With the BJP naming Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister, as its leader to take the party to a resounding success in the battle of the ballot coming May, the Congressmen have been donning the robe of being great democrats. They will not name their leader, they tell the media right and left. In true “democratic” spirit the party would wait for the election results and choose the party leader after the polls. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the world knows who their leader is. With 42-year-old Rahul Gandhi running around beating the drum for the Congress government’s achievements and an entire war room filled with Oxford and Harvard boys and girls planning the strategy, there is no question who really is calling the shots in the outfit. That makes us ask why are then they not crowning him even though the bugle of the battle has been already sounded. Even prime minister Manmohan Singh has publicly said that Rahul Gandhi is the right person to become the prime minister if the party wins and that he (Singh) would be only too glad to serve under Rahul. The last bit was typical of the subservience that is the hallmark of Congress leaders. But that was not needed. The whole country knows that Singh is just a proxy for Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Nor is it anyone’s contention that Singh enjoys even an iota of political clout within the party despite being the government leader. Ever since Indira Gandhi became the prime minister, the Congress party has been a mere extension of the Gandhi family. If there was a break when P V Narasimha Rao led the government and the party, that was a passing phase in the wake of the sudden tragedy of Rajiv Gandhi, the scion of the Gandhi family, being assassinated during the 1991 election. After leading her party to victory, party president Sonia Gandhi surprised all by choosing Singh to lead the government instead of taking up the job that was hers by virtue of her position in the party. While Gandhi was hailed by the doting Congressmen for her so-called “sacrifice”, events later proved the critics right. They had foreseen that this was a ploy to consolidate the family’s 60-year-old hegemony over the party by demonstrating that the party president was far more powerful than the government head. In fact the government leadership was a gift from the party president who decides this all by herself. Also with the freshly elected party MPs in 2004 tamely accepting her nomination of Singh she could underpin her leadership of both party and the government. After all, this diarchy would only make the prime minister a shadow of the party president. Over the nine years since 2004, events proved that the prime minister was now just a person without political clout. In the diarchy the prime ministership became a plaything of the party president reversing the trend so far when the Congress was in power, and both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had reduced the party chief to a nominee. That was true of for both Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, a powerful chief minister whom Nehru chose to head the party, or Nijalingappa, then Karnataka chief minister, who was Indira Gandhi’s choice for the same post and who, however, showed guts to assert his position leading to the historic split in the party. Some analysts have speculated that the exercise in putting the PM nominee of the Congress for 2014, wrapped in mystery, was just a ploy to prevent the party’s prince-in-waiting from getting too exposed to the real person behind the media hype created around him through deliberate image-building. Such an analysis has a ring of plausibility because the campaign intervention of Rahul Gandhi did bring no credit or added to the power level of the Congress in the last four years in various state-level elections, more especially in the heartland of the country’s electoral map. If that poor mark is repeated in 2014, the claim to the throne that Rahul Gandhi wears on his kurta sleeves will suffer a huge setback and the family’s charisma on which alone the party has its clout will get eclipsed even more. The assumptions go something like this: If the party wins in 2014 it could easily claim that it was Rajiv Gandhi’s “leadership” during the campaigns between now and the decisive May. If it does not as almost all opinion surveys display, the blame can be laid at the door of the non-performance of Singh’s government, that is, the sacrificial goat is readily available and the second Gandhi could wriggle out. This non-performance is not a myth or accusation of the opposition only; it is a reality that stares the government in its face, the last few months’ rush with “reforms” notwithstanding. The Congressmen know it best. A little reflection into the history of this party could be more revealing of the reality. Gandhi and her shortlisted advisers must have calculated that with the BJP making the leadership of Narendra Modi official, the Congress just does not have anyone of that stature to project. The wave of support to Modi from all sorts of quarters including many minority leaders and the appeal the Gujarat chief minister’s achievements at the state level holds for an aspiring young India, projecting Rahul Gandhi alone as the opponent to Modi will cut not ice with either the masses or the classes. As a wise political strategy it would be better to project the Congress’ claimed affiliation with the “poor”, the charisma of the old (and failed) Garibi Hatao slogan could be invoked as a collective response. This could sort of insulate Rahul Gandhi being compared to Modi — apolitical pygmy with nothing to show so far, a raw carrot so to say, cannot be allowed to be pitted against a political giant with solid achievements to showcase him. The Congress’ first family is reading the writing on the wall. And Rahul Gandhi drumming up the Garibi Hatao motto in a different garb in his Rajasthan rallies lends credence to this analysis. The Muzaffarnagar events have further showed that the hope of riding over so-called Muslim consolidation is also evaporating for the Congress. The contours of what is to come in 2014 now need no astrologer to predict.