Challenge for Congress to reinvent itself
THE question that is being asked after the conclusion of the two-day plenary session of the Indian National Congress is whether the party can fight the 2024 General Election with greater vigour than in 2014 and 2019. A scion of a family of party loyalists says the Congress stands a good chance of winning the 2024 Lok Sabha elections because the BJP has ‘maxed out’ and people are ready for change. But he is not sure whether the party is ready to grab the chance.
A dissident voice — there are many such voices in the Congress despite the domination of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul, Priyanka and their admirers in the party — said the party leaders must learn to work with the workers in order to win elections, indicating that the leaders are living in their ivory towers and are not in touch with the grassroots workers. A party office-bearer from Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh observed that the BJP and RSS take their ideas to the street-corner tea stall and spread these out among people, while the Congress’ ideas and achievements remain confined to the homes of the party workers and supporters.
Indeed, it is the ‘star quality’ of Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka that infuriates the art-house political watchers. They accuse the family of having a stranglehold on the party, and they express their sympathy for the underdogs in the organisation — the humble workers, the humbled leaders and the defanged dissidents. It is for this reason that Congress-watching is so much more fun than BJP-watching, surrounded as the latter is by RSS watchtowers.
Another issue of interest at the plenary session was whether there would be elections to the Congress Working Committee (CWC). On February 24, in his media briefing, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh asked everyone to wait till the steering committee meeting was over. And in the evening briefing, he said that keeping in mind the Congress’ position as the main Opposition party and the political conditions in the country, it was decided to empower party president Mallikarjun Kharge to nominate members to the CWC. Whether nomination was a means to give Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka permanent seats in the CWC was a tricky point, but the party wriggled its way out. An amendment to the party constitution was approved to give permanent seats to former Congress presidents and former prime ministers from the party. The number of CWC members has been increased to 35 from 23.
Of the 85 amendments, an important one was that the party decided to give 50 per cent reservation to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, women, minorities and the youth in the CWC. The constitution amendment committee felt that there was a need to make a permanent place for these unrepresented and under-represented sections of society. It seems quite a convoluted social engineering. Committee convener Randeep Surjewala acknowledged that this was something that came out of Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra.
An interesting aspect of the session was the many small voices one got to hear after Kharge’s presidential address and Sonia’s speech, and those of the middle-rung leaders who presented the resolutions and their seconders.
They came from all parts of the country. There was a speaker from West Bengal who bemoaned the plight of a Congress worker in his state. He said he had faced beatings from Communist governments for 35 years, and from Mamata Banerjee’s TMC for 13 years. He said the Congress would continue to fight the BJP, but he wanted the central leadership to help the party in the state. There were speakers from Mizoram, Manipur, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala too.
The All-India Congress Committee (AICC) delegates, members of the Pradesh Congress Committees (PCC), and district and block committee presidents crowded the pandal. It was a part-carnival political convention of the American kind, where the ordinary political workers seem to turn out with enthusiasm.
In the 1970s, political scientist Rajni Kothari attended a Congress plenary session in Gujarat and mapped out the social and caste structure of the party which led him to write his classical work, Politics in India. The Congress plenary session awaits another political anthropologist like Kothari to understand the social spectrum of the Indian political class. And in the Congress, there is social diversity — from a small businessman to a big one, men and women from block and district levels who struggle to make their mark in local politics. It is an interesting democratic spectacle. In ideology-bound and caste-based parties, you will find people with the same ideas and same identities. In the Congress, Indian diversity is displayed in all its splendour.
But the main question whether the Congress is relevant in 2023 where the BJP and regional parties are the dominant forces seems to have been answered at the Raipur session. The party is standing, perhaps rather precariously. Unless the Congress wins some of the states where elections are due this year and the next, and wins back a substantial number of seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the party will not be taken seriously. And the realisation has dawned on everyone in the party that this is a battle for survival. The rank and file of the party seem keen to fight and there is a semblance of a political leader in Rahul. He has gained in political stature, and he is not the Rahul of 2014 and 2019. This is not going to be a walkover for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The question, ‘If not Modi, who’, may not be asked in 2024.
