If politics is the art of making the impossible happen, the Congress has an impressive record of performing such feats. After 1967, when power shifted out of the Congress’s grip in several north Indian states, Indira Gandhi restored the party to its lost glory to everyone’s surprise. Again, after being virtually routed in 1977, the Congress made an impressive comeback. A similar spectacular success was achieved in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. It is this record of past successes that has emboldened the party to announce, at its recently concluded working committee session amidst much fanfare, that it would go it alone in the coming elections.Whether the Congress will eventually succeed in this gamble has to be seen against the backdrop of the changes that the party has undergone in the intervening years. Several factors contributed to the spectacular success of the party in the past. It had an organisational structure which spread out from the Centre and the state capitals down to the village level. It had a committed cadre that effectively engaged in expediting work or ‘doing service’, mediated disputes in the local communities and maintained contact at the grassroots. The important point in this context is that the party workers engaged in performing tasks for the public all the time — not just when elections were announced — and were skilled in participating in activities that linked the party to the masses. Further, the Congress permitted aspiring social groups to gain power within the party. It was possible for new recruits to hope that they would rise to the highest level in the party organisation as long as they were able to serve the interests of the party and widen its social base.All this has changed in the intervening years. The Congress continues to have a constitution as well as regulations, but political expediency more than organisational demands have determined adherence to the party constitution and its rules. The Congress’s organisational structure, which had earlier reached out down to the grassroots, has virtually become defunct. It is true that state and district units still exist and those in control of these units maintain a tenuous link with the countryside and towns, but the nature of this link has completely changed. If earlier the local units and the committed cadre that manned these units succeeded in forging the party’s links with the masses, these links are now limited to local notables, who enjoy the patronage of the bosses at the state or district level. The party still boasts of a cadre and is able to gather them together and herd them to wherever a party function is being held. However, the Congress cadre is no longer singularly committed to the ideology of the party nor is it ready to put all its interests in the Congress basket. The stark reality is that the party cadre is today merely a part-time cadre. It simultaneously works for the Congress and other parties because it is not sure that, in the long term, the Congress will necessarily get it anywhere. The party’s ability to absorb new and aspiring groups within the party structure has virtually dried up. There is today a zero-sum view of the political process within the party, which rests on the belief that any expansion of power for those who are already entrenched in positions of power must mean its contraction for others.There are many ways that this transformation in the organisation structure of the Congress can be described. One way that has the merit of putting the transformation in perspective is that the party has shifted from being a democratic to an oligarchic party. It has become a motley crowd of those who, having somehow got power, wish to hang on to it as long as they can. If the neat balance of power equations the oligarchic elite has successfully built is now threatened by any kind of new initiative on the part of the political leadership, the elite is quick to thwart it. Such a situation allows neither bold steps to be taken to revise the traditional party structure nor the institution of an alternative organisational model that has the capacity to work in the changed social and political context of the country. One suggested way to sum up this scenario would be to say that, to the oligarchic elite, it does not matter if the Congress has shrunk to the level of 134 seats in Parliament as long as it is in power and there is a prospect for the members of the oligarchic elite to control that power.Many inside the Congress and outside are prone to arguing that the crisis of the party is really the crisis of leadership. That the party does not have a truly charismatic leadership that can lead it out of the recesses to which it has sunk. Thus a great deal of breath is wasted on the party’s efforts to promote Rahul Gandhi as a leader. It is debated whether Rahul Gandhi has the makings of a leader, whether he can lead the party, and whether he has the breadth of vision necessary to meet contemporary challenges. But the fact is that leadership has never been an issue in the Congress. It has during its long history demonstrated a remarkable capacity to throw up new leaders who have successfully enlarged the political base of the party from time to time. The issue of leadership is, in fact, incidental to how the Congress is going to perform in the coming elections. Critical to whether the Congress can, in the days to come, perform the miracle of restoring single-party dominance would depend on whether the party can create an army of committed cadres, democratise the organisation and undercut the oligarchic elite that controls the party organisation — thus opening up possibilities for new social elites to be enlisted. After all, the Congress Party has always been the vehicle through which diverse groups and individuals have hoped to maximise their power and social standing. If Congress can once again become such a vehicle, the party can realise the ambition it has set for itself. If it fails, no leader — however charismatic — can perform that miracle.The writer is a former professor of political sociology, JNUprofimtiazahmad@yahoo.com
