“Younger and promising leaders who’ve left the Congress didn’t achieve this as a result of they noticed no future for themselves within the occasion. They left as a result of they felt the occasion had no future.”
This privately shared notion by a senior All India Congress Committee (AICC) functionary sums up the disaster that has come to cripple the occasion within the aftermath of its back-to-back defeats in two Lok Sabha elections beginning 2014.
The political context of Udaipur’s meet
The management vacuum since Rahul Gandhi’s resignation as Congress president after the 2019 parliamentary debacle has aggravated the organisational atrophy, proof of which was the occasion’s wash-out within the lately held elections to 5 state assemblies, particularly Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa.
The Aam Aadmi Occasion (AAP)’s spectacular rise in Punjab is a sign that the citizens has a substitute now for the Congress that appears older however has ceased to be grand. A check of that will be the upcoming elections within the two different bipolar states, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, the place the AAP is trying critical incursions. The query is whether or not Arvind Kejriwal’s fledgling occasion will eat up the Congress’s house in these states the best way the Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP) may to overhaul the absentee occasion in Odisha?
The three-day chitan shivir of the Congress in Rajasthan’s Udaipur will occur in opposition to this backdrop and a rising refrain inside for a serious overhaul of the occasion construction. In that restricted sense, the cart appears to have been positioned earlier than the horse, provided that the brainstorming occasion will precede the organisational polls scheduled in September this 12 months.
The train shall be useful provided that a call is taken on holding elections, along with that of the president, to the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Committee apart from the revival of the Central Parliamentary Board. However these are manageable nuts and bolts. There are not any quick-fix options for a slew of different points the occasion faces.
Intra-party elections are advisable as they assist political events energise cadres, induct younger blood, undertake new concepts and invigorate join with their vote base. The Congress wants all of that. However successful elections to legislative our bodies are the tripos it has to clear to remain related. A string of electoral defeats have compromised badly the occasion’s pivot-position within the anti-BJP house in our more and more crowded multi-party democracy.
The electoral battle forward
Leaving apart Gujarat for argument sake, the Congress’s existential disaster shall be dauntingly actual if it loses Himachal the best way it misplaced Kerala and Uttarakhand, the place the Left Entrance and the BJP defied electoral historical past to retain energy. In that eventuality, the lingering doubts about its unsure future will discover a ringing affirmation.
Greater than anything, the Congress in the present day wants the life-line of an electoral win. The depend of defeats it has suffered after Narendra Modi’s 2014 rise is astoundingly revelatory. Of the 49 meeting contests, it gained simply ten, together with the 2017-18 victories in Punjab, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Of those, it misplaced energy halfway via in MP and Karnataka with Punjab lately going the AAP’s method.
No matter who leads the Congress after the September elections, the occasion should hit the bottom working for the Himachal- Gujarat polls due in November-December this 12 months.
The Udaipur meet ought to turn out to be useful to plan a method with or regardless of ballot strategist, Prashant Kishor’s exhaustive blueprint for a “persona transplant” the comatose Congress should endure. The Empowered Motion Group (EAG) on which Kishor declined to take a seat, has studied his proposals and will take them ahead.
So what may or must be the salient factors for chitan (reflection) on the Udaipur shivir (session)? It’s a no brainer that the occasion wants a full-time, 24×7 management. Any diploma of absenteeism on the bottom and within the public discourse will be deadly within the face of adversaries/friends who eat, stay and breathe politics.
The Congress’s challenger on that entrance isn’t simply that humongous marketing campaign machine, the BJP, but in addition a set of regional formations led by formidable leaders: Mamata Banerjee, MK Stalin, Chandrashekar Rao, Jaganmohan Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Nitish Kumar, Arvind Kejriwal, Uddhav Thackeray, Akhilesh Yadav, Sharad Pawar, Tejasvi Yadav and Mayawati. A couple of amongst them are the Congress’s allies, however one has to eternally do not forget that there are not any everlasting pals or enemies in politics.
Handle ideological and historic debates
In narrative phrases, the Congress has lots to study from Stalin, its Tamil Nadu ally, who boldly claimed his organic and ideological ancestry to rebuff the BJP’s dynasty cost. He has saved up the offensive after a pithy riposte delivered via a video just a few weeks in the past.
On finishing his first 12 months in workplace as chief minister on Might 7, he instructed the state meeting: “I’m not Kalaignar (as his father M Karunanidhi was referred to as). I can’t communicate like Kalaignar. I can’t write like him. However I’ve taken the pledge to work arduous like him….”
The template set by Stalin should immediate the Congress to revisit its founding rules to be the massive tent of concepts and ideologies it initially was with its balanced, but emphatic temporal positions. Whereas doing that, it has to assertively declare quite than be diffident in regards to the legacy of its towering leaders who the BJP seeks to selectively glorify and demonise to go well with its account of historical past.
Because the late Jaipal Reddy would typically say: The Congress was the primary coalition of concepts to rule India. It saved house for contesting visions of the nation whereas hewing to an assimilatory centrist view. The BJP-inclined thinkers can name that smooth Hindutva. In actuality, it’s an amalgam of faiths the place the Congress — just like the nation’s Structure — didn’t subscribe to anyone in opposition to the opposite.
In some methods, the Congress wants to return to its fundamentals the best way the BJP did in 2008. The latter misplaced the elections a 12 months later however held on to the Hindutva fundamentals until alternative arose, post-2014 to boost their acceptability with an assorted combine of non secular, financial and cultural nationalism.
“We now have a robust set of erudite party-men with deep understanding of points, be it our Nehruvian previous or the scripting of the brand new financial order by Dr Manmohan Singh. The BJP can’t match us in a critical debate,” argued a member of the Congress previous guard. “We are able to begin by asking our opponents fixated on Kashmir and China however detest to present us credit score for the Bangladesh struggle, to call one world chief like (Jawaharlal) Nehru and Indira (Gandhi) who didn’t make sincere errors. Folks of their stature must be holistically recalled.”
If that occurs, it is going to be a leap of religion the Congress has shied from taking in recent times. A lot in order that the occasion didn’t even put up Nehru’s portraits in its central workplace in Gujarat through the 2017 elections.
Whatever the speaking textual content, the chitan shivir should delineate the Congress’s mental infantry to mount an alternate or counter narrative to its rivals’ partisan jibes. It must forcefully personal up its ancestry, its icons of the liberty battle. The occasion, referred to as the “Indian Nationwide Congress” hasn’t been true to its title in failing to propagate its nationalistic credentials.
The management and messaging problem
Moreover stitching up a story befitting its authentic character, the Congress has to have a crop of younger leaders to attach new voters with its historical past and the causes it espouses.
In states the place it isn’t in energy (and there are a lot of to depend) the occasion ought to arrange “shadow governments” to showcase its governance acumen quite than losing time in verbal slugfest on points chosen by ruling dispensations, particularly the communication-savvy BJP.
The target must be to proactively set the agenda on necessary nationwide questions and points touching the folks. Within the post-truth age, a celebration desirous of being the choice can’t let public opinion go wayward on issues requiring an knowledgeable discourse.
Until it makes reflection (chitan) and motion its full time occupation, the Congress would stay a celebration with jaded concepts, drained appears to be like and a bleak future. A picture makeover restricted to a change of faces gained’t assist.
What’s wanted is a paradigm transformation in the best way it does politics. For twitter wars are a waste of time with out a military of natively or formally educated barefoot staff.
The agenda is big and never shortly achievable regardless of the most effective of efforts. For starters, the message from Udaipur should guarantee that the occasion is alive. As an MP from Punjab put it: “The least we’ve to do is to inform that Congress zinda hai.”
HT’s veteran political editor, Vinod Sharma, brings collectively his four-decade-long expertise of intently monitoring Indian politics, his intimate data of the actors who dominate the political theatre, and his eager eye which might juxtapose the previous and the current in his weekly column, Distantly Shut
The views expressed are private
