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Congress at a crossroads

Published : Monday, 28 September, 2020 at 12:00 AM  Count : 454

Congress at a crossroads

Congress at a crossroads

Twenty three senior leaders of the Congress-including former Union Ministers, Chief Ministers, members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), senior office bearers, legal eagles-have written a letter to the Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi. The letter has come in the backdrop of the exit of young leaders of the party over the past year, increased factionalism in the state units and uncertainty of leadership. In the letter they have acknowledged the erosion in the support base of the party and pointed to the lack of honest introspection after electoral defeats.

They have outlined an agenda for reform-an active, full-time and visible president; a collective leadership and internal elections in the organisational hierarchy from the grassroots to the top; decentralisation of power and empowerment of state units; establishing an institutional leadership model to collectively guide the party and a national coalition with like-minded parties. The letter is a challenge that has served the purpose of telling the leadership that it has to reform. It has been clear that the Grand Old Party was going through a serious crisis with two successive Lok Sabha elections, losses in the state Assembly elections, inability to retain governments and desertion of leaders and workers from the party.

When senior leaders, who got the party out of trouble and steered the ship for years, write a letter to their chief, they do it on the understanding that they have earned the right as loyal stakeholders of the party they built. That they have right to save it, having invested their political lives in it. By calling for inner party elections at every level and empowerment of State units, they are seeking democratisation and they have laid a roadmap of revival to build on the party's existing pan-India matrix.

By emphasising on collective leadership, the letter signals to the Gandhi family that the entire notion of the control of party high command needs to be redesigned. By calling for an "active, full-time and visible" leadership, it is suggesting that an absent leadership would not be able to revive the party's fortune. The letter-writers have stressed that the Gandhis can still be the integral part of it and they have not questioned their authority. Since 2014 Lok Sabha elections, many observers outside the party have pointed to the organisational, structural, ideological and personality-centric weaknesses of the Congress.

The marathon August 24 Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting has led to no dramatic outcome. The discussion has been dominated not by the contents of the letter, but by questions about the motives of the letter-writers. In a debate that mainly asks, "are you with the Gandhis or against them" or by reducing the moment to a yes-or-no referendum on the Gandhis, there is little or no possibility of serious engagement with the broader concerns the August 7 letter articulated.

The latest development is that Mrs Gandhi carried out a major organisational reshuffle on September 11. The CWC, the party's highest decision-making forum, has been reconstituted. The veteran leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Motilal Vora, Ambika Soni and Mallikarjun Kharge have been removed as general secretaries. P Chidambaram, Tariq Anwar, Randeep Surjewala have been named as its regular members. Mrs Gandhi also set up a committee of leaders to help her in steering the party towards a session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) where a full-pledged president of the party is expected to be elected.

Dr Shashi Tharoor, who has been effective voice of the party within the parliament, has not been accommodated in any of the new committees. Mrs Gandhi has been party's saviour-in-chief in times of crisis and it was her skills that paved the way for the creation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that lasted in government for a full decade. The Gandhi family that commands the loyalty of the entire party has a special duty to ensure that this cry for reform within the party is no reduced to a question about themselves.

The letter cannot be seen as a rebellion simply because none has ever done this before. The significance of the letter is not as much in what it says but the fact that it has finally been said by a cross-section of party veterans. The bigger question is if this is really a woke moment for the Congress or another episode of ego wars? It is possible that the reformists also have a career agenda, but this is no sin in politics.

The sooner Congress can sort out its leadership woes, the sooner India will benefit from the presence of a strong opposition party. Ego clashes are common in politics. But in Congress they snowball into mutual destruction. The loss of Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh and the very recent Rajasthan crisis can be traced to giant-sized egos getting hurt in wars. It was for the central leadership of the party to address such thorny issues and arrive at a final decision before things went out of hand. The Rajasthan saga has reinforced the trend of strong regional leaders in the Congress.

The party has been centralized, but as the central leadership has got weaker, the locus of power has shifted to the states. The return of Sachin Pilot to the party after a month-long stand-off may have saved the party's government led by Ashok Gehlot, but it may have weakened the party. After the Congress's Lok Sabha debacle last year, Mr Rahul Gandhi has quit as party president taking responsibility for the massive defeat. However, in the subsequent months it has appeared that Congress is unwilling or unable to look beyond the Gandhis for leadership. Mrs Sonia Gandhi taking over the party presidency was stop-gap arrangement. But now 73, the age is against Mrs Gandhi and she does not keep good health.

The root cause of Congress turmoil is lack of central leadership. When a central leadership is unable to play the role of an honest broker to defuse the tensions, a fracture in the state is almost inevitable. Regardless of how the deadly feud within Congress government in Rajasthan ends, it is unlikely that India's main opposition party will stop imploding unless it settles its national leadership issue. India deserves a coherent and healthy opposition which can hold the government accountable to the parliament and the people. For its own sake, and for the sake of Indian democracy, the Congress must ensure a transparent election to find a president along with a new CWC and a parliamentary board.

Politics is the art of programming perception. Without the artist there is no art. The Congress was the artist of the freedom movement, and its leaders were just the models. Unless the Grand Old Party recovers its true potential as an artist, the negative reviews will keep coming.
The writer is political analyst and an advocate, practicing at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh












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