Shikha Mukerjee | Congress flounders, needs a strategy to get relevant

The 138-year-old Congress Party needs an emphatic popular mandate to deliver on its deal to its partners in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance that it will pull its weight in the 2024 general election by winning enough seats to oust Narendra Modi from power and defeat the BJP. The present team of leaders owe it to the lineage of the party that imagined the nation as a republic committed to modern, secular and just values to succeed in fulfilling the promises it has made.

To do so the party needs a message and a mission that is unequivocal and makes common sense to the crores of voters across the diversities of identity, geography and language. A “Donate for Desh” fundraising campaign or a 6,200-km Bharat Nyay Yatra crossing 14 states, most of them ruled by the BJP and the toughest battlegrounds for the emaciated Congress in these parts, is not a strategy for wooing the masses and winning a mandate.

By the time the money comes in and the yatra is over, the 2024 general election will have been, most likely, called and the Congress may not be any better off than it was in 2019 when it won a mere 14 parliamentary seats out of the 355 constituencies that the march will cover in 150 days. The BJP won 236 seats in the 14 states, including Uttar Pradesh with 80 MP seats, West Bengal with 42 seats, Bihar with 40, Maharashtra with 48, Gujarat with 26, Rajasthan with 25, Odisha with 21, Madhya Pradesh with 29 and Chhattisgarh with 11 seats.

The chances of the yatra’s success in mobilising the popular vote will face its first obstacle in Manipur. Experts on the Northeast say, at best, Rahul Gandhi may be allowed to flag off the yatra from Imphal, after which the probability is that he will be airlifted out of the state and sent on his way. It is difficult to imagine a red carpet will be laid out for Rahul Gandhi through the tense and volatile Manipur countryside.

The yatra and the crowdfunding exercise, more about that later, are only two of the four action points the Congress has been able to announce as of now. The party’s other two initiatives are setting up a five- member National Alliance Committee, that seems to be floundering in the negotiations with the regional and smaller parties over seat-sharing, and the 138th year of its founding celebration in Nagpur.

There is an inconsistency between what the Congress thinks it is doing and its actions thus far. From the outside, the Congress seems to be in denial about its current shortcomings in relation to the targets it has set.

The cognitive dissonance is obvious. It is uncertain if it is cause for hilarity or the deepest depression.

The cash-strapped party has launched a campaign of crowdfunding, “Donate for Desh”. The Congress says it is a unique moment in its history when it is asking people to contribute “for the nation”. From Mallikarjun Kharge’s explanation, it would appear that the party believes the donations will serve to establish a connection with the masses and draw them into participating in the campaign to oust Narendra Modi and defeat the BJP in the general election. It is incomprehensible why the Congress thinks something as impersonal as a cash transfer into a bank account is the same as a steadfast commitment to vote for the party in 2024, when it is so obviously not.

The “Donate for Desh” has no clear message; nor does it have a mission that contributors can identify with. Neither Mr Kharge nor the Gandhi family have an iota of the charisma and the appeal that Mahatma Gandhi possessed in truckloads, which makes the argument that the fund drive has a pedigree the same as the Tilak Swaraj Fund an insult to the extraordinary effectiveness of a campaign that inspired women to donate their gold, the only property they possessed over which they had total control.

It would have been inconceivable for the Mahatma to squander the collections on a Bharat Yatra with an abstract mission of presenting itself as a crusader for “nyay”, or justice. It is absurd for the Congress to finance a road trip involving complicated logistics and enormous expenditure for setting up camps, transporting yatris and the container modules for Rahul Gandhi and other VIP leaders to sleep in without firming up seat-sharing with its INDIA partners in UP, Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal, for starters. It seems to have no memory of its recent pitiable performance in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where it lost to the BJP in the recent Assembly elections.

And it has not as yet unveiled strategy for states like Odisha, Assam, Jharkhand and Meghalaya.

If the Congress is committed to the challenge of mobilising the masses to vote for it and the INDIA collective, it should have got on with the seat-sharing negotiations, for starters. The Rahul Gandhi-led yatra may have had some political value if INDIA as a collective of parties had a common minimum programme and a common campaign strategy. None of this has progressed to the point that the yatra and the campaign can be fused together to create a buzz among voters in what is politically hostile terrain for the Congress and the INDIA alliance.

The vague announcement that eight to ten meetings of the INDIA group will be held across the country seems to have nothing with to do with a coordinated strategy to grab voter attention as the yatra gets going. What message can the yatra deliver in UP if the Samajwadi Party and smaller parties on the one hand and the Congress on the other have not finalised seat-sharing and a common campaign agenda?

The BJP’s message and mission are clear. The party led by Mr Modi guarantees delivery on all promises. The Ram Mandir inauguration is the biggest and shiniest example of the guarantee message and its capacity to fulfil its declared mission.

Funds, message and mission, that is resources, purpose and strategy, is the basic minimum that the Congress needs for a mandate to lead the INDIA collective and put up an honest fight against the BJP. The people’s mandate will not be delivered on a platter; INDIA and the Congress will have to fight for it. Without syncing message, mission and strategy, the INDIA collective will be at best a banner and the regional parties will work independently to protect the turf they now control from the even more aggressive and immensely beefed-up BJP, after the Ram Mandir inauguration on January 22, 2024.