Opinion The morning after
Congress cannot begin to recover from this devastation until it recognises why it is laid so low.
Days after its worst-ever electoral defeat, the Congress party’s top leadership met to mull over what went wrong. It has been reduced to 44 seats, less than a tenth of the Lok Sabha, but the party showed no sign of having been punched in the teeth, and made little attempt to identify the reasons for the widespread rejection. The Congress Working Committee spent half of its time beseeching Sonia and Rahul Gandhi not to resign. The time remaining was spent on discussing how there had been failures of communication, and that all levels of the party and the government were responsible for the loss. In Congress-speak, both the fixating on the “communication” problem and the resorting to “collective responsibility” are convenient ploys to evade genuine accountability.
For the Congress, it is necessary to acknowledge that many of its crises begin at, or travel to, the top. At the same time, it is also true that ritually affirming or denying the performance of the Gandhi family, or their fate, cannot be the whole point of the introspection exercise. If it wants to put itself back together again, the Congress has to shed the baggage of being a party of power and coterie, and needs to build ladders all the way to the grassroots. This is not a matter of advertising strategy or outsourced PR campaigns.
It is about building an organic link with the people and articulating their interests, the primary task of political parties. In order to do so, however, the party needs to go well beyond Rahul Gandhi’s low-risk, small-scale primaries. Inner party democracy must be brought in at all levels — and it must also extend to Rahul Gandhi’s job. Elections to the Congress Working Committee would be an emphatic signal of a willingness to genuinely open up the organisation. It will help encourage local and regional leadership and dispel the sense that power flows from access to greater power, rather than constituency spadework.
A genuine reinvention will necessarily include a reexamination by the Congress of old pieties and complacencies. This election has signalled that there are no political gains to be had anymore from old-style appeals to nostalgia or from fear-mongering. There are diminishing returns, also, to the politics of entitlement. The Congress needs to find a way to talk to an increasingly impatient voter who demands greater opportunity and disdains condescending promises of patronage. The party has to find a new language to reach out even to its erstwhile constituencies among the disprivileged and minorities. It still has 20 per cent of the vote, but to recover from this moment of devastation, the Congress will first need to abandon its own status-quoist instinct.
Share
