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New Delhi, Roses, speeches and a resolution. A read out by former President of Ghana, John Kufuor, the last bit brought in an element of global reach.
In a way the two-day conference organised by the Congress to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru had all the required ingredients, but one. It drew a blank on the idiot box (TV), which religiously followed every move of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Australia.
As the narrative shifted from the first Prime Minister to the present, the Congress, true to its legacy, remained anchored to its past.
Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav provided the only connect to the present day politics on the second day of the conference on Tuesday. Senior Congress leaders and former Union Minsters P Chidambaram, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Kapil Sibal, Kamal Nath and even Shashi Tharoor, were conspicious by the abscence at the conference.
The Lohiaites — Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad — too had skipped the first day of the conference, which provided a platform to the non-NDA parties to come together in defence of Nehru and his idea of India.
If there was a hint of a ‘grand alliance’ in which West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee could break bread with her arch rivals from the Left Front, it remained unexplored.
That the Congress was trying to underline the relevance of Nehru and through him his politics and the party itself, was evident in the resolution adopted at the end of the two-day affair.
It stated, the world needs to brace against “divisive politics” that put communities against each other. Even former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, keeping aside his own template altering economic reforms of the last two decades, hailed Nehru’s ‘mixed economy’ and his ‘socialism’ which “is not just about economics, but about a way of life”.
Continuing in the same vain as Monday, Sonia reiterated that “we need to struggle to keep Nehru’s ideas alive’’.
The international participants at the conference — Karzai, Kufuor, General Obasanjo of Nigeria, former Prime Minister Madhav K Nepal of Nepal and Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk, Queen Mother of Bhutan, concurred.
