One of the first things Rahul Gandhi did after assuming charge as the Congress vice-president in January this year, we were told, was to put a bar on sycophancy. The Gandhi scion, we were told, had ticked off several senior party leaders for their obsequious behaviour by joining the ‘Rahul for PM’ chorus.

He had, in fact, chided a leader as senior as Uttarakhand chief minister Vijay Bahuguna for raising the demand back in February this years – soon after being appointed the number two in Congress at the party’s ‘chintan baithak’ in Jaipur the previous month.

"Do your work (and) don't give unsolicited advice,” the Amethi MP is believed to have told Bahuguna at a meeting of Congress chief ministers and state party chiefs as part of Gandhi’s efforts to analyse the party’s position in different states.

Some things, though never change in the Congress. So, many of them caused intermittent clamour, asking Gandhi to become the party’s PM candidate even afterward. And many others, including senior leaders who had worked with his father as well, have fallen over themselves to say cheese to the mother-son Gandhi duo and dab their hands in butter whenever the need arose as winter of Rahul’s anointment turned spring for the Congress and gave way to summer and is now showering monsoon rains.

But not for a long time has anyone done the butter-finger act the way Charandas Mahant has now done. It is said that most Congress leaders, when asked to bend, crawled before Indira Gandhi during and after the Emergency – BJP veteran LK Advani, a minister in the Janata Party government that was elected after the Emergency was withdrawn, had famously made the same carp about the Indian media at the time, but that’s another story.

Charandas Mahant, the union minister of state for agriculture and food processing and recently made the working president of the Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress committee, has chosen to crawl even without being asked to bend.

Asked nothing in particular by reporters at state capital Raipur on Monday, Mahant said, "I obey the orders and directions of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and I also obey the orders of Rahul ji (Rahul Gandhi), and I have been obeying them, and this is an absolute example for it that if they ask me to broom the pradesh Congress committee (office) of Chhattisgarh, I will do it. For me, their orders are above all.”

As elections to different state assemblies and the big one for the Lok Sabha, scheduled next year, draw closer, it seems Rahul Gandhi would have to do a lot more than merely chiding his party leaders. His diktats and fatwas have failed to elicit response, for Congress leaders, both at the state and central level, have learnt it the hard way that buttered fingers to greet the high command gives more dividend and acts as a guard against butterfingers that might fail to latch on to that catch.

The task for Gandhi is cut out because he should remember that over the years the Congress has done well in states where the local satrap has had a mind and voice of her/his own to garner those votes. The yes-men and yes-women are almost always part of the ‘high command’ in Delhi, primarily getting into parliament through the Rajya Sabha route.

ALSO READ: Wearing the sycophant’s pants!