Defeat, as John F Kennedy said, may be an orphan but it is a fecund parent: it generates a thousand accusations. After Congress’s two successive defeats in general elections, in 2014 and 2019, all the blame is being heaped at the door of the Nehru-Gandhi family. A Martian landing in India after May 23 may come to the conclusion that the grand old party, which has played a seminal role in the history of modern India, has been willfully taken over by an unscrupulous, scheming family.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For Congress leaders and activists, enchained though they are, love their chains; the family obliges rather than torments them by keeping them in thralldom.

This situation brings to mind a scene from V Shantaram’s classic Do Aankhen Barah Haath. The film’s protagonist, played by Shantaram, is an idealist jailor who wants to rehabilitate six dangerous prisoners in an open prison. He wants to reform them through a life of toil, freedom and virtue. But this makes them uncomfortable; more than toil and virtue, they find freedom unbearable.

Having spent years in jail and accustomed to a shackled existence, they are unable to sleep without being chained in the new set-up; so they chain themselves up to sleep properly. This scene is a metaphor for Congress’s relationship with the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Having got accustomed to shepherding by the first family, they feel disoriented without the stewardship of a Gandhi. P Chidambaram is recently said to have become “emotional” while appealing to Rahul not to step down. Fifteen years ago, when Sonia Gandhi announced that she won’t stake claim for the post of prime minister, many senior party members wept and made poignant appeals to reconsider her decision. How could a non-family member take the top office?

It’s not that the party or the nation has not been properly led by a non-Gandhi Congress president or prime minister. Lal Bahadur Shastri did pretty well in his short tenure on the national security and economic fronts; PV Narasimha Rao was surely a great, if not the greatest, prime minister. But not from the perspective of Congress leaders; for them, only a Gandhi deserves to be at the helm of affairs.

What is astonishing is that all leaders, including the most educated and competent ones, share this perspective. Such is their love for servitude that they don’t feel ashamed of taking orders from a less experienced and talented person so long as that person is from the family.

This love has suppressed even a most primal human instinct – to reach the top. It’s worse than that: they can’t even imagine one of them on top. For them, it is an axiomatic truth that the GOP would be ruled by a Gandhi. Period.

That the current leadership has failed the party is clear as day; Congress couldn’t get a single seat in 18 states and Union territories. Except for the party’s performance a few months ago in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and a few successes on and off, the GOP has fared pretty badly in the last few years.

Yet, Congress leaders can’t think beyond the Nehru-Gandhi family. Won’t the induction of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra a little earlier have been better? Or even won’t she have been a better inheritor of the family?

It would, however, be too harsh to blame only Congress for promoting dynasty politics; almost every party is a family enterprise in India. The exceptions are too large and too small: the Bharatiya Janata Party and communist parties.

While there are offspring of BJP leaders who have risen, none of them has reached the top by virtue of pedigree. That dynastic succession doesn’t happen in the parties on the opposite sides of the ideological spectrum has to do with the ideas and ideals they uphold – howsoever perfunctorily. Ideas and ideals matter more than men and women do.

Yet, the GOP’s case is spectacular, of astonishing transmogrification – a political party that successfully fought against the world’s greatest empire longs to be perpetually in the service of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The transmogrification shows that if there is a freethinker and a rebel in every person, there is also a slave in them. It is the objective conditions and climate of opinion that determine who gets power – the rational arguer, the rebel, or the slave. The last one emerged victorious after Nehru in Congress.

While the conditions and prevalent ideas – which are dirigisme-generated – made the GOP a handmaiden of the Nehru-Gandhi family, they have also affected the saffron party. It has proved to be immune to the dynasty infection, but genuflection is the defining feature of the ruling party’s culture – indeed of all parties. The Anti-Defection Law of 1985 played the most critical role in making the representatives of people subservient to the bosses and managers in all parties. Obeisance replaced argumentation.

The consequences are for all to see. Jawaharlal Nehru had his admirers; Indira Gandhi, sycophants; Prime Minister Narendra Modi has bhakts. It took some time, though: in the Vajpayee-Advani era, there was a ‘high command’; now there are commanding heights of politics.

Meanwhile Congress leaders are striving hard to keep themselves in servitude. In folklore, a knight in shining armour rescues the damsel in distress. But can any knight save a damsel who has fallen in love with her chains?