‘Out With the Gandhis’ a Cry of Despair; With No Obvious Replacement, Cure May Be Worse than Disease Mar 27, 2022 |Prem Shankar Jha Mar 27, 2022 The party’s future lies in defending federalism from Modi’s assaults and building regional coalitions around a programme of development and reform.
To warn the people of this danger and seek their vote to avert it, a political party needs to identify the early signs of danger, and flag them convincingly for the voters to see. But the Congress’s leadership has not raised its voice to warn the people about the peril they are facing...
Why the Congress footprint shrank
It is the Congress’s silence on the threat to India’s future that the BJP’s rise to political dominance has created which has triggered the widely shared view that the Gandhi family must retire from politics and allow the party to reconstruct itself.
The rank and file of the Congress has been very slow to recognise this. In the 2019 general elections, the Bihar elections of 2020, and even before the recently concluded assembly elections, the party clung to the illusion that the evocation of the Gandhi-Nehru legacy could still revive the Congress organisation in the states where it had withered away.
But Sonia Gandhi’s decision to reach out to the ginger group of senior party members suggests she recognises the need to create a collective leadership that relies on credible policy commitments for the future instead of the legacy of the past.
But this is only the lesser half of the battle that lies ahead. The greater part is the recreation of a party organisation that can carry the message to the people. Given its unending succession of defeats – which represent a failure to make headway on its own – the way ahead clearly lies not in creating an entirely new grassroots organisation but in partnering with regional parties and relying on their cadre to spread the coalition’s message...
As Karnataka showed, such coalitions will inevitably be looser than the coalition that existed in the pre-1969 Congress. But the way to strengthen them is through the adoption of programmes that meet the most urgent needs of the poor, and publicising these well before the elections.