Opinion Congress decline is a story of centralisation, missed opportunities

In my last meeting with former President Pranab Mukherjee a few weeks before he passed away, our conversation turned to books. I suggested to him that he should write a book examining the decline of the Congress party. “When do you think it began?” he asked me.

Without thinking, I replied instantly that I would date it from Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure when the number of party members in the Lok Sabha went down from over 400 to under 200. Mukherjee sat back, reflected for a while and said, “I think you would have to start from 1969”.

The Indian National Congress that led the national movement for India’s freedom from European colonialism formally split in 1969. In his fictionalised autobiography, The Insider, former prime minister Narasimha Rao has one of his characters say that “the party had become a proprietorship”. This remark in the book is dated to around the time of the Emergency.

Clearly, the two stalwarts, Mukherjee and Rao, believed that the split in 1969 followed by the centralisation of political power within the PM’s office and family, with chief ministers being reduced to rubber stamps, had together contributed to the organisational decline of the party.

The party revived briefly in the 1980s but based on this centralised model. Indira became India. The subsequent decline has been well recorded by political analysts. During Rao’s tenure as PM, he tried to revive the party organisation, conducting elections to the Congress Working Committee, but it was an aborted experiment. Rao did not have the political base in his own home state to empower himself for such a task.

However, the Congress party had the opportunity to reinvent itself as a normal, mainstream all-India political party, not dependent on the charisma of one family, if its leadership of the 1990s, across the country, had come together and rebuilt the party from the grassroots. This did not happen. Into this vacuum Sonia Gandhi, and the power elite that surrounded her, stepped in.

The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party gave Congress an opportunity to team up with regional parties and the communists to form a coalition government in 2004. Having returned to power, the Congress party could still have revived its organisation at the state level by empowering regional leaders within the party. Only Y S Rajasekhara Reddy managed to do that and eventually the party organisation he built up in Andhra Pradesh was betrayed and abandoned by the Delhi leadership. Elsewhere, Congress could have revived organisationally by bringing leaders like Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, and others back into its fold. That did not happen.

On the other hand, the tenure in office was used to further consolidate the Nehru-Gandhi family’s leadership. It was clear to one and all that party president Sonia Gandhi wanted her son to take charge of the party. While some leaders, most prominently Mukherjee, resisted this dynastic succession, others, most prominently PM Manmohan Singh, acquiesced.

In September 2013, Rahul Gandhi had challenged prime ministerial authority by publicly rejecting an ordinance passed by the Union Cabinet. Rather than quit, Singh told the media, while returning home from Washington, DC, that he was ready to take up any role in the Congress party and that he would be “very happy to work under the leadership” of Rahul Gandhi. He then went on to state “I have always maintained that Rahul Gandhi would be an ideal choice for the PM post after the 2014 elections.”

The die was cast. Those who questioned this line of thinking were snubbed. It’s now too late for Congress persons to seek alternative solutions. As I have argued since 2008, if Singh had sought a second term in 2009 by contesting the Lok Sabha elections — he would have won hands down from Amritsar or Chandigarh — and returned to office as a politically empowered PM, he could have completed the task Rao began of reviving the party’s regional leadership.

The centralisation of political and organisational power in one person after 1969 had cost Congress dear. A return to that model in 1998 only contributed to a further erosion of the party’s base. Rahul Gandhi inherited this atrophied base.

While the BJP stepped into this environment as an organisation and cadre-based party, within a decade PM Narendra Modi has also converted it into a personality-based party. Regional leaders within the BJP have been disempowered, while political lightweights have been elevated to positions of power. If the BJP continues to walk this path, it will also decline organisationally, despite the support it has currently secured from the RSS.

One consequence of the turn to personality-based politics is that every political leader feels tempted to consolidate their position by projecting their personality. While BJP chief ministers are scared to do so, after the way in which regional leaders like Shivraj Singh Chouhan have been downsized by Modi, the weakness of the national leadership in the Congress party is encouraging regional leaders like Siddaramaiah in Karnataka and Revanth Reddy in Telangana to assert themselves.

The fact that others like Shashi Tharoor, Digvijaya Singh, Manish Tewari, Ashwani Kumar and Prithviraj Chavan have recently become more visible and articulate also suggests that there is some attempt to try and challenge this centralised model. The decentralisation of leadership within Congress will augur well for its future just as the centralisation in the BJP is likely to be its undoing.

Baru is a writer and former editor, The Financial Express. His books include India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution