Fighting for survival
Struggling with a crisis that has its origins far back into the past, the Congress is unable to offer any viable alternative to the BJP, and the Bharat Jodo Yatra is unlikely to change that situation.
THE timing could not have been worse. With barely a fortnight to go before the launch of the Congress’s ambitious 3,500-kilometre Bharat Jodo yatra from Kanyakumari on September 7, party veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad dropped a bombshell on August 26, announcing his exit from all posts of the party. This included relinquishing his four-decade-old primary membership, which was, in one sense, the unkindest cut. In a five-page letter addressed to Sonia Gandhi, the former Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, former Lok Sabha MP and former Chief Minister of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir State, explained his reasons for leaving the party he was associated with for so long.
There was a hint of what was coming when on August 21 he quit the chairmanship of two party committees on Jammu and Kashmir. Ghulam Nabi Azad had been general secretary in the AICC since the mid 1980s and was a member of the Congress Working Committee and the party’s parliamentary board.
In his letter to Sonia Gandhi, Azad wrote of his deep loyalty to the party from his student days and ex
pressed disaffection with the current leadership, namely former party president Rahul Gandhi. He detailed all the posts he had held since the mid 1970s, saying he joined the party at a time when to be associated with the party drew stigma. He was referring to the Emergency without actually stating it. He wrote he had the “honour of serving as a Union Minister” in the governments of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
He pointed out that Sonia Gandhi as party president was able to steer two successful terms in government for the UPA because she “heeded the wise counsel of senior leaders, besides trusting their judgment and delegating powers to them”. He accused Rahul Gandhi of being responsible for demolishing the party’s consultative mechanism after he was appointed vice president in 2013. He castigated Rahul Gandhi for tearing up a government ordinance in full public view, describing it as “childish behaviour”, which, he said, contributed to the defeat of the UPA government in 2014. The UPA government, he said, was then already under an offensive from right-wing forces and unscrupulous corporate interests.
Attributing the Congress’s defeat in 2014 to Rahul Gandhi’s tearing up of an ordinance is a bit of an exaggeration. In that election, the BJP’S vote share was actually 31 per cent. Yet the “first past the post” system saw it through with more than half the seats in the Lok Sabha. The party’s “acche din” slogan resonated with two sections–those who had been left behind in aspirational India and the corporate class which expected largesse from a more benevolent government. The UPA had got re-elected in 2009 not because ordinances were not torn but because its 2004-2009 tenure brought about progressive reforms in the form of employment guarantees and food security. But after 2009, it was the old Congress back in form, driven by a neoliberal agenda and fiscal conservatism. It failed to see the impact on the ground, a vacuum which the BJP exploited.
Azad’s letter is not entirely respectful even to Sonia Gandhi, who, he says, took over as Congress president after “dethroning” Sitaram Kesri. His main grouse seems to be with the leadership of Rahul Gandhi. There is also perhaps resentment at the way he was sidelined in the Bharat Jodo Yatra initiative.
The questions he raises over the Congress’s laggardly implementation of organisational reforms are understandable. Nothing much happened despite brainstorming sessions (the Chintan Shivirs at Panchmarhi in 1998, Shimla in 2003 and the latest in Jaipur in 2013). Azad said that as chair of the group on organisational affairs, he proposed a detailed action plan, approved by the CWC, which never took off.
NOT JUST ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES
The challenges before the Congress now go beyond organisational issues. The disconnect with the people that has crept in, which the BJP capitalises on with its rhetoric of “sab ka saath, sab ka vikas”, is sought to be rectified through campaigns like the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Despite its limitations, it is not altogether a bad idea. To what extent an engagement with civil society groups with their limited organisational and mass base will help in this process is quite another thing. Not all of them want to be identified directly with the Congress though their members share individual equations with individual leaders. But all of this will not necessarily make for a successful campaign. Can the Congress dissociate itself completely from the factors that scripted its defeat in more than one election?
Manickam Tagore, Lok Sabha MP from Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, who is vocal about his views regarding party deserters, told Frontline that the party wanted to go
Despite the Congress’s touted irrelevance, it continues to be the BJP’S favourite bugbear.
to the people through the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Its aim was to “unite for India”. He was confident that there was no danger of the Congress coming apart, despite the spate of resignations. He believed the recent resignations would affect only the
newspaper-reading political class. Rahul Gandhi strongly felt that party workers should go out to the people and the yatra was being held in that spirit. Manickam Tagore said Rahul Gandhi’s engagement with members of civil society, including those who
have been critical of the Congress, was a meaningful one.
RAHUL GANDHI AS TARGET
That something like Azad’s exit would happen was expected. It was meant to sabotage the Bharat Jodo
Yatra, said the Virudhunagar MP, hinting that the BJP had a hand in it. “We felt that something or the other would be triggered prior to the yatra to attack Rahul Gandhi,” he said. On the whole he was dismissive about the deserters, saying they would go
wherever “sarkari bungalows” were given. About organisational elections and the criticism against the manner in which they were being held, he said Rahul Gandhi had a democratic style of functioning and was not averse to reforms. He also said there was nothing unusual about the manner in which organisational elections were taking place. The critics, he said, were part of the consensus model of nominating delegates to the electoral college. For them to turn around and question the whole exercise was not right.
Other sources in the party said that Azad held important positions in seven of the nine years that Azad says he was not comfortable.
The Congress has been going downhill ever since Rahul Gandhi stepped down as president following the debacle in the 2019 general election. Azad’s letter talks about how the AICC leadership has been “perpetrating a giant fraud on the party to perpetuate its hold on the ruins of what was once a national movement that fought for and attained the independence of India”. The fraud claim can be disputed, but not the steady decline. Yet, to be fair, the Congress has been at its combative best, offline and online, in recent times and has matched the BJP’S propaganda machinery word to word.
BJP’S FAVOURITE BUGBEAR
Indeed, despite its touted irrelevance, it continues to be the favourite bugbear for the BJP. Targeting the Gandhis and the “Lutyens culture” and ridiculing Rahul Gandhi has become routine for the BJP’S electoral managers. Notwithstanding its talk of a “Congress Mukt Bharat”, the BJP still needs the Congress to justify its own existence. Developments like Azad’s exit and the group of 23 Congress leaders who in Azad’s words wrote to Sonia Gandhi complaining about the “abysmal drift” in the party, helps the BJP in part.
Despite its shrill attack on the Congress, the BJP was unable to win Punjab and Delhi. To boot, it has an uneasy alliance with its coalition partners in some States. The recent falling-out with the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar is a case in point.
Still, the Congress is undeniably a pale shadow of what it was. It has shrunk considerably, having lost 39 out of 49 Assembly elections