The future of the individual Congressman named Mr. P.C. Sethi is not a matter of concern for us. But the future of the party is. And this future is not assured by the manner in which the leadership has acted in the Sethi affair. It has ignored its own rules in suspending him and giving him just one week to explain why he should not be expelled from the organisation. Mr. Sethi has raised four issues in this connection, all of them pertinent. Under the Congress constitution, the working committee has to authorize the disciplinary action committee to suspend an AICC member; in this case, the DAC has acted on its own without any such authorisation. The party constitution does not provide for a vice-president; so Mr. Sethi’s criticism of Mr. Arjun Singh cannot be said to bring the office of the Congress vice-president into contempt. The same constitution stipulates that a suspended member has to be given a fortnight to reply except in a case where the working committee has thought it fit to reduce this period. Finally, the charges must be specific so that the person concerned can provide proper replies; in this case, the DAC has not spelt out its charge of “anti-party activities”; the committee has taken exception to Mr. Sethi’s interview to the Illustrated Weekly Of India but not pointed out the specific portions which it finds objectionable.
It is, of course, not the first time the Congress leadership has responded in this high-handed manner to an expression of dissent; the former Karnataka chief minister, Mr. Gundu Rao, has even challenged his expulsion from the party in a law court because he feels that the leadership has disregarded the Congress constitution. Indeed, a reference to the Congress constitution comes as something of a surprise. For it has for all practical purposes been dead since the party split in 1978. The Congress as an organization then virtually ceased to exist; it was replaced by what may be called Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s and Mr. Sanjay Gandhi’s praetorian guard. Mrs. Gandhi returned to power in 1980 and stayed there till her assassination on October 31, 1984. But in that period she did nothing to change the praetorian guard into a regular organisation. She did not worry about the rules. Her decision to expel Mr. F.M. Khan, also an AICC member, without the courtesy of a show-cause notice was, for example, conveyed to the working president, Mr. Kamlapati Tripathi, in Varanasi; even he was not consulted. The consequences are there for anyone to see. At one stage it appeared as if Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was alive to the danger of a non-organisation being in charge of the country’s affairs. Unfortunately, events have belied those expectations. It now looks that Mr. Gandhi too has decided to “manage” the Congress in the way his mother did. Regardless of whether or not he is surrounded by a coterie, this ad hocism, arbitrariness and intolerance towards dissent bode ill for the country. Mrs. Gandhi used up most of the reserves of strength and resilience in the system. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has to build new reserves in order to be able to draw on them.