By Sankarshan Thakur

They brought her a 240-kilo cake from a five-star patisserie. The tonnage of roses and marigolds deposited as offering by a daylong eddy of the faithful would have been harder to measure and put away. It is tempting to think Sonia Gandhi called garbage disposal as last rite on her 58th birthday. What do you do with such an overload of sweet sycophancy? But was it that?

Pandit Ratnakar Pandey, arch celebrant, former Congress elder and the man who tutored Sonia Gandhi in the rudiments of Hindi, has a sanskritised way of looking at all this. Not sycophancy, he says, just love and affection for a great leader. Nobody in the Congress dares differ. Sycophancy happens when its object begins to demand it as a matter of right, so Pandey believes. Sonia Gandhi wanted none of this, no cakes, no flowers, no beelines. Blame the love of the ordinary Congressman, if you have to, don’t blame Sonia Gandhi. Two points arise from this. One. The Congress president is a greater leader today for what she did following the verdict of May 2004 but she isn’t quite the greatest yet. There were, to name a couple, MK Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Were they less loved for the party not carting 240-kilo cakes to their doorsteps? Were they less great because they didn’t command the morning’s floricultural harvest? And two. It would be heartening to believe that the current leadership eschews what has for long been standard practice in the party — sustenance through frequent displays of prostrated worship. But what’s there to convince the observer that what happened at 10 Janpath on December 9 happened in utter disregard of the new leader’s inclinations to sobriety? Sonia Gandhi’s wish is command for partymen. Her strength of will was well demonstrated in her refusal of prime ministership in the face of abject pleading and supplication. If her aversion to such unseemly exhibitionism was firm and well stated, could the dutiful hordes have defied her? Perhaps. Old habits take time getting smothered. Sycophancy of the ilk that we see today is a good quarter of a century old in the Congress. It was seeded early in Indira Gandhi’s imperial premiership. It’s a vogue that’s bitten others. Mayawati, bedecked in chunky jewellery, cuts a seven-tier cake on her birthday in the presence of commandeered thousands. The manner of the court and the veneration of cults has entered the Congressman’s DNA. It will take time and proactive effort getting purged.

Assuming Messrs Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi have decided to flush it out, the effort will demand commitment and consistency. One of the first things Manmohan Singh did after taking over was to ban his pictures adoring government offices or public advertising. That did not stop colleagues. Many are victims of habit. Others don’t want to be left behind others in the sycophancy stakes. Much of this excess is committed on public money. Witness the exaggerated advertising put out for Sonia Gandhi’s birthday by Congress state governments. A government that pledged itself to the common man must think whether such squandering is in order when the development sector is forever starved of critical funding. This isn’t about one 240-kilo cake; it’s about the millions that don’t even have bread.