Cause for concern

The Congress' electoral prospects continue to decline

Prashant Kishor’s prediction over the weekend that the Congress party would be routed in the forthcoming Assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh didn’t require the formidable analytical skills of the election strategist. A day earlier, Patidar leader Hardik Patel’s exit from the party, with a sarcastically disrespectful reference to chicken sandwiches in his letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, had indicated which way the political wind was blowing. Even the most casual observer of the proceedings of the mammoth Chintan Shivir at Udaipur could have come to similar conclusions. After three days of deliberations the party came up with a notably weak and unremarkable agenda — reserving seats for candidates under 50, a qualified limitation on seats for dynasts, fixed tenures for office-bearers, and various advisory committees —that scarcely reflected the depth of the crisis in the party. Much of this organisational tinkering could have been done without the elaborate exercise of a Thought Camp. It defies logic that the debacle of the past eight years — two stunning routs in parliamentary elections, the loss of successive states, a semi-permanent revolt by several of its stalwarts known as the G23, and the blunt advice of Mr Kishor — did not jolt the Congress out of the ennui that has played a stellar role in the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

There were no new ideological ideas to attract India’s millennial generation, just well-worn ones about fulfilling SC/ST organisational quotas, and some sops to welfarism, which the BJP has effectively appropriated anyway. The plan for a yatra as a tool of mass contact amounts to a pale imitation of the BJP’s early tactics as does its destructive unstated policy of “soft Hindutva”. A “BJP-lite” positioning does not work against a maximalist ideology such as Hindutva. The leadership remains in the grip of a working committee that is too old or unelectable and short on fresh ideas. Worse, the incompetent role of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasts Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra is unchallenged. Both have contrived in the past two years alone to lose the party Punjab and Madhya Pradesh due to infighting (Mr Gandhi) and worsen the party’s electoral performance (Ms Vadra in UP).  Both have shown that they are unable or unwilling to put in the consistent hard work that a successful career in politics demands.

The collective ham-fisted non-response to an existential challenge is inexplicable because everyone in the party — including Mr Gandhi — is all too aware that the Congress presents the only national-level opposition to the BJP. There is no doubt that the party has in its ranks many talented and experienced minds with the nous to rejuvenate it. That is why the BJP expends so much resource, attacking the Congress and Mr Gandhi, although neither presents a meaningful threat. In this context, concerns that the party may splinter if the Nehru-Gandhi family steps aside may be valid, but Mr Kishor’s broad plan had factored in a gradual transition that would have enabled a soft landing in the rebound from a dynastic platform. History has demonstrated that the dominance of one party —whether the Congress in the seventies and eighties and the BJP now —under a “strong” leader has not been best for India. With the Chintan Shivir non-event, the Congress may have done India a disservice.