The Travails of Indian National
Congress
I have been intending to write
about the travails of the Indian National Congress(INC) for quite some time. Ever
since BJP won the 2014 general elections
to assume power at the centre, the
INC has systematically been decimated from a heavyweight opposition
to a very skeletal one in parliament. BJP only consolidated its position after
the 2019 elections. In the lower house, Lok Sabha, they have absolute majority, while in
the upper house, Rajya Sabha, they are
very close to it. I have been studying the development in Congress over these years to understand what has led
INC, the political heavyweight, instrumental in leading India out of British
rule and to declare independence, to the steep fall in its popularity among the
masses. It has lost its popularity even
in the so-called Congress-strong states.
The sudden decision to write on
this has been prompted by the news item: ‘Lack of clarity, cohesion among State
leaders in congress: Sonia.’ (The Hindu, Wednesday, October 27,2021).Anybody reading this will get an
impression that there is clarity and cohesion at the high command level. Anybody living in India and reading
newspapers know that these two
parameters fall abysmally short at the
national level in the party. If it was there, there wouldn’t have been any Group of 23, a group of
dissenters in the party. And she advised the attendees of her address that ‘the
party must ideologically fight the diabolical campaign of the BJP/RSS and expose
the government’s lies.’ This is precisely the problem with the Congress. They
and their leaders fight on the same plank, just as children fight between
themselves abusing each other with the same language and blaming each other
narrating the same reasons.
Mrs. Gandhi’s words clearly indicate that the leadership has
no idea as to how to win back their lost glory. There has been no elected
president for the party, and Mrs. Gandhi is continuing as interim president.
The major problem in the party is that the leadership is clueless. Mr.Rahul
Gandhi has been leading as President for some time and none of his ideas of
countering the BJP gaining mileage has
succeeded for the last seven years. What does it indicate in simple terms? They
need leaders who think radically different from the present ones. They need to bring in
fresh faces at the top. The problem with the party is that very few of them are courageous enough
to question the leadership. Dissent seems
to be a dirty word in the party. Most of the leaders want to just promote
themselves to positions of power and does not do anything to strengthen the
party. What BJP (and Modi though not necessarily right for a PM to do) did was
not to spare any efforts to strengthen the party.(That the strength of the party has made the
leadership into an autocratic one may be true but the fact remains the party
has been strengthened, whether one agrees to the methodologies or not!)
So, the options available for the
INC to bring back some of its lost glory are
1.Think of new leadership at the
top as the present top leadership has failed to deliver and unlikely to deliver
with the present way of leading the party. Try new people with radically
different thinking.
2.Allow vociferous dissent and debates about how to improve.
3.Don’t fight tit-for-tat with
BJP. That is not going to help. Evolve programmes that will take the party to the
masses keeping in mind all those secular values which the party always stood by.
4.Mr.Sonia Gandhi and Rahul
Gandhi should distance themselves from the leadership positions so as to shake out the allegations of being a
family-led party.
5.Please note that the results of
the efforts may not appear immediately. The party has to allow sufficient time
to forego all the debris and to make gains. They should set a target for 2029
general elections and work towards the same.
