Mitali Saran: To the Indian National Congress

There's one vowel between you and irrelevance

Congratulations on the 2016 Assembly elections! Got your heads bashed in in Assam, but anti-incumbency. West Bengal was never to be. The Kerala result was predictable so it didn’t hurt. Tamil Nadu didn’t want you and the DMK so bad that they created history by re-electing Amma, but you won a couple more seats. All in all, not your fault.

And hey, Puducherry, so congratulations! Shake hands.

Just kidding. I don’t want to shake your hand — I want to shake you by the shoulders until your bones rattle.

The maps of your political footprint, dear Indian National Congress (INC), are like those poignant, scary maps of receding glaciers, the ones that invoke human hubris and future environmental disaster. Your reactions have been slower than glaciers, but your recession faster — from power in 14 states in 2012, to seven today. The Indian Express points out that, counting your winning coalitions in Uttarakhand and Puducherry, you’re in charge of a little over 7 per cent of the population, or about that of undivided Andhra Pradesh. You’re going to have to find a way to put down your baggage and reboot the whole enchilada.

The BJP wildly overstates its recent victory, just as the narrative overstates your defeats. But most of us voters are neither political experts nor loyalists. I will leave to those folks the job of explaining how, actually, the Congress improved its vote share and how you have to be philosophical about political cycles and not write off anyone, blah-di-blah.

All of that is true. But we laypeople also go by how politics feels to us. Food on the table, health care, jobs, safety, opportunities, and the business environment are matters of fact in our lives, and open to material evaluation. But other things matter: how helpful, intrusive, efficient, dynamic, corrupt, responsive, representative, and democratic a party or government is; how competent and trustworthy; what direction it’s taking. To the voter, all of these, as well as political commitment, potential, effort, and achievement, are matters of perception. We may not have the slightest appreciation for what goes into governing a country as gigantic and diverse as this one. But when we enter the polling booth, we have our feels.

You’ve failed us a lot. You brought us the Emergency and the 1984 riots, out of control corruption, destructive religious pandering, unconscionable neglect of education and health care, indifference to freedom of speech and artistic expression, lethargic policy-making and governance.

And yet, despite disappointing massive numbers of people, despite becoming flabby and complacent and sclerotic — despite all the things that caused you to crash and burn in 2014, you were, and remain, the obvious big tent national party for anyone who would rather live in a pluralist democracy than a Hindutva-inflected hegemony. Even those of us who say “A pox on both your houses” largely look to you to counter the RSS-BJP machine.

Relieved of the pressures of governance — so very extensively relieved — are you seen to be bouncing around fixing yourself? Nope. You continue to shield the leadership. You hire a political strategist and try to tell him what to do. You commission autopsies of the 2014 general election fiasco and do nothing about them. You continue to value loyalty over plain speaking. You keep dithering about a change of leadership. You invoke history like a broken record as if it absolves you of your present pickle. And you absolutely refuse to look your basic problem in the eye: the Congress cannot innovate unless party members speak truth to power, and contest power. You go and put Robert Vadra’s face on posters around Delhi. Way to outwit a charging bear by throwing yourself off a cliff.

Hear this: it doesn’t matter what your actual position is, or how hard you’re actually working, or what fantastic odds you’re fighting — if you can’t change people’s perception of you as a bunch of entitled, low-energy dinosaurs who refuse accountability and spend their time in infighting, you will continue to pay heavily. You have steered India to this place in history where the RSS-BJP is rampant. It’s your job to rebuild an alternative that people can believe in. You may not win in 2019, but you’d better be seen to be trying. For that, you’ll first have to quit giving off this toxic aroma of complacency and defeatism, and start taking communication seriously.

A lot of Indians today believe in the BJP because it spent its years in the wilderness revamping itself, changing perceptions, and creating a viable alternative. Today, it calls for a Congress-mukt Bharat. That’s its wishful thinking, and unlikely to happen. But, dear INC, if where you are today isn’t giving you night terrors enough to prod you out of introspection and into action, you’re going to be recast as the Indian Notional Congress for a few election cycles yet.