India's Governing Party Shows Spine for a Change

NEW DELHI - On Sunday, thousands of people assembled in Delhi to have a good time as three earnest but ungifted orators talked about the benefits of “foreign direct investment” and the other things that will come their way as long as they are in the care of the government led by the Indian National Congress party.

The speakers were Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; the Congress party's president, Sonia Gandhi; and her son, Rahul Gandhi, the party's general secretary. The rally was intended to be the war cry of the party, which has in recent times been hit by a string of corruption charges. Reacting to the huge gathering, Shashi Tharoor, minister of state for human resource development, tweeted, “The Party fights back.”

It is not unusual for a political party to stage a rally or for thousands to turn up, but what is unusual is the way the Congress party has chosen to rehabilitate its battered image as it prepares for the general elections, which are scheduled for 2014. On Sunday, the party did not dwell on its standard claims of loving farmers, of subsidizing lives and of its enduring love for all religions and castes. Instead, it tried to explain to the masses, a majority of whom were from rural areas, the importance and the inevitability of long-term economic measures.

Among these reforms is the lifting of restrictions on foreign retail chains investing in India. The government has allowed these companies to own up to 51 percent of their Indian ventures as long as they comply with certain conditions.

The change became controversial after various political parties played on the fears of millions of small local shop owners who fear that they will become irrelevant if stores like Walmart and Carrefour come to India. Politicians with obsolete ideas, of whom there are many in the country, even invoked an old Indian fear that is not widely perceived anymore - the ghost of the East India Company, the British firm that came to trade with India and ended up ruling it. In October's festive season, when the effigies of demons were ritually burned, one of the demons on a street in Kolkata was the effigy of an East India Company executive with “FDI” (for foreign direct investment) stuck on his chest.

The Congress party has been resolute and has withstood all opposition from friends and foes, which is uncharacteristic. The party has many strengths, but spine has never been among them. On Sunday, the party told the people that there was evidence from other countries to suggest that the arrival of retail chains like Walmart would create more jobs, not deplete them. Several Indian states are set to open the multibrand retail segment to foreign chains, but some state governments have said that they will not. India's federal structure gives every state the right to reject some of the policies of the central government.

In his speech on Sunday, Rahul Gandhi said that India's biggest problem was that the political system was flawed and that Indian politics did not permit a fair representation of the “common man.” A majority of Indian politicians, especially the younger ones in the Congress party, hail from political families. Mr. Gandhi's comment is a part of his self-whipping act, as he himself is the biggest beneficiary of dynastic munificence. He has, at least once in public, said that he is “the symptom” of the problem. It is not clear how he plans to save Indian politics from nepotism, but he has evidently decided to whip himself, as strategy or penance, until he knows the answers.

There is a touch of martyrdom in his tone and words. He often manages to spin the privilege of his political ancestry as an inescapable trap of destiny from which he chooses not to escape because he wants to serve the nation. It is inevitable that the Congress party's fight to redeem itself will increasingly depend on his royalty-like branding.

The chief tormentors of the party have been the new anti-corruption revolutionaries and an old political foe, Subramanian Swamy, president of the Janata Party, who surfaces every now and then with extraordinary allegations of corruption against the Gandhi family. But there is some comfort for the Congress party. Its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is a bit worse off.

The news media have long accused the anti-corruption activists of functioning like secret mercenaries of the B.J.P. Finally, last month, one of the activists, Arvind Kejriwal, perhaps in a move to lend himself greater credibility, produced seeming evidence of corruption against the B.J.P.'s president, Nitin Gadkari. Since then, the hefty Mr. Gadkari has sunk deeper and deeper into a political quagmire and the B.J.P.'s leadership has looked disoriented and confused in its rescue missions. It's as if the Congress were a grand veteran who knows how to take serious blows and the B.J.P. an amateur who is easily rattled.

In the Congress party's fight for survival, one of the factors that will assist it is an old charm: the sense among voters that the other parties are probably worse.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 8, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.