The Congress party is in need of ‘creative destruction’

The Congress party’s ‘Chintan Shivir’ in Udaipur, Rajasthan, one of the only two states where India’s Grand Old Party is in power on its own currency, to discuss its survival and future, concludes today, six days before the 32nd death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi, the last from the Nehru-Gandhi family to have been Prime Minister. A party that ruled at the Centre and in a majority of the states for decades is now gasping for breath.

The utter defeat in 2014, followed by another in 2019, and a series of electoral setbacks in states have forced many of the party’s remaining stalwarts to challenge its central leadership. From private murmurs to public pronouncements, much has been said and written about the need for the party to rethink and revive itself. Some half-a-dozen party committees formed to think about this have met a number of times in the recent past to frame the agenda for the ‘Chintan Shivir’. Some of the critics of the leadership have been entrusted with important tasks to suggest policy and functional reforms.

As though all the in-house thinking and rethinking was not enough, the party also brought in a self-styled election strategist whom many expected to achieve what the apex leadership of the party has not been able to do in a decade now. With that last hope also gone, the Congress president has admitted that “there are no magic wands” and that the party will be revived “only with selfless work, discipline and sense of collective purpose”.

Political parties are built and stand on the tripod of ideology, organisation and cadre. Winning or losing an election is a matter of a combination of these factors and many other ground-level issues that vary from constituency to constituency, election to election. The 1984 general election was held in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. It was an election in which the organisation and the party cadre had very little to do with the outcome. The ‘sympathy wave’ gave the Congress 414 seats out of 543, and put Rajiv Gandhi firmly in the saddle. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bombing attack in Tamil Nadu in May 1991 once again brought Congress to power on a ‘sympathy wave’, but this time, with no Nehru-Gandhi leading the party, it could only muster 244 seats, enough to be the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha, but well short of even a simple majority. Once again, neither ideology nor organisation had much of a role in the electoral victory.

Between 1991 and 2014, the party had to allow two non-Nehru family veterans to occupy the PM’s post. And it did so grudgingly, while the apex leadership of the party nurtured the ambition to regain the PM’s seat for another member of the family, almost as an entitlement. In such circumstances, the family “triumvirate” that uses the ‘Gandhi’ surname should not expect “selfless work, discipline and sense of collective purpose”. The party ‘rebels’ seeking change of leadership have a valid point in asking the apex leadership to own responsibility for the current state of the party and step aside. But that’s unlikely to happen. The only way forward open for the rebels may be to quit the party en masse and float a new platform.

Splitting is not new to Congress. The party has split and transformed like an amoeba in the past while retaining the same nameplate. The Socialists opposed Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies and split the Congress, making it stronger. Indira Gandhi was challenged by the ‘old guard’, who formed the Congress (O), only to wither away within a year. Indira Gandhi grew stronger, won hands down with her ‘Garibi Hatao’ slogan in 1971, won a decisive war against Pakistan, and imposed the draconian Emergency. In 1977, she took full responsibility for the defeat, hit the streets, and became PM again in 1980. P V Narasimha Rao faced opposition from his colleagues like Arjun Singh, N D Tiwari, Shiela Dikshit and others who formed their own splinter groups, only to return to the party fold later.

The pious resolutions and sincere suggestions of the ‘Chintan Shivir’ will in all likelihood meet the same fate as many of the earlier reform processes the party’s current leadership promised. The mother-son-daughter combine seems to be in no mood to stand aside and let the party reform and democratise. This time, the more the delay in effecting a split, the greater will be the danger that the Congress will bleed out of existence altogether. Sunil Jakhar is the latest cut it has suffered.

While many Congress leaders may find their way to the BJP headquarters, the ideological and political space vacated by the Congress will be filled by regional parties. When it comes to winning elections against regional parties, the BJP has mostly failed. Three out of the four southern states, and Odisha, West Bengal and Punjab, are recent examples of the BJP’s inability to fill the gap. If these parties maintain their winning spree during the general elections, they still have a chance to fill in the opposition political space the Congress continues to vacate, though none of them is keen to fill its ideological space.

A split in the Congress may well initiate the much-needed cleansing of the party, which will have a positive effect on its core support base. Eventually, this may result in the evolution of a fairly strong opposition, which will have the confidence to provide constructive criticism where needed and applaud the government when deserved, without rancour. The present Congress leadership is incapable of doing
either.