{"id":201,"date":"2019-03-24T09:39:04","date_gmt":"2019-03-24T09:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/?p=201"},"modified":"2019-04-20T10:08:48","modified_gmt":"2019-04-20T10:08:48","slug":"congress-party-now-paying-cost-dynastic-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/congress-party-now-paying-cost-dynastic-character\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Congress Party Now Paying the Cost for its Dynastic Character?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>I<\/strong> have consistently held the view that dynasties owning political parties is an unfortunate phenomenon which has accelerated in the last three decades.\u00a0 The Congress was original creator of this concept.\u00a0 Dynasties demolish organisational structures.\u00a0 They are unable to attract leaders of talent or mass following.\u00a0 Since the democratic structure of a dynastic party gets diminished, they become a crowd around a family.\u00a0 Chaudhary Charan Singh had very appropriately said that world over parties elect leaders.\u00a0 In India, leaders create parties.\u00a0 Wherever the leader goes, the party travels with him.<\/p>\n<p>Dynastic parties have one major drawback.\u00a0 If the current generation of the party is competent, charismatic and enjoys popular confidence, the dynast can pull-off major victories.\u00a0 There is an incentive in the party to rally behind him.\u00a0 However, if the current generation dynast is lacking in charisma, understanding and popular confidence, the crowd around the family gets increasingly frustrated.\u00a0 Is the Congress Party witnessing that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>The state of the Congress<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Congress Party has been out of power for five years.\u00a0 Its leaders and workers are accustomed to existing with the frills of office.\u00a0 They stare at another possible defeat.\u00a0 They have to live with their leader not relying on political advisors but on some from \u2018non-conventional\u2019 ones who are out of sync with the Congress leaders.\u00a0 Since the last word on any issue belongs to the leader, there is an element of unpredictability.<\/p>\n<p>For those familiar with the Congress leaders, some generic statements are frequently heard.\u00a0 A few illustrative ones are mentioned here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cWhat can I do? He just doesn\u2019t listen.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWait for the 24th of May, our politics will begin thereafter.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cI feel like quitting\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cOur campaign planning is lagging behind. I am told Uncle Sam has come to take care of it.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cLet\u2019s prepare 2024\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The above reflects what one generation of dynasty can do to a dynastic party.\u00a0 There are three prominent non-dynastic parties in India.\u00a0 The BJP has elected, over the last few decades, leaders of the calibre of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Shri L.K. Advani, and Shri Narendra Modi as its front rank leaders.\u00a0 When the new generation of the Left took over, their dominant faces were men like Shri Prakash Karat and Shri Sitaram Yechury.\u00a0 Despite the limited impact of the Left, they had decades of experience and ideological clarity.\u00a0 After a series of splits and mergers, the Janata Dal (United), another non-dynastic party, elected Shri Nitish Kumar, who will shortly be completing his third term in his office as Chief Minister.\u00a0 It goes to his credit that he changed the governance culture of Bihar.<\/p>\n<p><strong>When leaders wrongly assess their own capacity<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Dynasties impose leaders.\u00a0 These leaders don\u2019t become great \u2013 greatness is thrust on them.\u00a0 Some suffer from what psychologists now regard as the \u2018Dunning-Kruger effect.\u2019\u00a0 Social psychologists Dr. David Dunning and Justin Kruger have given an apt description.\u00a0 They believe that those who suffer from this effect have a bias of illusory superiority which comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognise their lack of ability.\u00a0 Without the self-awareness of their limitations, such low ability people cannot objectively evaluate their own competence or incompetence.\u00a0 This leads to their miscalculation in their assessment of the calibre of highly incompetent ones.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They suggest that poor performers are not in a position to recognise their shortcomings and consequently are insecure and biased against the more competent ones.\u00a0 There is little place for men of high calibre in dynastic parties.\u00a0 An insecure leader is scared of the shadow of more talented people.<\/p>\n<p>Is this the reason for the current mood within the Congress Party?\u00a0 Or is it also the reason which persuades the Congress President to cross the line of decency and dignity when he refers to the Prime Minister.<\/p>\n<p>This should suffice as a lesson for the dynastic parties.\u00a0 They succeed on the strength of some generations of the dynasty. \u00a0They sink with the others.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have consistently held the view that dynasties owning political parties is an unfortunate phenomenon which has accelerated in the last three decades.\u00a0 The Congress was original creator of this concept.\u00a0 Dynasties demolish organisational structures.\u00a0 They are unable to attract leaders of talent or mass following.\u00a0 Since the democratic structure of a dynastic party gets<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[146,147,143,144,203],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political","tag-cost","tag-dynastic-character","tag-is-the-congress","tag-party","tag-paying"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kamalsandesh.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}