Party building calls for grassroots connect, not just star managers

Political managers may not help build support base if parties do not hit the ground to build cadres

AAP has shown that issue-based politics can build a support base. Leaders celebrating Punjab poll-win in Mumbai. Credit: PTI Photo

BJP claims to have 17.4 crore members, the world's highest party membership, surpassing the Chinese Communist Party. Credit: PTI Photo

On Friday, five members of Parliament from the Congress expressed concern about the "transparency and fairness" of the party president's election, demanding access to electoral rolls to check their veracity. The five MPs are in good company.

Over 80 years ago, a similar problem worried the Mahatma, too.

The 1939 Tripuri Congress is remembered because Subhas Chandra Bose defeated Gandhi's nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya. "The defeat is more mine than his," Mahatma Gandhi wrote. But he also flagged that he suspected a large number of bogus Congress members, demanding an overhaul of the party's membership register and that some of those elected by such fake members would be unseated after scrutiny.

Read | Five Congress MPs write to Mistry, express concern over transparency, fairness in party chief polls

In April, the Congress claimed to have added 2.6 crore members during its recent digital membership drive. Such claims seldom stand the party's own internal scrutiny, let alone independent examination.

At 17.4 crore members, the BJP claims to have far surpassed the Chinese Communist Party, to become the political party with the highest membership in the world. While this claim has not been impartially examined, nearly 23 crore Indians voted for BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

It is embarrassing for a political party when elections expose such boasts, with the party not even managing a number of votes that matches its self-proclaimed membership numbers. As Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra discovered during the UP assembly elections in March this year, building a party cadre and organisation from the ground up is a back-breaking exercise, despite the advent of social media.

The effort could even turn out to be a thankless one. Election results laid bare Congress' claims of building a vibrant grassroots organisation. "She (Priyanka Gandhi) held 200 meetings across UP, but Congress could win only two seats (out of 403), and nobody talks about her or that effort anymore," says political commentator Rashid Kidwai.

As Rahul Gandhi embarks on a 3,570 km-long Bharat Jodo Yatra, an attempt to reconnect the Congress with the people, he would hope for more invigorating results than his party's experiment in 2019 to document party workers through an app. The Congress claims that 50,000 people have registered for the yatra. Does that mean 50,000 more workers or just more votes?

Admittedly, the Congress is a mass-based party, not a cadre-based one. In Kerala, the CPI(M) is worried about becoming subservient to Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister. But as the cadre-based RSS discovered in the 2015 and 2020 Delhi Assembly polls, even it cannot be sure whether its cadre or their families will vote or campaign for the Sangh's political affiliate, the BJP. According to an RSS functionary, their family members, women and youth, voted for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

In the weeks leading up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, in the aftermath of the BJP's emphatic win, hundreds of RSS shakhas in Delhi saw a steady increase in numbers on Sunday mornings. Prior to this, for a decade or more, attendance in shakhas had declined.

The Sangh Parivar

The RSS understood the turnaround could be short-lived. The new lot at the shakhas did not hail from the usual well-off, privileged-caste catchment. They were young professionals and gig workers, mostly migrants, who found Narendra Modi's example inspiring and thought the Sangh could be a vehicle for upward social mobility. "If Modi, an OBC, a chaiwallah and an RSS pracharak could be the PM, so can we, or so I thought when I joined the shakha," says Haldar, a migrant from Bengal, who works as a data entry operator in Delhi.

The Sangh was quick to change, knowing the aspirational young men would find its archaic morning drills, and wearing the ganavesha — the khaki shorts — tiresome. Soon, the RSS swapped the shorts for brown trousers. Even t-shirts and track pants were permitted. It included handball and kabaddi as part of its exercise regime. It made shakha attendance optional but ensured volunteers remained connected to the local shakha through WhatsApp. The RSS also made its outreach to backward communities more robust.

But the recruits were looking for political action. That is when the Amit Shah-led BJP stepped in to start its membership drive. That it was or soon attained power in most states meant donations increased.

Is the RSS, which has 51 lakh volunteers, now subservient to Modi-Shah's BJP? The question has no easy answers. The 'adhinayakvaad', or personality cult, worries some in the RSS.

The RSS-BJP has shed shibboleths, disowned inconvenient aspects of M S Golwalkar, changed its dress code and appropriated icons like Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Patel, and even community leaders for its OBC, ST and SC outreach to expand its support base. The AAP has shown similar spunk and adopted B R Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh as its icons.

As political commentator Prakash Patra points out, the Congress cannot seem to get itself even to amend its anachronistic constitution. The Congress constitution mandates that a party member should be "a habitual wearer of certified Khadi" and "abstain from alcoholic drinks and intoxicant drugs". A party member should undertake a minimum of one week's manual labour annually and usually use Swadeshi goods or articles. "Members of a party proud of delivering globalisation and liberalisation to India can honour such diktats only in their breach," a Congress leader says.

The Left's lot

The quitting of Kanhaiya Kumar from the CPI, and more recently, of Kavita Krishnan from the CPI(ML), has brought to the fore the ideological confusion of the communist parties. After the Tiananmen Square incident and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist parties in India ceased to be attractive to their urban, educated middle class. Cadres were loyal since it was in power. But the CPI(M) has withered away — it scored a zero in the 2021 Bengal polls —within a decade in a state it had ruled for 34 years.

"But post-2015, as Sitaram Yechury and other left leaders stood up for Dalit rights after the suicide of Rohith Vemula, or against CAA-NRC and visited university campuses, there is renewed interest in the Left," says a Left leader.

However, as Apoorvanand, who teaches at Delhi University, points out, the Left's lack of clarity on issues of authoritarianism and continued worship of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong leave many a youth underwhelmed.

"In India, communist parties fight for democracy and human rights but have maintained silence on China's treatment of Uighur Muslims today. Except for the CPI(ML), no communist party unconditionally condemned Russia's attack on Ukraine. This, even when there is no longer a communist regime in Moscow," Apoorvanand says. He wonders why Krishnan had to break away from the party to discuss these issues. "Should the party not also start talking about these questions?" he asks.

Krishnan might have quit the CPI(ML), but it is a rare communist party that is not gerontocratic. Dipankar Bhattacharya, who succeeded comrade VM (Vinod Mishra) at the young age of 38 as the party chief in 1998, has built a vibrant and youthful grassroots party with influence on university campuses. Of its 75-member central committee, half a dozen are in their 30s, and another 15 are below 45.

Many parties have taken to trusting professional political managers to do the work of party workers — to provide feedback from the ground to the party leadership, but not always with happy consequences. As Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and others have discovered, building a party organisation requires hitting the ground and spending time with party workers. While such exercises should not be episodic, the Trinamool Congress in Bengal (in 2011) and AAP in Delhi have shown that issue-based politics can defeat even entrenched cadre-based parties.