The Congress party is a legacy codebase that hasn't seen a stable update since the late nineties. It’s a mess of spaghetti logic and deprecated functions, and every time someone tries to push a patch, the whole system crashes. This week, Mani Shankar Aiyar—the party’s resident veteran dev who refuses to retire—decided to run a public diagnostic. It wasn't pretty.

Aiyar didn’t just point out a bug. He went after the developers.

In a move that surprised exactly no one who follows the internal friction of the Grand Old Party, Aiyar took aim at Pawan Khera and Shashi Tharoor. The context? The ongoing friction in Kerala, a state that serves as one of the party’s last functional servers. Tharoor has been doing a solo press tour there, acting more like a standalone app than a plugin for the main platform. Aiyar, never one for subtlety, flagged Tharoor’s "ambition" as if it were a security vulnerability.

It’s a classic corporate power struggle, dressed up in the aesthetics of "ideological purity."

Tharoor is the shiny, high-end hardware. He’s got the polish, the vocabulary, and the kind of global branding that makes the rest of the party look like they’re running Windows 95. But in the world of legacy politics, being too efficient is a red flag. Aiyar’s critique of Tharoor’s ambition is a polite way of saying the man doesn't fit the current architecture. It’s the old guard screaming at the new UI because they can’t find the "Start" button.

Then there’s Pawan Khera. If Tharoor is the product, Khera is the PR department. He’s the one sent out to handle the "handling" of the narrative. Aiyar calling him out feels less like a policy dispute and more like a senior architect being annoyed by the marketing guy’s lack of technical knowledge. Khera is loud. He’s aggressive. He’s the front-end dev trying to hide the fact that the back-end is currently on fire.

The friction here isn’t just about Kerala. It’s about the cost of entry.

Every time Aiyar opens his mouth, the party loses a bit of its remaining venture capital—voter trust. There’s a specific trade-off happening here: the need for discipline versus the need for charisma. Aiyar represents the discipline of a bygone era, a period where the "High Command" was a central server you didn't question. Tharoor represents the decentralization of the brand. He’s essentially a fork of the main project, and Aiyar is terrified that the fork is getting more downloads than the original.

The Kerala row is the perfect test case. It’s a region where the Congress still has market share. But instead of optimizing for the 2024 rollout, the leads are fighting over who gets their name first in the credits. Aiyar’s public dressing-down of Khera and his side-eye at Tharoor’s "ambition" suggests a party that’s more interested in internal version control than actually shipping a product.

You can almost see the Slack logs. Aiyar dropping 2,000-word manifestos in the #general channel while Tharoor ignores the pings to go record a podcast. Khera is somewhere in the middle, trying to spin the chaos as "vibrant internal democracy." It’s not. It’s a series of cascading failures.

The price tag for this kind of public bickering is steep. When you’re trying to convince a country to switch from a dominant, albeit heavy-handed, OS like the current government to your alternative, you probably shouldn't show them the blue screen of death every Tuesday. Aiyar’s remarks aren't helpful; they’re just another data leak.

He’s the guy at the office who remembers how things were done in the eighties and thinks that’s still relevant in a world of AI and instant feedback loops. He doesn't want Tharoor’s ambition because ambition requires change. And change is a breaking update for people who’ve built their entire careers on the status quo.

So, we watch the logs. We see the senior devs fight with the PR team while the star engineer thinks about jumping ship to start his own firm. It’s a spectacle of inefficiency. The Congress is currently a suite of apps that refuse to sync with each other, and Mani Shankar Aiyar just hit "Reply All" on an email chain that should have stayed in the drafts folder.

If the goal is to build a platform that can actually compete, someone needs to stop the internal auditing and start writing some functional code. But in this environment, it's easier to complain about the UI than to fix the kernel.

Does a legacy brand survive when its own board of directors keeps calling for a recall of its best parts?