Shotgun wants out. The PM didn’t make him a minister, so Shatrughan Sinha became a trenchant critic of the PM. He bolted to the Congress, thinking that the Congress would win and he would finally win his coveted ministership. But the Congress is disintegrating. He sees no future for himself there. Now he’s praising the PM to the skies. The PM’s independence day address. The PM’s handclasp and apparent bonhomie with Trump. But will the PM want Shotgun back? Unlikely, for the PM prizes loyalty above all else.

Shashi Tharoor too is trying to placate the PM. But he has been trying to do so since 2014, when the PM first came to power. After Sonia spurned Tharoor for the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, Tharoor has been sulking. He says one thing in support of the PM one day, then backtracks, then repeats himself. Clearly he too wants out. Sonia can put him out of his misery and expel him from the Congress, whereby he will remain a freelancer MP able to join the BJP, but Sonia faces the same predicament that she faced in 2014. That time forty-four minus one was forty-three.

Advertisement

This time fifty-two minus one will become fiftyone. So Tharoor’s fate hangs in the balance, as it has for the last five years. He wants to bolt, but Sonia won’t let him bolt. Unclear though are the intentions of the old-warrior Jairam Ramesh. He has said that the Congress should not demonize Modi. Really? Ramesh has traditionally been part of Sonia’s inner circle. Has he been shoved to its outer edges? Demonizing the PM is all that Sonia has done since 2002. Demonizing the PM is all that she’s doing now. Then Abhishek Singh Singhvi, Congress party spokesperson of all people, said that the PM had done some good things in his first term, such as the Ujjwala scheme.

Where are Ramesh and Singhvi going with their narrative? Like Shotgun, and maybe even like Tharoor, do they want to quit the Congress and join the BJP? Or are they merely speaking truth to power, in this case the Gandhi family? If Rahul Gandhi had focused laser-like on how poorly the economy is doing and what he would do to better it, he might have won another 100 seats and formed the government. It was his lack of political nous that he focused so strongly on Rafale. Sonia has much more political nous than him, but she probably was pleased with the “PM is a thief campaign” because it ridiculed the PM. Whatever ridicules the PM makes Sonia happy.

Priyanka too has much more political acumen than her brother, but she probably went along for the ride out of sibling fealty. Rahul’s outburst in his resignation tweet was amazing. He blamed Congress leaders for not supporting him enough to demonize the PM. And then Priyanka, in a previouslyheld Congress Working Committee meeting, reportedly lashed out at all the senior Congress people (barring of course Sonia and Rahul) in the room, that all the murderers of the Congress were sitting in the room. Priyanka has an inner Sanjay Gandhi in her, which she would do well at most times to restrain from coming forth. Mani Shankar Aiyar is the Gandhi loyalist par excellence. He is an inveterate baiter of Modi’s. Now he too has supported Ramesh’s stand.

What exactly is happening in the Congress? Ramesh and Aiyar cannot be expected to want to defect to the BJP. But the senior leaders are now seeing that the Congress under Sonia is persisting with the disastrous “chowkidar chor hai” campaign that Rahul ran. In the meantime, the PM is going from strength to strength, with the abrogation of Article 370 (which too has rendered the Congress asunder), Triple Talaq, and of course the absolutely riveting presentation of the UAE’s highest civilian award to the PM. With even Aiyar going against the party line of Sonia and Rahul, the last bastion of loyalty within the Congress has been broken. The Congress has become like a Trojan horse. Its soldiers, captive within, want to be let out and be able to breathe at the very least.

(The writer is an expert on energy and contributes regularly to publications in India and overseas)