Politics is just legacy tech with worse fashion choices. The Congress party is currently trying to execute a system-wide reboot, but Mani Shankar Aiyar is the legacy DLL file that keeps triggering a Blue Screen of Death at the worst possible moment. He’s the unhandled exception in an otherwise tightly scripted PR rollout.

Every few months, Aiyar says something that makes the party’s communications team want to throw their MacBooks out a window. This time, the party didn't just distance itself; they practically filed for a restraining order. Jairam Ramesh was out there on social media, hitting the "Force Quit" button before the headlines could even settle. The party’s official stance is that Aiyar is a private citizen who happens to have a very loud megaphone and a very long history with the firm. They want you to believe he’s a third-party plugin they never actually installed.

But Aiyar isn't playing along with the "deprecated" status. He’s leaning into the glitch.

In his latest outing, Aiyar didn't just double down; he went for the jugular of the new guard. He’s sticking around, he says. He’s the guy who remembers the original source code. While the "friends of Rahul"—the high-flying technocrats and the fair-weather consultants who treated the party like a pre-seed startup—have mostly pivoted to other ventures or jumped ship to the competition when the burn rate got too high, Aiyar is still there. He’s the ghost in the machine.

It’s a classic case of technical debt. You keep an old server running because nobody knows how to migrate the data without breaking the whole thing. Aiyar is that server. He’s noisy, he’s prone to overheating, and he hasn't been updated since 1991, but he’s still plugged into the wall.

The friction here isn't just about optics; it’s about the price of entry. Every time Aiyar opens his mouth to offer a "nuanced" take that sounds like a political suicide note, the party’s stock drops. We’re talking about a specific, quantifiable cost in swing districts where the "elite" tag still stings. The trade-off is simple: the party gets Aiyar’s "loyalty," and in exchange, the BJP gets a fresh batch of clip-ready soundbites to play on a loop for the next six weeks. It’s a terrible deal for the Congress, but in the world of legacy brands, getting rid of the founders’ favorites is harder than fixing a broken algorithm.

Aiyar’s jab at Rahul Gandhi’s inner circle—those "friends" who vanished the moment the polls turned sour—is the kind of inside-baseball talk that usually stays in the cafeteria. Bringing it public is a signal. He’s telling the leadership that while they might want to "disassociate" from his words, they can't delete his history. He’s the guy who stayed through the layoffs, the pivot to mobile, and the three failed rebrands.

The party wants to look like a sleek, modern app designed for 2024. They want clean UI, fast response times, and zero bugs. But Aiyar is the persistent notification you can’t swipe away. He’s the reminder that no matter how much you change the logo or update the mission statement, the old code is still there, running in the background, waiting for the right moment to crash the entire system again.

It’s a messy situation for a party that desperately needs to look disciplined. They’re trying to sell a vision of the future while their own back-end developers are arguing in the comments section of the patch notes. Aiyar isn't going anywhere, mostly because he has nowhere else to go and nothing left to lose. He’s loyal to the brand, even if the brand is currently trying to scrub his name from the "About Us" page.

You have to wonder if the party actually has a plan for the next time he decides to go rogue, or if they’re just going to keep hitting "Ignore" and hoping the users don't notice the system is hanging.

Is a loyal bug really better than a departed feature?