The Curious Case of the Congress Party

Suhas Palshikar (suhaspalshikar@gmail.com) taught political science and is currently

chief editor of Studies in Indian Politics and also co-director of the Lokniti programme of
the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.
 
The extraordinary nature of the crisis faced by the Congress means that the revival of
the party is necessarily predicated upon its renewal. This task becomes particularly
onerous as it has to be achieved in the face of a challenge posed by the ruthless
hegemonic force controlling politics.
The curious case of the Congress party seems to be stuck up indeterminately in the
alley of uncertainty, inaction and nothingness. Rarely has any party hogged headlines
for not doing anything. In traditional whodunnits, murders masquerade as suicides; in the
case of the Congress, suicide feigns murder.
Another bizarre aspect of the current Congress story is that, except the party itself, so
many others are interested in what happens to it and whether it survives. Just as
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Chief Mohan Bhagwat facetiously says that he did not
wish extinction of the Congress (PTI 2018), this writer, in response to pleas for the death
of the Congress (Yadav 2019), has argued that the death of the Congress is not a good
idea (Palshikar 2019a).
In the immediate context, the party has shown a faint possibility of internal stirring,
apparently on the issue of leadership, but its crisis goes back deeper. Let us first clear
the air on the leadership question. Again, it is rare that more than the Congress party
itself, everyone else seems to be passionately concerned about this question. Besides
the main rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), having a very active interest in who
should not lead the Congress, an outside observer staunchly and repeatedly suggests
that Rahul Gandhi ‘‘cannot take on Modi” (Guha 2020), while another outside observer
argues why Rahul alone is the right choice to lead the party (Gandhi 2020). While we
should surely return to this question of leadership, observers and analysts need not be
unduly worked up on the issue of who should lead a party. It is for the party—its top
leaders, its state units, its cadres or its internal decision-making mechanism—to sort out
the whos and the hows of this. Once the fog over personalities is set aside, the task of -
analysing what is happening to the Congress becomes clearer, but that much grimmer
as well.
Extraordinary Moment of Crisis
So, what is wrong with the Congress? Defeats and setbacks are not adequate
representations of crisis for political parties. Parties must be ready to go through
prolonged cycles of defeats and erosion. What is so special about the Congress’s
predicament is the inability to define the nature of the problem, identify what has gone
wrong and begin to shape a response so that the party can be renewed or simply
revived. The task of the renovation of the party is central, but before you renovate, there
has to be an admission that something is so wrong that the old ways and tactics might
not work anymore. In the case of the Congress, therefore, the first problem is blindness
to this reality; a blindness that grew out of the providential and superficial revival in 2004
and 2009. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) years, instead of helping the party
cope with the problem from a position of strength, resulted into a period of stupor born
out of complacency. Now, not revival but irrelevance stares the party in the face.
The second feature of the current crisis is that, unlike in 1989, or even in 1996–98, the
party has actually reached an existential crisis. It has fallen below 20% vote share and
10% seat share and lost state after state. One is not even sure if it is the main ‘‘national’’
opposition. Being unable to retain minimal strength electorally has demoralised the party
worker on the ground, while at the same time, making the party much less coalitionable
in times when a large party has emerged as a dominant player. If the 10 years from
1989 were years of decline, post 2014, the Congress began to face an existential crisis
for the first time.
Three, this existential crisis has occurred at a political moment when, besides another
party having emerged as electorally dominant, that party is clearly assuming a
hegemonic role in India’s society and polity (Palshikar 2019b). This is something the
Congress is confronting for the first time. Its earlier crises, be it the immediate post-
Nehru crisis, or the one in the mid-1970s and later in the late 1980s, were all crises
when India’s politics either still lived in the shadow of the Congress’s hegemony or, at
best, no alternative hegemonic forces had made an appearance (in the late 1980s and
then in the 1990s). The Congress, today, just does not have the historical precedence to
exist and renew itself in the face of a ruthless hegemonic force controlling politics.
Routes to Crisis
After 10 years in power, when the party lost miserably in 2014, not the defeat but its
scale suggested that something was wrong with the party. Following that, the party
mostly did not do anything to address the question—it did not even ask the question
what was wrong; time passed by and next election came, forcing the party to only
consider improving its performance, which it mostly failed to do. If anything, it did not
further go down (a small increase in seats with almost same vote share as in 2014).
That, however, does not mean the story begins in 2014. Yes, from 2011, its crisis began
becoming quite serious and reached a tipping point in 2014. But, in reality, the current
crisis of the party has had a long life of three decades. In 1989, when Rajiv Gandhi failed
to win the elections, the decline of the Congress was setting in. 1 His assassination
ironically helped the party return to power in 1991, and while the decline mode
remained, the imminent irrelevance of the party got postponed. The two UPA terms
similarly postponed the deterioration, and hence, now, two debilitating defeats in a row
have finally got the party on its deathbed. In these three decades, the party has reached
at the present impasse through three routes.
First, for a party that has been in the decline mode for over three decades, decline soon
becomes normal, so much so that the associated ills never jar the average Congress
worker. Thus, for most Congresspersons, who today may be in their 60s, or below,
certain conditions of the decline are “givens.” Some of the aspects of this normality of
the decline actually date back to the early 1980s and have deeper roots in the Indira
Gandhi years. For instance, most Congresspersons of today just have no idea what it
takes to build a party, run an organisation, retain a social base and connect to newer
social sections. The pyramidal way in which Indira Gandhi structured the party meant
that the idea of a party was practically destroyed. It did remain as a somewhat clumsy
election machine, inheriting some memories of partyness; it ran state governments often
in chaotic manners, but on questions of leadership, organisation, strategy or programme,
Congresspersons did not have party-like debates, discussions and decisions. An ad hoc
nature appended itself to everything the party did.
Second, most “leaders” of the Congress party in the states have no idea of how to look
at the all-India context. There has been a clear-cut division between the so-called Delhi-
based headquarter actors and the state leaders. Even its chief ministers have often been
insulated from the all India perspective and remained cocooned in their respective state-
based imaginations. Practically, no leader in the party can be said to have the state-level
experience and an all-India vision. Many may have something to say about the national
issues, but that is different from the all India perspective because the latter has a hard-
nosed sense of regional realities and the urgency of comprehensiveness of an overall
all-India way of arriving at decisions. This is a debilitating feature because, just as India’s
politics became increasingly state-centred, the need to also have a robust sense of the
all-India scene was extremely necessary in politics and that is exactly what most
Congresspersons wanting to operate at the national level often lacked.
Third, the party has reached here through the route of ideological bankruptcy. Ever since
Rajiv Gandhi took over the mantle, there was the erosion of an ideologically-oriented
politics. He sought to replace ideology by a supposedly modern outlook and the infusion
of new technology into policymaking. However, as a lever of politics, as rhetoric and also
as a factor providing purpose to the deeply selfish activity of politics, ideology continues
to be a requirement. The party chose to forget this. In the post-Rajiv era, the turn to new
economic policy made the Congress rather coy about ideology. Steeped in populist
rhetoric of socialism, the party could not admit to having shifted away, but the reality of
political economy did not allow the party to indulge in that same socialist rhetoric.
Narasimha Rao did attempt to refashion the Nehruvian ideology, but in its urge to forget
Rao, the party did not work on that line of ideological argument either. Even during
the UPA-I phase, the party came close to having a semblance of an ideological arg-
ument, but being rudderless both as a government and as a party, that initiative (about
the idea of a new rights regime as the basis of welfare governance) was easily lost. So,
today’s Congresspersons—including those who may play a key role in shaping the party
—operate in an ideological vacuum. This reflects adversely on the party in stark contrast
to the ideologically calibrated politics of its rival.
Lame Responses
Of the larger crisis and deeper malaise, there has been denial. All through the past three
decades, the Congress has mostly denied that there are any real issues it needs to
address. It has always seen setbacks as temporary, occasionally caused by the absence
of a leader from the entitled family. But, even after 2014, it has not been able to spring
back with any energetic response. After 2014, many observers made a point that social
media was the new magic. Since then, Congresspersons began doing politics only on
and via Twitter. Moreover, the Congress’s overall response to the BJP and the situation
emerging post 2014 smacked of lazy temptations.
The initial temptation was to underestimate the legitimacy of the new power-holders by
disparaging them as upstarts, calling them unsuitable and thus inadvertently
strengthening the criticism that the party believed that it alone was entitled to govern the
country. In such shallow responses, no efforts were made to distinguish between the
policies of the new government and Congress policies. As a result, these responses
failed to delegitimise the new incumbent. In fact, this facilitated the lampooning of the
Congress as the ‘‘elite’’ against whom the new rulers were fighting. The strange outcome
was that, even after losing power, the Congress continued to be the establishment and
the new rulers claimed the anti-establishment ground.
The other temptation to which the party fell prey to was the temptation of matching
leader with leader. Obviously, Narendra Modi and the entire media, for their separate but
sometimes overlapping reasons, love to presidentialise politics. By trying to pitch its
leader as an answer to and a counter to Modi, the Congress joined in this game of
personalisation of power—in turn strengthening Modi without having an arsenal to match
him. The media, sensing that this will help its own game of personalisation, temporarily
latched on to Rahul Gandhi, and thus, for a moment, the Congress believed that ‘‘Rahul
was clicking’’ and it may benefit on that count, but demagoguery combined with
diabolical ruthlessness is not easy to destabilise by projecting an alternative personality,
which has only limited resonance with the public at large. But the real slip the Congress
made was to succumb to the temptation of imitating the ideological copybook of the
hegemonic power. While the analysis that Hinduism and Hindutva are not the same
does have validity, empirically, the two get mixed up. As a result, in its bid to appeal to
Hindus (as Hindus), the Congress lost the fig-leaf of its non-communal intentions.
To top it all, among its state leaders, there never seems to be awareness about the
challenge. The new hegemony that the BJP has been constructing is fundamentally
altering our public sphere and the way competitive politics is seen and understood. This
challenge has aggravated the Congress’s existential crisis because now it is not only
about electoral decimation, it is about going out of circulation altogether. The language
of politics, the framework of contestations and the nature of dreams that politics posits
before the public have almost completely changed, and therefore, the Congress faces
either the temptation of speaking in the rival’s language or becoming outdated. It is not
certain that many of its state leaders, much less cadres, are aware of this, and as a
result, their response is bound to be with the framework of tactics and intermediate
strategies alone.
What Is in Store?
The so-called high command of the Congress has tested patience of middle-level
leaders and ground-level workers of the party for too long. Particularly since the defeat
of 2019, the Gandhi family has neither made it clear if it will take the initiative and run the
party or if it will let other leaders have a free hand. Since Rahul Gandhi gave up the
president’s post, Sonia Gandhi seems to have staged a coup of sorts because she does
not want anyone outside the family to take the reins. So, she agreed to an interim
arrangement ostensibly till Rahul completes his moral penance for not being able to lead
the party to a better electoral performance. Once that penance is over, he will regain
control of the party. Or, at least, that seems to be the calculation of Sonia and many
others in the party. Rahul himself has done nothing to dispel that impression, nor has he
genuinely encouraged others to take the lead. On the other hand, he has been behaving
and pronouncing as a de facto party chief or a chief-in-waiting, giving press releases,
organising webinars with experts, and so on. But at the same time, it is equally evident
that most of the party veterans have not been in tune with him on the Kashmir issue or
students’ unrest or even the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. That must be deterring him
from taking the second plunge.
So, the complication is mind-boggling: the party wants Rahul to lead, but it does not
want Rahul to take them where he wants them to go; Rahul wants to lead, but does not
want to be seen as wanting to lead the party; within the Congress, no other leader has
the courage to claim leadership; but many are not sure if Rahul can really deliver the
political goods; everyone in the Congress identifies Modi as the opponent, but nobody
wants to make it clear if they are opposed to what Modi stands for; the G-23 letter wants
the party to be revived urgently, but G-23 does not have the strength to force the
change. Those who can force the change, on the other hand (like sitting chief ministers
and party chiefs with weight in their states), do not want to change the party because
they think that the tag of the Congress, the label of Gandhi and the meaningless clatter
of secularism, diversity, welfare, etc, will suffice to turn the tide once people are finally
tired of the magician who has no rabbit to show.
Such an internal deadlock can only lead to one of the two possibilities. First, like it has
happened many times in the past, but as late as in the 1990s, the party splinters into
multiples. Frustrated with what is happening at party headquarters (and what is not
happening), different groups and individuals part ways with the party. Multiple state
Congress parties may emerge out of this churning. From the current nature of groups
within, it is unlikely that an attempt to form an alternative Congress at the all-India level
would happen. Even if that were to happen, it would still have an imprint of a state outfit.
Leaders and factions having sufficient resources and following at the state level can opt
for this route. That is exactly what the ‘‘high command” seems to have averted recently
when it coaxed Sachin Pilot to agree to stay back in the party and when the  G-23 letter
came out, most of the more resourceful state leaders were persuaded to keep away
from the letter writers. Thus, in the current intra-party scenario, the high command
having no base has struck a deal with quite a few state bigwigs having local resources
and base. This has left the disgruntled ones orphaned. They may still form a party, but
that is more likely to be a non-starter. Unless intra-party dissatisfaction crystallises
around one or two leaders who can gain a moral high ground and attract ordinary
workers in more than a few states, an alternative the Congress (or parallel Congress)
does not seem to be a possibility.
If that does not happen, then the only possibility that remains is to trudge along like the
past six years. With its diffusely spread 20% vote share and semblance of organisation
in quite a few states, the present Congress will not easily disappear for another 10 years
at least. So, the Gandhi family will retain control over the dilapidated castles, its ruins will
be enjoyed by the usual palace politicians who have often benefited since the late
1990s and the so-called high command will make compromises with state heavyweights
in order to survive but will never really enjoy their company.
Ironically, these scenarios seem plausible not because the party is too faction-ridden but
because there are no robust factions within the party today. There may be enough
Congresspersons to shout pro-Rahul slogans against the G-23, but Rahul Gandhi, who
seems to have his own ideas about the party, does not have a strong faction of his own.
Until he develops such a faction, his leadership will be dependent on the goodwill his
mother enjoys among the workers and the charity of those who manipulate the “high
command.” On the other hand, no other leader in the party has a strong factional support
either. In fact, the way the party survived through its crisis of the 1990s was this novel
and unwritten precondition, that there will be only individual leaders but no strongly
networked factions in the party. That in the end is the undoing of the Congress bec ause
mass parties in democracies need to have factions and bargaining mechanisms among
the factions; something that makes the party stronger, rather than weaker. In India’s
political obsession with leadership and loyalty, this basic lesson on party building is often
sacrificed. The Congress is now paying the price for that.
Needless to say, whether the party fragments into smaller state parties or drifts on the
lines it is currently drifting, both these possibilities serve the BJP’s purpose admirably.
State parties can put up a limited fight against the BJP but will not take the fight to the
core of the current political question in India, namely the hegemonic takeover of
democracy. On the other hand, a drifting Congress would only mean a hurdle in building
electoral coalitions against the BJP. So, either way, the BJP benefits from the current
situation in the Congress party.
Resilience and Renewal
Finally, a wishful question (from the Congress’s side): Are there possibilities of resilience
and, better still, renewal? James Manor has recently presented a critical but balanced
assessment of this question (but written before the G-23 episode) arguing that re-
democratisation, offering governance and development strategy, re-federalisation and
organisation building are areas where the party may make sincere efforts (Manor 2020:
134–39), though he points out that in states constituting half of the Lok Sabha seats, the
Congress really does not have much chance and also that a lot might depend on how
the two factors—Modi government’s popularity and its penchant for limiting democracy—
unfold.
Indeed, it would not only be a pity but also a political puzzle if a party with the large
presence simply withers away. It would also be a waste of political energy in times of
democratic crisis. Having broken the jinx that it cannot return to power in states where it
is once defeated, the Congress has managed to retain its base not only in Karnataka (as
Manor forcefully points out) and has come back to power in Punjab, as also in Madhya
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan (again defying the jinx that it cannot defeat
the BJP). This only suggests the presence of a political force that the party leadership
has refused to tap and cultivate. More pertinently, despite the stability and expansion of
the BJP vote, it is still uncertain if social alignments have frozen enough to deny
competitors any entry into various social segments. At least, one significant fact needs to
be noted in this context. While socially and economically privileged sections (castes and
classes in the upper half of the social-economic hierarchy) seem to be more favourably
disposed toward the BJP, the lower half continues to experiment with
parties,2 particularly with the non-BJP options. That is the space where politics internal to
non-BJP parties is bound to unfold, and that is the space the Congress can try to occupy
nationally. This is indeed a tall order, but that is at least a possibility. For the Congress to
survive and also to claim a key role in non-BJP politics, it must have a sufficiently wide
pool of voters to draw from.
However, given its current mess, the party does not have an option of merely reviving
without rebuilding itself. Historically, parties have reinvented themselves (like the ‘‘new’’
labour, or nearer home, like the “new” Congress of Indira Gandhi in 1969–70). But such
rebuilding is predicated on leadership and astute agenda setting besides a ruthless
pruning of the party itself. Is the Congress ready for this? Has it ever thought in this
manner?
This is where we return to the question of leadership. It is not about dynasty, nor about
what the rival parties say. In the impossible task of rebuilding, reinventing and
reinvigorating the party, leadership of the party (and not just one top leader) will be
severely tested. Electorally, mass appeal will have to be a major consideration, but
beyond being a vote-gathering commodity, leadership will be required to also calibrate
and coordinate with non-BJP parties for purposes of alliance building. It would need to
take up the challenge of bringing clarity among party workers on questions of economic
policy as also socio-cultural matters. It is true that, sometimes, circumstances bring out
leadership qualities, but in the last instance, this challenge regarding leadership is about
imagination and ambition; imagination about how to get workers and voters on board
and ambition to protect democracy and turn politics into a pro-people enterprise.
These are audacious challenges but party building is never an easy task, much less so
in the times of hegemony unabashed in its use of brutal state power. If recent rumblings
in the Congress produce reason and political sense among both the letter writers (who
seem to be clueless and indeterminate) and the high command (who seems to be
throwing into the dustbin the message along with the messenger), then the party may
consider the challenge of redefining itself. The real imponderable therefore is: Will the
Congress take this challenge up? If the party realises that no outside foe is killing it, that
it is committing self-killing,
not the BJP’s slogan of Congress-mukt Bharat, but its own resolve of ridding its
“Congressness” is the beginning of the story, it would have taken the first step in
reinventing itself. Though its recent record leads to pessimism, requirements of
democracy push one towards the search of distant optimism.
Notes
1 Yogendra Yadav discusses the nature of decline, its overall context and ramifications
in two of his pieces (Yadav 1996, 1999).
2 In a forthcoming work, Jyoti Mishra and I have tried to look at the pattern of electoral
choices over time made by upper-middle castes and upper-middle classes. We regroup
respondents from National Election Studies by classifying those with both class and
caste advantage as the privileged ones and those with both class and caste
disadvantage as persons with low privilege. We find that the former consolidate behind
the BJP and the latter, even after BJP’s ascent in 2014, continue to be fragmented
across states and across parties (Palshikar and Mishra, forthcoming).
References
Gandhi, Rajmohan (2020): “I Disagree with Ram Guha’s Assessment of Rahul
Gandhi,” NDTV, 21 August, viewed on 13 September 2020, https:
//www.ndtv.com/opinion/rahul-gandhis-significance-in-todays-india-by-rajmohan-gandhi-
2282929.
Guha, Ramachandra (2020): “5 Reasons Why Rahul Gandhi Cannot Take On Modi for
PM,” NDTV, 18 August, viewed on 13 September, https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/why-
my-assessment-of-rahul-gandhi-remains-unchanged -2281181.
Manor, James (2020): “The Prospects for a Congress Party Revival,” Indian Politics &
Polity, Vol 3, No 1, Spring, pp 129–48.
Palshikar, Suhas (2019a): “Dear Yogendra, I Disagree: Why the Congress Is
Unnecessary,” Indian Express, 22 May, viewed on 13 September
2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/yogendra-yadav-congress-exit-
polls-2019-lok-sabha-elections-bjp-5741245/.
— (2019b): “Towards Hegemony: The BJP Beyond Electoral Dominance,” Majoritarian
State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India, Angana P Chatterjee, Thomas Blom
Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), London: Hurst, pp 101–17.
Palshikar, Suhas and Jyoti Mishra (forthcoming): “Caste, Class and Vote: Consolidation
of the Privileged and Dispersal of Underprivileged.”
PTI (2018): “Congress-mukt Bharat Is Not Sangh’s Language: Mohan Bhagwat,” Times
of India, 2 April, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/cong-mukt-bharat-isnt-sanghs-
language-mohan-bhagwat/articleshow/63572521.cms.
Yadav, Yogendra (1996): “Reconfiguration in Indian Politics: State Assembly Elections,
1993–95,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 31, Nos 2 and 3, 13–20 January, pp 95–
104.
— (1999): “Electoral Politics in the Times of Change: India’s Third Electoral System,
1989-99,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 34, Nos 34 and 35, pp 2393–99.
— (2019): “Why Congress Can’t: It Doesn’t Possess the Vision, Strategy or Ground
Strength,” Indian Express, 22 May, viewed on 13 September
2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/lok-sabha-elections-elections-
results-congress-bjp-rahul-gandhi- 5741251/.