When one of the senior most leaders of the Indian
National Congress, Ghulam Nabi Azad, recently said that the party was at its
“historic low” and that if elections to appoint a new leader of the Congress
Working Committee (CWC) and other key organisational posts were not held soon,
it could mean that the Congress could continue to sit in the Opposition for the
next 50 years, the furore his statement caused was not unexpected. Such voices
of dissent are not common in the Congress party and, expectedly, a Congress
leader from Uttar Pradesh quickly demanded that he be ousted from the party.
But Azad, who is the current leader of Opposition in
Rajya Sabha, and has held key posts as a Cabinet minister, and as a chief
minister of Jammu & Kashmir, like the young child in the Hans Christian
Anderson folktale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, was telling the blunt truth.
Decimated in the parliamentary elections of 2019, the Congress has been plunged
into a crisis like it has been never seen before. Its leadership, still
controlled by the Gandhi family—Ms. Sonia Gandhi continues as the party’s
interim president after her son, Rahul Gandhi, stepped down from the post in
2019—has lacked decisiveness and several party leaders, have either left the
party to join the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (notably Jyotiraditya Scindia),
or have dissented against the Congress party’s leadership.
In late August, 23 senior leaders of the Congress
party, including five former state
chief ministers, members of the CWC, MPs, and former central government
ministers, wrote to Ms. Gandhi calling for sweeping changes at all levels of
the party. The letter focused on the erosion of the party’s support base; and
loss of support from among India’s youth, who make up a substantially large
proportion of the nation’s electorate. The letter, in effect, was a sharp
indictment of the party’s leadership.
When Rahul Gandhi took
over as the Congress’s president in 2017 it was in line with the sort of
dynastic leadership lineage that one has come to expect in the party. The nadir
of Gandhi’s short-lived tenure—he stepped down in less than two years—was the
second defeat of the party he was leading at the hands of the BJP in 2019.
Since then the Congress, already nearly marginalised after the 2014
parliamentary elections, which it also lost, has become a faint shadow of what
it was. Among India’s 29 states, the party is in power in the states of Punjab,
Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan where the party has majority support. In Puducherry,
it shares power with alliance partner, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the
regional party. And besides, simmering dissent within the ranks of its central
leadership, the Congress has also lost much of its direction.
Partly that has
happened as a side-effect of a series of debilitating electoral defeats; but it
is also the lack of a decisive leadership that has weakened and made it
rudderless. The contrast between the two central parties is stark. The strength
of the BJP leadership has never been greater than it is now. The Congress’s, on
the other hand, has never been lesser than it is now.
The Congress may have
missed an opportunity to revamp its leadership three years ago when Ms Gandhi
stepped down and a new president was to be appointed. As it happened, it was
her son who succeeded her. And that might have been the most serious wrong move
by the party to create a strong leadership. For Rahul has never really
demonstrated his ability to be the leader of the party. His track
record—whether it is in leading an electoral campaign or strategy, or in
restructuring the party—has been lacklustre to put it mildly.
Back in 2014, before
the parliamentary elections, this author had written in a column for an Indian
newspaper that the Congress had done a wise thing by not naming Rahul (who was
then the party’s vice-president) as its prime ministerial candidate. The
argument that I put forward was that he was not ready for the role. And
although wishing that the Congress party will come back to power when the next
parliamentary elections are held is, at least for now, in the realm of fantasy,
Rahul still isn’t ready for that role. Then and again in the 2019 elections,
the BJP went to the polls with a strong prime ministerial candidate, Narendra
Modi, and won both times.
The thing is that the
Congress has never really looked beyond the Gandhi family for its top
leadership position. In 2017, Rahul took over from his mother; in 2019, when he
stepped down, his mother became interim president, a position she continues to
hold even as dissent, and calls for a new leadership are welling up from within
the party ranks. It is true that the Gandhi family has acted like some kind of
glue that keeps the Congress party together. The family’s writ runs large in
the party and dissent has been discouraged. Probably not any longer.
The letter by senior
leaders; Azad’s recent statement; the resignation of several leaders (some of
them to join the BJP) all of this point towards one thing: the Congress cannot
exist in the manner it has been for so long. A non-Gandhi leader is what the
party needs most now. But even if it finds one, that person has to enjoy the
autonomy and freedom to change how the party organises; how it functions; and
how it strategises.
The first step would be for its current leadership to
heed the voices of reason that are surfacing from within. Its most important
leaders, some of whom have much more successful political achievements than,
say, Rahul Gandhi, have demanded changes in the way the party is led and how it
functions. For Ms Gandhi, as interim president, that is the writing on the
wall—in clear and bold letters. The second thing for the party and its main
movers is to realise that the climb from where the party has fallen is going to
be a long and very arduous one. The morale of its grassroots-level workers is
low; dissent has spread among its leaders in various states; and the BJP has
strengthened its position over the past six years that it has ruled at the
Centre.
The Congress’s comeback, if the party reads that
writing on the wall, is going to be slow, and often not painless. And, if those
warning signs go unheeded, then what once was India’s all-powerful national
party could hurtle towards extinction.
