For the Congress, a middle position is hard to sustain: Zoya Hasan

'While the Congress claims that the yatra is not a tool to win elections, its success will only be gauged in electoral terms in the future'

Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development in New Delhi. In conversation with Aditi Phadnis, she highlights the organisational problems and the ideological fuzziness as the main challenges the Congress has to tackle. Edited excerpts:

In your judgement, how much of the current slide of the Congress is due to organisational decay? And how much because of ideological fuzziness?
 

The Congress has been facing an existential crisis since its great defeat in the 2014 elections. The problems it faces can be summed up through three principal verticals: leadership crisis, organisational corrosion, and ideological