Can The Congress Reinvent Itself?

An eighth-class student from Gandhi Nagar, Charvi Solanki, woke up at 3 am in the morning to attend the Congress Working Committee meet held in Ahmedabad on April 8. She and her mother reached the venue at 5.30 am, but since they had no VIP pass, Charvi had to wait till 5pm so she could meet Rahul Gandhi, whom she obviously idolised. This young girl finds his speeches on a `united and secular’ India inspiring. It turns out that Rahul Gandhi has a huge fan following in Gujarat, and thousands of young people flock to attend his rallies.

Gandhi (and his party colleagues) needs to ask why he has not been able to transform this popularity into winning votes. There is little point in holding one meeting after another, even if it be in the BJP stronghold of Gujarat, if the Congress has, in the last eleven years, not been able to build a strong alternative power structure to take on the BJP juggernaut.

The central leadership of the Congress, led by none other than Rahul Gandhi, continues to issue pompous-sounding statements of organisational rehaul and of the induction of younger people at the district level, but they have failed to initiate basic operational tenets that are a must for any political party. To cite an example, the NDA’s landslide victory in the Maharashtra assembly elections saw the Mahavikas Aghadi, led by the Congress, accusing the ruling party of rigging, especially since there were major discrepancies between polled and counted votes in EVMs. This same accusation was made after the Haryana and UP state elections. What stopped the Congress from taking to the streets and starting a sustained movement against electoral fraud? It is simply not enough to be knocking at the doors of the Supreme Court on every issue. The Congress needs to take to social media and highlight these issues instead of continuously hitting at the Modi-Adani-oligarchy nexus or going on about the need for a caste census, which, without connecting such a gargantuan exercise to the complex local dynamics existing at the grassroots level, will prove to be another miscalculation.

The Congress should by now have shed its old guard in favour of a younger slew of leaders who can understand the aspirations of a rapidly changing electoral class.

The Congress is not short of talent, but Rahul Gandhi lacks the managerial strategy to use this talent to the advantage of the party. What stopped the CWC in its Ahmedabad session from announcing that they had assigned the task of reviving the party’s moribund structure across four different regions by entrusting this task to four young Congress leaders such as Sachin Pilot, Shashi Tharoor and DK Shivakumar?

The problem in the Congress is that the actual power lies in the hands of a very small coterie led by Congress general secretary and MP KC Venugopal, and it is they who, despite Gandhi’s best intentions, are calling the shots. The Gandhi siblings continue to suffer from a misplaced sense of entitlement, not realising that this dynastical sense of being born with a silver spoon has no place in modern politics. It is this coterie that has led Rahul and, if I may say so, Priyanka, to believe that if a younger generation of leaders is allowed to rise, it could well threaten their positions in the near future.

But for Congress to return to power, the Gandhis will have to find a way to increase the party's appeal beyond its die-hard supporters. The fact is that the Congress received only 19 per cent of the vote in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, losing its vote share to the BJP. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, its vote share rose to 22.34 per cent. But the key point is that the BJP vote share remained practically unchanged at 37.37 per cent even as their seats went down.

The elections in Haryana provide a good indicator of electoral voting patterns. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress won five of Haryana’s 10 seats, the BJP won the other five. It was a major shift from the 2019 election when the BJP won all 10 seats. But in the state elections, while the Congress vote share increased from 28.08 to 39.09 per cent, the BJP vote share increased by 3.4 percentage points to 39.89 per cent. The fact is that on the ground, the Congress has not been able to make a dent into the BJP vote bank, and in order to sweep the hustings, it is this vote bank that they need to break into.

The Congress has failed to recover from the two major developments that took place in the 1990s, namely, Mandalisation and the rise of religion-based politics exacerbated by toxic Hindutva ideology being promoted by the ruling class. Rahul Gandhi mistakenly believes that the Dalit and OBC vote will return to the Congress by the enumeration of a caste census.

Not being a cadre-based party, the Congress is ridden with factional fighting, which becomes a huge weakness when it has to fight a cadre-based party like the BJP. The other problem, which Rahul Gandhi has not been able to overcome, is to give the party a clear-cut ideology. Given its lip service to secularism and a social-democratic agenda, too many of the Congress leaders are also known to share the communal ideology of their Hindutva counterparts.

Under these circumstances, with politics no longer a level playing field and with the BJP having captured most of the institutions, including the Election Commission, what is the way forward for the Congress? It cannot match the money power of the BJP. It is well known that in the 2019 elections, the BJP spent a whopping $3.5 billion on the elections. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s expenditure went up by another 37 per cent, and the party spent nearly Rs 1800 crore, according to the party’s expenditure report submitted to the Election Commission, though sources in the party claim the figure was more than $5.5 billion, three times more than what the Congress is reported to have spent.

Given this unequal level field, the Congress will have to go back to the drawing board and follow the example of Mahatma Gandhi, who converted the Congress from an `intellectual platform’ to a mass-based organisation during the freedom movement. The Congress will have to take up the cause of the poor in order to become a people’s movement, and if they succeed in doing so, this will automatically help them forge a much-needed identity and also ensure they can recruit a network of volunteers. It is these volunteers who can take on the RSS pracharaks, who are presently infiltrating every nook and corner.

Democracy needs an opposition, and the Congress is the only party with a pan-India presence which can offer an alternative to the BJP. The country cannot afford to have the Congress being reduced to a marginal player. It is incumbent on Rahul Gandhi to get his forces together to fight this authoritarian government, which has divided us along communal lines. It is only if the party becomes a people’s movement that the Dalits, Adivasis, farmers and OBCs will flock to the Congress, and for that, it is high time its leaders acquire a coherent vision and build up a long-term strategy to counteract the divisive propaganda that Indians are being fed day in and day out. It is only then that they will have a machinery in place to absorb supporters such as Charvi Solanki.

Rashme Sehgal is an author and an independent journalist.

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