I will come again, and I will be millions. History didn't deny Eva Peron the realisation of her death-bed wish. Her posthumous invasion of the popular psyche is the best study in national necrophilia. ``In Argentina'', as an Eva-novelist says, ``we are never more alive than when we are contemplating death.'' In Delhi, as everyone knows, ancient Congress bodies are coming alive under the spell of a spectre less beguiling than Eva.

So Rajiv Gandhi has come back, though not in millions. It's a singular, lonely return of a ghost through the winding absurdities of the Jain Commission. Retribution has never had such a saddening visage. But for the Congress, let down by both ideology and biology, only the unreal gives hope. The reality: it has lost the people, the slogan, the Leader, and India. It has memories of power, and of course a coalition which is vulnerable enough to be manipulated. From the periphery of political irrelevance, it reads the reality: extinction is imminent. Hence the cry: Lead me, spectre.

Did you hear ``Lead me, Sonia''? It's all the same. The last, desperate cry of a party which has nothing to fall back on except the dead Leader and the living widow. The widow's absence continues to be the biggest presence in the Congress. Her manufactured enigma is every Congressman's secret source of salvation. She is stillness personified, but it is a turbulent stillness that supplies energy to the inanimate bodies of the Congress. She is the First Widow of India, preserved and protected by the minds that are eternally subordinated to the Dynasty. Anywhere else, she would have been living in a suburban apartment, doing either embroidery or charity.

In India, a country that has been civilisationally uncharitable to widows, she has become Madonna and Mona Lisa rolled into one. It has not been a natural transformation. Rather, it has been a deceptive self-distortion perfected under the servile eyes of the Leaderless leadership of the Congress. This distorted image is supposed to be a montage of martyrdom and redemption, of guilt and retribution. For a party that has failed in realism, abstraction is the last hope. And Sonia Gandhi is a garish, vulgarly constructed abstraction. The new aesthetics of Congressism. The aesthetics of kitsch.

In art as well as politics, kitsch is an emotional manipulation. Of its political function, Milan Kundera writes, ``kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Politics is unthinkable without kitsch. The function of the successful politician is to please''. Historically, communism perfected it. Imelda Marcos and Jayalalitha stylised it, though the vaudeville they choreographed was political kitsch at its best. V. P. Singh, social engineer, the wise man of realpolitik, the apolitical politician who is actually a cunning political beast, the connoisseur of self-serving consensus, exemplified refined kitsch. Today, as Congress seeks Sonia, it is plain kitsch: vulgar.

Remember, this vulgarity is meant to please. When you try to please through kitsch, you assume that the people are at your disposal, that you have the copyright over their conscience. A Harkishen Singh Surjeet is tutored in this pretence, for his long dead gods' favourite commandment was: you bastards, I will make you happy. In other words, kitsch was the aesthetics of totalitarianism. When Sitaram Kesri, legatee of a dead dynasty, seeks to please, he too assumes that `the people' are a gullible crowd, gullible enough to be conned by the magic of Dynasty. This assumption is born out of the pathology of Congress culture. Perhaps, it is the pretence of your average Congress neta whose life has always been secondary.

The Dynasty was his oxygen. He always needed a Gandhi in the vanguard. A Gandhi who could win the election for him. A Gandhi whose charisma would compensate for his colourlessness. His political life has never been autonomous. The overwhelming shadow of the Leader preserved and nurtured his servile self. Of the Leader, he or she was exploiting a historical memory: the Congress, the instrument of national liberation, as the natural ruling party of India. This memory was the driving force behind some of the darkest deeds of the Dynasty. The Congressmen had accepted this memory as a kind of genetic certainty. But he had never thought of himself as a Leader.

So the post-Dynasty Congress leader is not a Leader. That is why he is torn between memory and awareness. Think of Narasimha Rao. Once a peripheral member in the Gandhi durbar, he as prime minister was a passive ventriloquist. He was a `leader' picked up from the funeral party of Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress was such a shrinking sensation under his leadership. His slow march towards a political wasteland also marked the end of the Congress century. Today another old man is playing out the farce of resurrection. He is playing out Soniaji, our Goddess of Liberation.

When you are too old, when you are endowed with only rusted brain cells, when you have no faith or hope in the living, you assume that this morbid farce will be a blockbuster. But this farce is based on a false archetype -- the widow as a living embodiment of a wronged legacy. False because: the Rajiv assassination has not yet been proved as the result of an Indian political conspiracy. Like his mother, Rajiv was consumed by the forces unleashed by him. And Sonia Gandhi owes her appeal not to the popular perception of the Nehru family but the pathetic self-repudiation of the Congress leadership. The farce may further distort her image: Sonia as a representation of not the Dynasty but a decaying Congress. So please wait for a new thematic shift to the ghost story.

Kesri and other prime ministers-in-waiting are too involved in the story to anticipate any dangerous shift in the script. They are time-travelling back to the life-enhancing brightness of a funeral. Perhaps, they all would like to be a Duan Domingo Peron in khadi. For, the Argentinian used to comb the hair of the embalmed Evita, strategically placed on the dining table, while entertaining visitors. We are left with a hundred fragile hands reaching out to a woman who keeps smiling to herself. Only the spectators can afford to laugh.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.