2024 polls: For its revival, Congress must look inward
To renew its political appeal among voters before the general elections, the party must make an honest assessment of its strength, review the causes of its defeat, recreate the party’s brand, and find new avenues to generate resources
Has the Congress bottomed out at 20% vote share in national elections? Or, could its performance dip further? The arithmetic of emerging competition indicates a higher possibility of further erosion in 2024. The party is in no better shape in many states than it was in 2019 (and is worse in some). This has created a situation in which the party’s base is now like an unguarded vault, tempting raiders to make a play for its support.
Seventy years of Indian politics has shown us that the Congress rarely makes a comeback in any state after going below the
20% vote-share mark. Below this threshold, the vote base becomes vulnerable, and the psychological and mechanical vagaries of the first-pastthe-post system in multi-cornered contests severely damage the prospect of any revival. The expansionist ambitions of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are likely to bite off a chunk of the Congress’s base in all bipolar states such as Delhi and Punjab. And, the less said about the party’s chances of improving in bigger states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, and West Bengal, the better.
So, how can the party hope to revive itself ahead of the 2024 polls? This question was at the core of the chintan shivir the party held in Udaipur last week, and yet, the contours of a clear plan are yet to emerge. To do better, the party must seriously consider five things.
First, it must make an honest assessment of its current strength and set realistic expectations. The Congress contested in around 75% of the seats in 2014 and 2019; and of this, its candidates forfeited their deposit in one-third seats, ie, won less than one-sixth of the total votes polled. This means the party was not an effective player in around half of the Lok Sabha seats. Given this situation, the party should consider itself lucky if it even manages to hold on to its current position and not fall any further. Any addition would be a bonus.
Second, the Congress has been misinterpreting the political mandate since 2004. The party misread the reasons behind both its victory in 2009 and its defeat in 2014. It won merely two percentage points more votes in 2009 than it had in 2004. In fact, the party’s vote share in 2009 was 1% lower than in 1999, but it won almost twice the number of seats. There was indeed a positive rating of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s performance and its welfare programmes among the voters, but the extent of the party’s victory in 2009 was largely due to systemic features of the political structure rather than anything of the Congress’s own making.
In their paper Between Fortuna and Virtu, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar termed the 2009 Congress victory “ambiguous”. The Congress read this victory as an affirmation of its rural welfare policies such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNGREGS) and a negation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’S majoritarian politics. On the contrary, an analysis of the election results and survey data suggested that the Congress made serious gains in India’s urban pockets and among the middle class. The party’s victory in 21 seats in UP even made it believe that it had buried the ghost of Mandir and Mandal together. However, as Pradeep Chhibber and I outlined in our book, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, the sentiments that propelled the BJP’S rise in the 1990s had not dwindled despite the party’s electoral stagnation in the 2000s.
Third, this mischaracterisation of the 2009 victory led the Congress to make historical blunders. It inflated the party’s mythical belief that the Congress was the default party of governance in India. The UPA-II made policy choices that were unlikely to go well with urban middleclass preferences. The Congress delayed Rahul
Gandhi’s elevation within the party and he chose to play the de facto power centre of the ruling coalition. On top of that the charges of policy paralysis, massive corruption allegations, leakages in welfare schemes, and poor governance robbed all the goodwill generated in the first term. It failed to deflect the growing majoritarian sentiment through these five years and halfheartedly tried organisational reform measures (including its communication strategy) that could not match the formidable machine that BJP was building after its 2009 loss.
Fourth, the Congress continues to believe that the party lost in 2014 (and 2019) because it failed to communicate its achievements along with the BJP’S success in polarising the electorate on the religion-nationalism axis. The party also believes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi managed to hypnotise a section of society through false promises. The Congress must realise that the party’s continuous shrinking since 2014 is not merely due to a set of electoral defeats. It has lost a substantial portion of its political appeal and legitimacy. Its brand is now associated with negative images such as dynasticism, corruption, and indecisive leadership, among others. It is in a state of near-collapse and much of it is its own making. Recreating the party’s brand value that could be associated with positive images cannot be done with mere tweaking of organisational nuts and bolts, as the party decided in Udaipur. It needs a complete overhaul.
Finally, continuous losses in states since 2019 have further constrained the party’s ability to raise resources. The Congress must urgently find able replacements for senior leaders, many of whom have died over the past few years, who can swiftly mobilise significant resources. While it is common to find political dynasties in all democracies, South Asia is unique in this respect because most political parties in the region are dynastic — tightly controlled by members of a single family. The biggest challenge for dynastic parties such as the Congress is that it is often hard to separate the financial resources of the party from that of the family. It is no surprise then that mere cosmetic changes came out of Udaipur chintan shivir, but more serious demands such as reconstitution of the parliamentary board and the Congress Working Committee were rejected. As electoral victories become more sparse, this distinction of resources becomes further complicated. The party must find ways to separate them.
Political parties can overcome successive electoral defeats. We have several examples of that. The Congress must recognise that examples of a party’s revival after near-collapse are much rarer. It must get to work, and soon.