the declaration of results of the Lok Sabha polls held in 2004. At a time when she found herself within a whisker’s distance of becoming the country’s prime minister, she stunned her political rivals, who had questioned her credentials of leading the country, by renouncing her claim, and anointing, instead, Mr Manmohan Singh on the chair. Her action won her instant acclaim and admiration, and took the wind off the Opposition BJP’s “foreign origin” campaign.

Ms Gandhi has since then worked tirelessly to consolidate her party’s gains, especially in the heartland states, where Congress remains weak. As NAC chairman, she’s scripting the government’s social agenda, and is the brain behind the UPA’s signature schemes such as NREGA, Bharat Nirman and RTI.