The 82^nd plenary session of the All-India Congress Committee at Gachibowli, renamed as Rajiv Gandhi Nagar for the occasion, was the first such exercise after the Congress returned to power at the Centre via the coalition route. The deliberations and resolutions of the meet naturally bore the marks of the pressures and pulls of coalition politics.

Read with clarifications offered by the Finance Minister, the economic resolutions reaffirm that neo-liberal reform, including the privatization of civil aviation and “step-by-step” entry of foreign capital in the retail trade as well as labour reform, will go full steam ahead. But the party is also worried that its pro-poor mask does not come off too soon. The job of saving the mask has therefore been assigned to the ‘cadres at the grassroots’. Sonia Gandhi asked the cadres ‘not to feel shy to highlight people’s concerns, even if the government acted differently under other compulsions’.

This hypocrisy ran like a scarlet thread through the entire discourse at the 82^nd tamasha. The economic resolution, for instance, asked the government not to raise PDS prices for BPL families, leaving it free not only to raise prices for other households but also to reduce the availability of foodgrains for BPL families! Finance Minister P. Chidamabaram, in fact, hinted as much when he said that the FCI was now only maintaining the normal buffer level and no longer faced with a super-surplus situation as before when the quantum had been increased to ease the pressure on it.

The foreign policy resolution too reflected the same hypocrisy. It tried to keep up the pretension of ‘independence’ by talking about the need to review the old non-alignment paradigm while highlighting the developing “transparent” relations with the USA and remaining conspicuously non-committal on the crucial Iran issue that has identified India most glaringly with the blatant US drive for global hegemony.

If all this was meant to keep the Left in good humour, coalition partners were also asked to “follow a basic discipline”, not to cross “the limits of constructive criticism” and to honour “the collective responsibility” of the coalition. There was no dearth of self-congratulatory noise regarding the party’s success in practising the coalition dharma to keep the communal forces at bay. Any self-critical introspection on the recent reverses in Jharkhand and Bihar, let alone on the ongoing political crisis precipitated in Karnataka by the manipulative Congress leadership, was of course not to bother the AICC delegates.

While reiterating its ‘commitment’ to coalition dharma, the Congress of course did not fail to remind its partners as well as adversaries that it had not abandoned the vision of ruling India once again on its own. Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi laid a lot of emphasis on strengthening the organisation and reviving the party in its traditional bastion in the North. But like its communist allies who had made similar noises about expanding the communist influence in the Hindi heartland in their party congresses held last year, the Congress high command too remains equally clueless as to how to make any headway towards any kind of revival in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Even as the Hyderabad plenary busied itself with the challenge of reconquering the North, there were tell-tale signs from all the southern states to indicate that the Congress had no less reason to feel worried about the South either. In Kerala the party has suffered a major blow with Karunakaran loyalists charting their own separate course. In Karnataka, where the weakening of the Congress had become evident at the time of the last Assembly election itself, the Congress-led coalition government is all set to fall with the majority of JD(S) legislators withdrawing support and going the JD(U) way to forge an alternative equation with the BJP.

Most crucially, in Andhra itself, mass resentment against the Congress is beginning to assert itself. This was the state where the Congress had staged a dramatic comeback in May 2004, unseating the pro-World Bank Chandrababu Naidu regime. Apart from cashing in on the resentment of the toiling masses against farmers’ suicides and starvation deaths, the Congress had also flirted with the Maoists and the Telengana Rashtra Samiti, promising negotiations with the Maoists and formation of a separate Telengana state. Back in power, the Congress has now reneged on all these scores. The Hyderabad plenary said since the Telengana issue had been hanging fire since 1956, the Congress was in no hurry to make a time-bound commitment for a separate state. Having earlier tomtommed the talks with the Maoists as a genuine step towards a political solution, the Hyderabad plenary now went back to congratulating the Andhra police for the renewed spree of encounter killings and calling for still more powers to the police to effectively tackle the ‘Naxalite menace’. Meanwhile, the suicides and starvations have been continuing unabated and like in neighbouring Orissa, the tribal people and other sections of toiling masses are threatened with mass eviction as the government has begun dispossessing them of tens of thousands of acres of cultivable and forest land in the name of dubious irrigation projects and special economic zones.
Contrary to Sonia’s advice to Congress cadres to highlight people’s concerns and basic issues, most delegates to the 82^nd AICC tamasha in Hyderabad remained busy staging a choreographed clamour for an early coronation of Rahul Gandhi. This, they believe, or would like to so appear, is the surest way to take the party back to the days of the erstwhile Congress monopoly. But the people of India have other dreams - of reviving the spirit of the great Telengana struggle which had issued the clarion call of bhumi-mukti-vimukti: land, livelihood and liberation. The coming days will surely see the people’s resentment and resolve put paid to the fond Congress dreams of dynastic revival.