When the Congress MP from Kanyakumari, H Vasanthakumar, chanted “Kamaraj Vazhga (Hail Kamaraj)” after taking oath as a member of the Lok Sabha, hardly anyone expected that the party would be looking towards the late Tamil Nadu chief minister Kumaraswami Kamaraj to provide a way out of its present crisis.
Cut back to 1963. The Congress had been in power for over 15 years, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was ageing and factors like the defeat in the war with China in 1962 had contributed to some erosion in the party’s popularity. The Congress also lost three key bypolls to Opposition stalwarts Acharya Kripalani, Rammanohar Lohia and Minoo Masani.
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K Kamaraj, then chief minister of Tamil Nadu and one of strongest regional leaders in the Congress, provided a formula for revitalising the party. One 2 October 1963, Gandhi Jayanti, Kamaraj resigned as chief minister and urged other chief ministers and Union ministers to follow suit.
An impressed Prime Minister Nehru is said to have offered his own resignation as well but Kamaraj is said to have urged him not to quit.
Six Union Ministers including Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jagjivan Ram and Morarji Desai, and six chief ministers, including Biju Patnaik, SK Patil and Kamaraj himself, resigned from their posts.
Whether the plan actually revitalised the Congress is debatable, but it did unleash a major churn in the party. Kamaraj, the architect of the organisational overhaul, became party president.
According to Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Kamaraj Plan also helped settle the matter of Nehru’s successor in favour of Lal Bahadur Shastri.
“At Kamaraj’s instance, Nehru brought Lal Bahadur Shastri back, as minister without portfolio, virtually as deputy prime minister. This made his succession by Shastri foregone, when it could otherwise have been fractious,” former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi wrote.
Over half a century later, more than 200 Congress functionaries have resigned from their posts to compel Rahul Gandhi to stay on as party chief. According to speculation, even some of the party’s chief ministers are said to have offered to resign, in their meeting with the Congress president. This has opened up the possibility of another, perhaps even bigger Kamaraj Plan-like experiment in the Congress party.
Can it Help Revive the Congress?
Kamaraj Plan is a very interesting organisational experiment but it must be kept in mind that the Congress of today is nowhere near what it was in 1963. The Congress was the dominant force at that time and ruled the Centre as well as every state in the country. It could afford to undertake a comprehensive overhaul of the government and party.
The Congress of today has just 52 seats in the Lok Sabha and is heading the government in just four states and one Union territory. Organisational instability could end up harming instead of helping it. The party can hardly afford this with key states like Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand heading for Assembly polls later this year.
The other problem is that in many positions, the Congress doesn’t really have alternatives. For instance, replacing Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath with a younger leader like Jyotiraditya Scindia or Arun Yadav could end up destabilising the Congress government in the state, where it enjoys a wafer-thin majority.
Then there is the question of whether the plan would include Rahul Gandhi quitting or not. Kamaraj did not let Nehru resign as prime minister in 1963 but it does seem that Rahul Gandhi is presently not keen on continuing as party president. Should he make way for another leader, it would remain to be seen whether the functionaries who resigned to put pressure on him to stay on would be willing to work with a new leader.
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