Bring back the Syndicate

Cong must dismantle 'high command', woo state satraps

After an election result that can only be described as disastrous, the president of the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, reportedly informed the Congress Working Committee (CWC) that he would like to leave his post. What happens next is uncertain; the CWC, stocked with old-guard Congressmen who have risen to positions of power under the Gandhi family, supposedly rejected his resignation, but more recent reports suggest that Mr Gandhi himself is adamant about a change in leadership. Certainly, in most political parties around the world, a defeat of this magnitude would require a resignation at the top. But the Congress is not most political parties, and India is not most democracies. Even in other parties — from the Bahujan Samaj Party to the Akali Dal — it is hard to enforce accountability at the top for poor electoral performance. This is because it is frequently the leader or the first family that holds these parties together, in the absence of clear internal structures. 

The question is how the Congress party might conceivably survive the possible exit of the Gandhis from a position of control (if not authority). There are some, such as psephologist-turned-politician Yogendra Yadav, who think that the Congress itself should die. That is, however, a somewhat extreme point of view, as the pole of national politics that the Congress occupies is valuable to the national discourse, even if the party itself has become moribund. The Congress itself has won only 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, insufficient even to lay claim to the position of leader of the Opposition. However, the larger Congress family needs to be taken into account. At joint fourth in the Lok Sabha, in terms of the number of seats won, with 22 each, is the YSR Congress from Andhra Pradesh and the Trinamool Congress of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar won five seats and is already in coalition with the Congress in Maharashtra, which has second-highest number of Lok Sabha seats and where, however, the BJP swept the elections. Put these five members of the extended Congress family together, and it would have more than 100 seats in the Lok Sabha. 

Any post-Gandhi party, which seeks to resurrect the original purpose of the Congress, must recognise the predominance of the states and the power of state leaders. One way to begin this process is by seeking to weld together the various Congress breakaway factions — which are after all together stronger today than the rump Congress led by the Gandhis. Both Mr Pawar and Jagan Reddy of the YSR Congress left the party thanks to differences over leadership positions with the Gandhis. It would be important thus for a post-Gandhi Congress to try and reverse those departures. Since the days of Indira Gandhi, the Congress has had a centralised “high command” structure. This has not helped the party in recent decades. It might be time to revisit the organisation that it had used till Indira Gandhi destroyed it — collective decision-making by a group of state-level satraps, known as the Syndicate. Vibrancy at the local or state level might then percolate up to the federal level and create a more potent opposition force to Narendra Modi than the Congress has been hitherto.