It is already a matter of considerable dismay that otherwise decent officials, educated aides and learned advisers have acquiesced in the organized worship of a man who grandiloquently pretends to know profoundly about everything, from gaming the examinations to disrupting the economy, even without the benefit of a Harvard education, and making a virtue of “hard work”. From senior most ministers to junior joint secretary, all find themselves subscribing to this “daddy knows best” syndrome, very much reminiscent of the Narayan Datt Tiwari hymns to Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency days. 

History of the last hundred years has taught us one simple lesson:  personality cults do introduce undesirable imbalances in the body politic. Personality cult produces very little democratic good; it always ends up badly, even disastrously.      

 The greatest danger we face is Narendra Modi is using all the accruements of democracy to de-legitimize democracy’s good practices and values, and, to turn all its bad habits to  make democratic arrangements look inadequate and unequal to the task of restoration of our national glory.

The top Congress leaders are due to gather, in a fortnight from now, for their party’s plenary session. Apart from consecrating Rahul Gandhi’s election as the party president, the gathering will need to undertake far more serious a task: they will have to perform a duty to start a conversation with the nation and to take the citizens into confidence on how the entire political system is groaning under the weight of one man — his whims, his fancies, his attitudes and his limitations. The Congress and its leaders need to make a case before the nation as to why the current state of affairs is neither desirable nor acceptable. At the end of this three-day gathering, the Congress should have given the country a good enough reason to look beyond Narendra Modi, as and when the Lok Sabha elections get organized.

Since it will be a political gathering, there will be plenty of partisanship and mouthfuls of philippics against Narendra Modi, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. But it would be a waste of time and resources if the Congressmen confine themselves to abuses; it will be an even greater farce and greater shame if the Congressmen were to engage in their familiar weakness for sycophancy. Instead, they have to behave and speak as responsible and reasonable keepers of the best of the constitutional values. As those who claim to be committed to the Idea of India and who subscribe to the Nehruvian virtues, the Congressmen have a sober and serious task at their hands:  a democratic obligation to talk to fellow-citizens as to how we are all mindlessly getting sucked into the small-time viciousness of a small-time man; how as a nation and as a society we are getting infected with pettiness and small-mindedness.  More than that, the Congressmen need to convince the nation that they have the legacy, the leadership, and the experience to rescue us all from this quagmire of petty vindictiveness being palmed off as a new normal.

We remain — for now — a constitutional democracy; but, all our constitutional arrangements stand diluted and all-out constitutional functionaries — be it the President of India or the Union Home Minister or External Affairs Minister —have been made to feel diminished. The Cabinet system of government has been reduced to a joke that no longer invokes a laugh. The country needs to be told that the fine architecture of checks and balances is in serious jeopardy.

It is for the Congressmen to enlighten the citizens how all the key relationships in our national scheme of things are being  revised and reduced: first,  the majority-minority equation has been systematically reshaped and the secular commitments stand eroded; second, the Centre-States federal equation has tipped dangerously in favor of New Delhi and the state governments  are being reduced to whining tots; third, the State-Citizen balance has changed  drastically, an all-intrusive Aadhaar arrangement is demanding compliance and surrender of privacy, and, we are beginning to look like a misshapen  authoritarian setup; then, we have the creeping distortions  in the Civil-Army relationship, with the Army in danger of losing its institutional rectitude; and, lastly, the virtual governmental takeover of the electronic media. All these key equations are off the keel. And, our citizens need to be told how these institutional distortions are unknowingly putting the nation on a road to a totalitarian-lite experiment.

When the Opposition fails to impart a democratic vibrancy to the polity, all other institutions of restraint — like the judiciary, the Election Commission — too feel discouraged; and, independent regulatory authorities like the Reserve Bank of India feel inclined to give in to the government’s unreasonable demands. The Congress, as the principal opposition party, has an obligation to create conditions for robust counterpoises.

If nothing else, the country needs to be repeatedly educated about the whimsicality that has dictated the (mis) management of the economy, and how all the great projects — like Make in India — stand in tatters; and, more importantly, whether the Congress has an answer to jobless growth and whether the Congressmen can help the country find its way out of a deepening agrarian crisis.

Notwithstanding the loud chanting of deshbhakti, and balidaan mantras, it is the Opposition’s task to inform the country that we stand isolated in our own backyard because we have needlessly and arrogantly alienated all our South Asian neighbors; and, the nation needs to be educated that India today is less safe than it was five years ago.  The Congress has to introduce the citizens to a new narrative that takes us away from this excessive preoccupation with national security and an unwarranted and unworkable flexing of muscles at home and abroad. We are losing our national self-assurance without making smaller nations in the neighborhood respect us.

Then, there is a personality overload. A personality cult may have been “normalized” in New Delhi but it remains a personality cult, with all its unhealthy demands on men and institutions. It is already a matter of considerable dismay that otherwise decent officials, educated aides and learned advisers  have acquiesced in the organized worship of a man who grandiloquently pretends to know profoundly about everything, from gaming the examinations to disrupting the economy, even without the benefit of a Harvard education, and making a virtue of “hard work”. From senior most ministers to junior joint secretary, all find themselves subscribing to this “daddy knows best” syndrome, very much reminiscent of the Narayan Datt Tiwari hymns to Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency days.

History of the last hundred years has taught us one simple lesson:  personality cults do introduce undesirable imbalances in the body politic. Personality cult produces very little democratic good; it always ends up badly, even disastrously.

The greatest danger we face is Narendra Modi is using all the accruements of democracy to de-legitimize democracy’s good practices and values, and, to turn all its bad habits to make democratic arrangements look inadequate and unequal to the task of restoration of our national glory.  Those associated with national security are already muttering that there-is-too-much-democracy claptrap. The next pit-stop in this journey would be to look temptingly at the Xi Jinping kind of authoritarian option.

(The author is editor-in- chief of Tribune group of newspapers)