Time for Congress to start rebuilding the party

Prime Minister Narendra Modi still has a high rating in opinion polls but the aura of infallibility and invincibility he built around him is shrinking. However, he, his Bharatiya Janata Party and its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, have no immediate cause for worry. For, he needs to face the electorate only in 2024. That gives them enough time to refurbish his image.

At the moment they have a big advantage. The disparate opposition is in no condition to pose a challenge to the Hindutva juggernaut.

The Congress, the largest opposition party, is the only one that can take on the BJP nationally as it alone has a pan-Indian reach.  But it is now leaderless.

Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress President last year, owning responsibility for the party’s defeat in the elections in which Modi won a second term. Unable to find someone to hold the fort, it recalled his mother, Sonia Gandhi, who had stepped down before the elections on grounds of age and health.

After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, Sonia had stayed away from politics, despite pressure from party men to take over its leadership.  She took up membership of the party and became its President a few years later, at the instance of faction leaders, as it was sinking.

She held the Congress together and helped it to regain power, heading the United Progressive Alliance.

Under 10 years of UPA rule, India’s economy boomed.  Corruption charges played a big part in the UPA’s defeat at the hands of the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance in 2014. But neither she nor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had attracted allegations.

Like Sonia before him, Rahul Gandhi was initially a reluctant politician. But the Congress party’s need for a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family to hold it together made him his mother’s logical successor.

The BJP had harped on Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origin to check her advance.  Ahead of Rahul Gandhi’s emergence its propaganda machine launched a campaign to run him down. He survived the onslaught and was well set to lead the party when the elections came.

Modi-friendly media created an impression that BJP had won a landslide victory. It did increase its vote share by six percentage points and win 22 more seats than in 2014. But it did not gain at the expense of the Congress.

The Congress’ vote loss was only one percentage point. Despite this drop in vote share, it won eight more seats than in 2014. The BJP had made gains primarily at the expense of smaller parties. But the Congress was too demoralised to realise that its performance was not as bad as the media had made out.

Rahul Gandhi’s resignation did not lead to a churning in the Congress. It only resulted in the loss of time which should have been used to rebuild the party.

Some names like that of Shashi Tharoor, MP, have been bandied about as potential prime ministerial material.

Tharoor, with roots in Kerala, is a former UN bureaucrat who returned home to try his luck in domestic politics after his bid for the post of Secretary General failed. He has had vast experience in international affairs and is a powerful speaker. But the Congress needs not an orator in English but a leader with whom the masses can relate.

All things considered, Rahul Gandhi remains the best bet for the Congress since ordinary folks can relate to him, even if it is on basis of dynastic association. The question before the Congress is not merely one of who should lead it. The party is a menagerie of leaders who are spent forces. They are hanging around the party’s neck like an albatross.  It has to get rid of them to meet today’s challenges.

Above all, the Congress has to redefine itself. It is the party which set before India the goals of democracy and secularism. It was Jawaharlal Nehru’s commitment to these principles that kept communal forces at bay for decades after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.

Getting rid of deadwood and fortune-hunters in its ranks is a necessary first step in the process of rebuilding the Congress. Instead of locking up legislators whose commitment to secularism is suspect to prevent poaching by the BJP, it should let them go and join kindred souls even if it involves thinning of the party.

The second necessary step in the rebuilding process is infusion of new blood. Let a new generation committed to democracy and secularism come in and take the party forward.