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Ramachandra Guha’s recent essay on the Congress party and the Gandhi family has generated considerable discussion. Given Guha’s stature as one of India’s most respected historians and public intellectuals, his arguments deserve serious engagement. His central contention is familiar: the Congress party became excessively dependent on the Gandhi family, failed to democratise its leadership, and thereby contributed significantly to the rise and consolidation of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

There is considerable truth in this argument. Congress has undeniably struggled with organisational renewal, leadership transition, internal democracy and strategic coherence. Its decline cannot be understood without acknowledging those failures.

But the central weakness in Guha’s thesis is that though not completely not wrong, it is dangerously incomplete.

His explanation elevates the Gandhi family into the principal cause of a political transformation that was shaped by much larger historical forces: the rise of regional parties, the social churn unleashed by Mandal politics, the organisational expansion of the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the consequences of economic liberalisation, changes in media ownership, and the growing role of money in electoral competition.

In effect, tracking the remaking of Indian politics has been reduced to a story about one family.

That explanation is too narrow for a democracy as vast, diverse and politically dynamic as India.

The first difficulty with the dynasty thesis is that it inadvertently understates the BJP’s own achievements.

If Congress dynastic politics is the primary explanation for the BJP’s rise, how do we explain the party’s expansion in states where Congress was not even the principal political adversary?

In West Bengal, the BJP’s primary challenge was not Congress but the Trinamool Congress. In Odisha, it confronted Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal. In Tamil Nadu, it entered a political arena dominated for decades by Dravidian parties. In Uttar Pradesh, the defining political contests of the post-Mandal era were fought largely among the BJP, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Bihar presents an even stronger counter-example.

For more than three decades, Bihar’s politics revolved around the competing and occasionally cooperating formations led by Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar. Congress had long ceased to be the state’s principal political force. Yet the BJP steadily expanded its organisational reach, built social coalitions among non-Yadav OBCs and upper castes, and eventually emerged as one of the dominant poles of Bihar politics.

None of these developments can be explained away through Rahul Gandhi or Congress dynastic politics.

The BJP’s rise was not merely the consequence of Congress’s decline. It was also the product of decades of ideological consolidation, cadre-building through........

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