Consider this. Of the 303 BJP MPs in the current Lok Sabha, at least 31 are former Congress members. Between 2015 and 2020, some 120 elected Congress MLAs have switched sides to the BJP. The Modi tsunami in 2014 reduced the party to its lowest-ever tally of 44; a performance it improved only marginally by eight seats in 2019. Of the three heartland states it won in 2018, Madhya Pradesh has slipped out of its hands along with Jyotiraditya Scindia, Rajasthan and Sachin Pilot are hovering around the exit door. In 2019, the party was unable to prevent 13 of its MLAs in Karnataka from resigning and bringing down the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government. In the 2017 assembly elections for Goa and Manipur, despite emerging as the single-largest party in both states, the sloth and indecisiveness of the party command structure saw rival BJP snatch victoryfrom the jaws of defeat.
The mahagathbandhan in Bihar, which comprehensively won the 2015 assembly election, now lies in tatters, with Nitish Kumar firmly entrenched in the BJP camp. In the five states that account for the highest number of seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Bihar and Tamil Nadu, the Congress won only 12 of their combined 249 seats. Of the 1,462 assembly seats in the five states, the Congress occupies only 130. The party does not have a single MLA in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Tripura, Sikkim and Nagaland.
Yet, the grand old party lumbers on, as though in a stupor. It took a Sharad Pawar to goad it into supporting Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra; it is taking all of Ashok Gehlot’s political acumen to save the Congress government in Rajasthan. The party finds itself in a curious bind: it cannot look beyond the Gandhis for leadership, and they in turn are unable to provide that leadership. The central command of the party is caught in a tug of war between Sonia Gandhi’s old guard and Team Rahul’s young turks. With little intervention from the high command, state units have become fiefdoms of regional satraps, or are in disarray where there are no strong leaders, with rampant infighting. Convinced that they have no future in the party, a number of Congressmen have chosen to hitch their wagon to the winning horse of the BJP. “If your leader cannot get you power, it’s natural for politicians to seek it elsewhere,” says Tom Vadakkan, an AICC insider and family loyalist who switched to the BJP in 2019. The party appears to have neither a narrative to counter the dominant BJP discourse nor the organisational cohesion to take on the might of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo.
Is the party in terminal decline then? Is the BJP close to realising its project of a Congress-mukt Bharat (an India without the Congress), helped in large measure by the Congress itself? What really ails the party? And is it possible to revive it? To understand the crisis in the present, one needs to rewind a bit to the past, more specifically, to 2003.
Crisis of leadership
At a three-day Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) of the Congress in Shimla in July that year, a Congress general secretary known for his proximity to the Gandhi family went around asking the participants to put down names of young Congressmen whom the party could groom as future leaders. On the final day of the session, July 9, among the few names scribbled on a piece of paper were of Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora and R.P.N Singh. All of them, barring Singh, who was already an MLA in Uttar Pradesh, were given tickets to contest the Lok Sabha election the following year. At the same time, another young man made his debut in electoral politics, Rahul Gandhi, then 33 years old. That was the beginning of Team Rahul.
In the next 10 years, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power, Pilot, Scindia, Prasada, Deora and Singh were made ministers. Other young men (by the standards of Indian politics, that is), K.C. Venugopal, Jitendra Singh and Ajay Maken, also joined the Union council of ministers. Rahul stayed away from ministerial responsibility but rose to become party vice-president. Team Rahul was ready, all set to take the party reins from the veterans.
Soon after, he packed off Pilot to take charge of the Rajasthan Congress, which had stalwarts like Ashok Gehlot and C.P. Joshi. In February 2014, he made 34-year-old Ashok Tanwar, a former Youth Congress president, head of the Haryana Congress where party veteran Bhupinder Singh Hooda was running a government. These changes seemed to indicate that Rahul meant business and the Congress was headed towards a long-overdue overhaul.
As it happened, Rahul failed his very first test. The Modi juggernaut effectively flattened the Congress in 2014. Rahul, the vice-president of the party at the time, was spared any blame. However, it put paid to any well-meaning desire he may have had to revamp the party organisation. His mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the veterans rejected Rahul’s blueprint for Congress revival as they believed that tinkering with the party organisation at a time it was out of power would only hasten its demise.
Rahul then dedicated himself to the “politics of the long haul”, fought less on electoral battlefields and more on a moral high ground. Thus the barb of “suit-boot ki sarkar” and other potshots on social media. There were some electoral successes too along the way, the partial win in Bihar in 2015, the electoral victory in Punjab in 2017, followed by the near-victory in Gujarat towards end-2017 and the three heartland states in December 2018. All of them, however, owed more to the efforts of others rather than any significant contribution by Rahul.
Meanwhile, the tag of ‘Pappu’ that the BJP and its army of trolls gave Rahul started to stick in the public perception, aided in no small measure by his gaffes and vanishing acts. Rahul was accused of being inaccessible to his own partymen. Young Himanta Biswa Sarma, who wanted to be chief minister but was denied access to Rahul, left for the BJP in 2015. Once in the rival camp, he ensured that Congress was out of power in all seven states of the Northeast, either in straight election defeats, or by engineering defections.
Meanwhile, Team Rahul itself began to disintegrate. Rahul appointees such as Haryana Congress president Tanwar, Tripura Congress president Pradyot Debbarma and Jharkhand Congress president Ajoy Kumar left the party. Humiliated by the old guard and left in a lurch by Rahul, they began to see the space for them in the party getting increasingly constricted. “He hates being the referee,” says a close aide of Rahul. But by refusing to take sides and sacrificing the ambitions of the Scindias and the Pilots at the altar of party compulsions, Rahul only managed to alienate the very men who were groomed to be his lieutenants. Scindia left in March, the Pilot issue is still hanging fire, and in Manipur, royal scion and third-generation Congressman, the 41-year-old Rajkumar Imo Singh, is all set to leave the party with nine MLAs, in rebellion against former CM and Congress veteran Okram Ibobi Singh.
The defeat in 2019, when Rahul lost even pocket borough Amethi, changed the internal dynamics of the party completely. Team Rahul did not fare well either in the election. The near-victory in Haryana, commandeered by old war horse Bhupinder Singh Hooda, further strengthened the voice of the veterans in the party. Rahul, rather than accept any responsibility, chose to resign from his post of party president, churlishly accusing senior leaders of lobbying for tickets for their sons rather than in helping him fight Narendra Modi, and leaving his own men out to pasture. The return of Sonia Gandhi tilted the balance back in favour of the old guard, evident in the manner in which Gehlot managed to punish young Pilot for the sin of nurturing chief ministerial ambition.
With the diffusion of leadership at the top, resentments continued to simmer within the party. While Rahul remained indifferent, Sonia Gandhi took her time over taking decisions. “She takes a long time in taking decisions because she prefers to arrive at a consensus,” says former Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi.
Is it time then for the Congress to look beyond the Gandhis? When he resigned as Congress president, Rahul left it to the Congress Working Committee (CWC) to decide on the next incumbent. Several relatively young voices such as Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari demanded election for the post of president. But the CWC persuaded Sonia Gandhi to resume charge.
And that is where things get back to square one. The Gandhis are still the fallback option for the party. Despite their failure to keep the house united and their declining ability to garner votes, party leaders are unanimous in their belief that only the Gandhis can save the Congress. “Unlike most other Congress leaders who have a regional identity, the Gandhis belong to, and connect with, all of India,” says Rajya Sabha MP and AICC in-charge Rajeev Satav. “They are the common thread that connects every Congress worker from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. They did not achieve this overnight. From Kashmir, where the Nehru-Gandhis have their roots, to Allahabad in the heart of India, Chikkamagluru in Karnataka to Wayanad in Kerala, the Gandhis have a piece of every part of India in them.”
Others point to the phase when the party was led by Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri, and saw the exodus of several stalwarts and bitter infighting. Things stabilised only after Sonia took charge in 1998 and brought the party back to power eight years later.
In Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh’s mind, there is no duality in leadership. “The CWC appointed her president, not interim president. The decision has to be ratified by an AICC session. Unfortunately, because of Covid-19, that session has got delayed. Once we convene the session, the decision will be ratified,” he says.
Rahul supporters, though, are clamouring for his return. They believe he is the only one in the Congress who arouses nervousness in the BJP camp. “Why do you think the BJP fields a dozen spokespersons and Union ministers every day to react to and dismiss every word he utters and every social media post he puts out? It is because he rattles them with the truth. The only way they can counter him is to heap ridicule on him,” says Satav. However, as Mausam Noor, who switched from Congress to the Trinamool Congress in January 2019 and later became a Rajya Sabha MP, points out, “Rahul doesn’t command the respect Sonia Gandhi does. He’s not consistent. Leaders don’t trust him.”
If the Congress is indeed serious about survival, it needs to look beyond the Gandhis. A small section of Congressmen is, in fact, in favour of electing a new president, even if it is a non-Gandhi. “Some may be motivated by ambition and others may say it out of genuine concern, but there is nothing wrong in the demand that elections should be held to the post of president and the matter should be resolved once and for all,” says a CWC member.
Building organisational muscle
It has become imperative for the Congress to find a new president as the party needs to regroup fast to gain lost ground. “The organisational network is in a shambles. There is no coordinated effort by the central and state leaders to change that,” says a Congress general secretary.
Over the years, organisational restructuring in the Congress has been restricted to random appointments by the central leadership; a comprehensive revamp eludes the party. In Congress-ruled states with established faces, the norm has been to strike a power balance by handing over the reins of the government to one leader and the party unit’s command to another. But this has often backfired, as it did in MP and Rajasthan, and also caused a leadership ambiguity at the top. In Assam, for instance, it’s anybody’s guess if state unit chief Ripun Bora or former chief minister Tarun Gogoi is the boss. Amid demands for Bora to be replaced, the high command has yet to spell out who will lead the party in the assembly election next year.
Rahul had attempted to rebuild the Congress Seva Dal and get it to act as an ideological support block for the party, on the lines of what the RSS does for the BJP. Little has moved on that front since he stepped down. Organisational rigour is also missing at the top. For instance, AICC sessions, once an annual affair, are rarely held. The CWC, the party’s topmost decision-making body, meets only in times of crisis or when critical issues need to be discussed. In contrast, the BJP’s executive council holds regular meetings. Besides, the RSS acts as a feedback mechanism, sending the party inputs from the grassroots.
In the Congress, feedback from the states reaches the central leadership through AICC general secretaries, who are tasked with one or more states. While the idea is to get impartial feedback by appointing AICC in-charges from outside the states, many in the party blame this system for the increasing factionalism and the high command’s weakening grip on party affairs in the states. A common allegation is that AICC in-charges rarely spend time in their respective states, choosing to rely on their acolytes in the states. Sarma explains how the feedback mechanism is starkly different in the two parties. “In the Congress, an in-charge pays visit, meets the chief minister or the party chief and returns within a day or two. In the BJP, the in-charge meets party workers as well as RSS leaders and holds transparent interactions. So the high command gets the real picture,” he says.
To streamline feedback gathering, Rahul appointed younger leaders as AICC in-charges or brought them in as deputies to seniors holding such posts. But it hardly made any difference as most of his appointees complained about not getting work; some others lacked the drive to effect changes.
Simultaneously, the Congress needs to beef up its organisational structure. That the Congress is not a cadre-based party puts it at a massive disadvantage against the organisational strength of the BJP and the RSS. Both Digvijaya and Gogoi believe the Congress should mould itself into a cadre-based unit and hold regular trainings for leaders. “The Congress has been a party of [mass] movement. It was never cadre-based, which did not make much difference while it was in power. But now, we need a cadre-based leadership and a sustained training programme for all leaders,” feels Digvijaya. “The Congress constitution is not being followed, which is why the party’s organisational functioning needs to be reassessed at all levels,” he adds. Others say an organisational structure is slowly taking shape at the grassroots level. According to Shaktisinh Gohil, AICC in-charge for Bihar and Rajya Sabha member, the Congress now has presidents and workers in 80 per cent of the panchayats.
In search of an ideology
The biggest failing of the Congress has been its inability to mount a credible, cohesive narrative to counter the BJP propaganda. The party responds only with criticism, it does not provide a constructive alternative to any issue. Rahul’s opinions are espoused as the party’s views rather than a collective response arrived at through deliberation and careful consideration. So, while Rahul took the lead as early as February 12 to warn of the impending coronavirus pandemic, the party failed to specify what could be done differently. It criticised the lockdown, the plight of the migrants, but did little else than espouse some bleeding heart economics. Asked by india today at a press conference what his model of decentralised handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was, Rahul only managed to sound evasive, saying it was something best left to experts. However, this reliance on experts, showcased in video conversations with economists Raghuram Rajan and Abhijit Banerjee, did not seem to have set the intended discourse. Critics claim that these show Rahul as someone who does not have a mind of his own and has to rely on others to have a viewpoint.
Likewise, on the issue of the border conflict with China in Ladakh, the Congress has offered no alternative viewpoint. Instead, Rahul used the occasion to taunt the prime minister’s ‘strongman image’ and ‘56-inch chest’ and a vague reference to ‘China’s strategy to restructure the planet’. Worse, the party found itself on the defensive after the BJP managed to turn the tables on them and hold them accountable for the Chinese donations to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation run by Sonia Gandhi.
The ideological opacity continued with the Congress’s stand on contentious issues, such as the abrogation of Article 370, NRC (National Register of Citizens) and CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act). While the party struggled to articulate its nuanced position, leaders like Bhupinder Singh Hooda, unwilling to go against the BJP’s popular nationalism narrative, supported the abrogation. The opposition to NRC and CAA further isolated the Congress.
The party also stands accused of doublespeak on critical issues. In Tripura, it stopped then state unit chief Pradyot Debbarma from opposing the CAA to avoid antagonising Hindu Bengali voters, while in Assam, it took credit for initiating the NRC process. “The Congress criticises Veer Savarkar, but joins hands with the Shiv Sena to form a government,” says Debbarma. Digvijaya counters that the common minimum programme chalked out by the ruling coalition in Maharashtra does not compromise with the basic ideology of the Congress.
Many party leaders admit in private that in an increasingly majoritarian India dominated by the BJP’s Hindutva politics, the secular and inclusive ideology of the Congress is fast losing its appeal. Elections in recent years have seen the party attempt to challenge the BJP by adopting a ‘soft Hindutva’ avatar, leaders making publicised rounds of temples during poll campaigns, Rahul himself emerging as a ‘janeudhari Shiv bhakt’ and dumping the annual iftar parties. However, as the Lok Sabha election drubbings in 2014 and 2019 proved, the Congress was making a poor copy of the original, the BJP.
In such a situation, as Tharoor advocates, the party needs to stay invested in its core ideals. “The ideology of an inclusive and progressive party, liberal and centrist in its orientation, committed to social justice and individual freedoms, patriotic in its determination to protect national security and promote human security, still has great appeal if it is projected properly,” he says.
Manish Tewari too thinks it’s all the more pertinent now for the Congress to articulate its philosophy on issues like secularism, nationalism and economic development. His colleague and Congress leader Salman Khurshid says the party needs to master the “art of storytelling” to reconnect with the people. “If you fail at good storytelling, others will take over. If one’s story is superior, I believe the Congress’s is, one will win the hearts and minds of the people,” he says.
Rahul may be currently attempting this as he tries to take the Congress’s ideology and vision to every household. The slew of videos released recently, where he can be seen conversing with global experts or explaining issues of national concern, has a dual aim, to tell the Congress story and build his own image as a serious but compassionate leader. “For the Congress, this is the time to stick to its ideology all the more strongly. Only then can the party fight the BJP, which is determined to destroy parliamentary democracy in the country,” says Ahmed Patel, Congress treasurer and CWC member. As the india today debate among top intellectuals and senior Congressmen in the following pages reveals, the party has to sort out its crisis in leadership, organisation and ideology if it has to remain relevant and even think of returning to power at the Centre.