Those who faced the music: (From top) JB Kriplani, Kumaraswami Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar, VP Singh, Sharad Pawar. Survivor: Mamata Banerjee

New Delhi, Aug. 20: Thunder on Tuesday, jab on Wednesday, salute on Thursday, back in attack on Friday — where does Natwar Singh go after suggesting for the second time that Manmohan Singh is not up to the Prime Minister’s job?

“Out, out, out,” rasped a Congress leader.

The message was clear: greater worthies had challenged leaders of their time, fell from grace and were either resuscitated temporarily or sank without a trace.

J.B. Kriplani, Kumaraswami Kamaraj and Morarji Desai spring from the pages of the Congress’s history as testimonies of the party’s famous slogan that has become axiomatic: “Jo hamse takraye gaa, choor, choor ho jaye gaa.” (Whoever dares to cross my path will be smashed to smithereens.)

Chandra Shekhar, V.P. Singh and Sharad Pawar did just that against different leaders, in different ways and for different reasons. They didn’t exactly fall by the wayside. But for brief moments of power and glory, they ended up striking compromises to remain politically relevant.

Mamata Banerjee alone has bucked the trend so far. She left the Congress in 1997 to form the Trinamul Congress, ostensibly to protest her parent party’s “proximity” with the CPM. Her reason for quitting remains politically legitimate because in Bengal, the Congress would be known as the Left’s “B” team.

Mamata’s success (or lack of it) to emerge as a serious rival to the Left is another story.

Kriplani’s case encapsulated certain eternal — and bitter — truths. He was Mahatma Gandhi’s closest associate by virtue of which he was the Congress’s general secretary from 1928 to 1929. Despite being at odds with the dominant ideologies of the party — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s right-wing one and Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialism — he was elected Congress president in 1947, around Independence.

Kriplani began losing ground after Gandhi’s assassination. Nehru rejected his demand that the party should be consulted on government policies and decisions. With Patel’s backing, Nehru told the Congress president that while the party could lay down the broad guidelines, it would not have a say in governance.

However, in 1950, Nehru supported Kriplani for the party president’s post against Patel’s nominee, P.D. Tandon, who was associated with the “soft Hindutva” school of thought. Tandon won by a whisker.

An embittered Kriplani left the Congress and teamed up with Ram Manohar Lohia to form the Socialist Party of India.

But he was doomed to stay out of power. His wife, Sucheta, whom he married in 1938, meanwhile rose from strength to strength in the Congress. She became its first woman chief minister, that too of Uttar Pradesh, and often sparred with her husband when she was a member of Parliament.

Desai and Chandra Shekhar became Prime Ministers, which they couldn’t have had they stayed in the Congress. Desai did not conceal his ambitions when he conveyed loud and clear to Indira Gandhi (when she was Prime Minister) that as finance minister, he was the deputy PM. When he got himself “promoted”, it was courtesy the hotchpotch Janata Party.

Chandra Shekhar, who as a “young Turk” tried to move the Congress to left-of-centre, left the party after the Emergency, stuck with the socialists in their various “avatars” and finally became Prime Minister with Rajiv Gandhi’s support. While Indira Gandhi ensured Desai was Prime Minister for a year, Rajiv Gandhi did one better and saw Chandra Shekhar out in five months.

Like Desai and Chandra Shekhar, Pawar, too, saw life outside the Congress through the “Janata parivar” lifeline. The Janata Party made him Maharashtra chief minister after he ditched his mentor, Vasantdada Patil. The wheel came full circle for Pawar when he hoped to become Prime Minister by breaking off from the Congress and forming the Nationalist Congress Party.

Timing is of essence in politics. Pawar missed his moment when he was egged on by the socialists to split with the Congress and team up with them in 1997. By 1998, it was too late. He had to eat humble pie by aligning with the Congress, in Maharashtra and Delhi.

A senior Congress functionary once said that to survive and come up, “you have to accept the Nehru-Gandhi parivar” as the axis of power. “Once you do this, you can find your level and float forever.”

Those who didn’t either drowned or clung to feeble straws.