- The Existentialist Angst of the Once Powerful Congress Party Harsh Sethi https://thewire.in/books/congress-party-zoya-hasan-review
- Zoya Hasan’s new book explores this malaise of the party, but insufficiently. Her book Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Polarization and the Growing crisis of the Congress Party (2009-19) focuses on the last decade, years that the Congress has been out of power at the Centre, wracked by internal crisis if not an existential angst about its survival.
- the ‘near vanishing’ of ‘a certain conception of politics, in the midst of an ideological consolidation of the Right in India’, an experience which the author claims ‘has relevance for the experience of centrist and centre-left parties in other countries’ as well.
- The emergence of a decisive leader in Indira Gandhi and her overwhelming victory in 1971 transformed what was earlier a ‘loose coalition’ of ideologically diverse groups into a highly centralised party completely dominated by its leader, de facto converting electoral contests into a presidential one.
- There was a shift from a state regulated economy to a market based model of growth, and the emergence of new local level elites, of lower caste and class, gaining from the affirmative action policies, now seeking greater power and representation, that the party found difficult to accommodate.
- Equally important has been the role of associated non-electoral organisations across multiple social segments and regions to contest the earlier ideological and intellectual formulations favoured by the centre-left and create new legitimation for an ethnic, civilisational view promoted by the BJP.
- As the citizen-voters got reduced to beneficiaries of largesse more than active agents in the construction of their own futures, the party’s roots in society weakened.
- Once politics gets reduced to elections and electoral victory becomes paramount, contests for power acquire a sharper, even uglier edge. It is worth reflecting on why India’s complex of regulatory and oversight institutions, a feature our republic took great pride in, has so easily capitulated to ‘institutional capture’.
- we need to better understand the deeper implications of shifts in language and concepts as we move into a post-truth world. No longer is it easy to discern fact from fiction as powerful forces, political and corporate, construct their ‘favoured version of truth’ and shape popular perceptions through ‘creative’ use of new IT technologies. Terms which once enjoyed popular legitimacy – development, justice, representation, equality and so on – no longer carry a common meaning but, unlike the past, may even carry a negative connotation. Creating an alternative narrative which can appeal across sharp divides has become more difficult.