Elections are veering to one significant factor: the personality of the chief minister or the prime ministerial candidate. The presence of and recognition by a party of a strong, popular leader who is projected and offered to the people as the “hope” is an essential strategy going in for state or national elections.
It is what the leader in whose name the party gets identified, reflects and what people see in her/ him. So while Amarinder Singh was this hope in Punjab, Narendra Modi assumed this role in Uttar Pradesh, as he had subsumed the identity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its chief ministers to be as his “avatar”. Maybe if Congress had projected a name in Goa, it may have got a full majority (Manipur was more a case of triple incumbency).
In this kind of climate, the BJP and regional parties are more effective election machines, while Congress weakens due to some strategic and cultural issues. Our “high command” culture, while giving us the strength to unite and rally together, militates against strong regional leaders. It’s because the All India Congress Committee’s (AICC) normative understanding has been to always characterise all local leaders as subservient in position and under suzerainty of our “high command”. “High command” is not the party president, but the rather large group of leadership surrounding it, that can out manoeuvre and out protocol a popular leader only through this enforced culture of subservience to “high command”. Sadly, ideology, how the governments or local parties work, how we energise and build cadres, how we influence new social, economic, spatial, livelihood, identity and age based groups has gone out of the perspective of senior controlling leadership, since that means giving effective space to those who bring these groups into the Congress umbrella.
Congress often states that party and government are different, which without an understanding that government is the vehicle to implement the elements of your ideology and vision of society, economy and people in a democracy, becomes disastrously an “us” versus government scenario. This often, as we saw especially during UPA-2, and in most Congress-ruled states, turns governments into defensive and apologetic arms of the party. Congress party has often been found unhappy and reluctant to own the achievements of its governments, especially when the leaders of these governments are also growing in stature.
When in Government, it is reluctant to benefit from the popularity of its governments, as the rootless coterie remains suspicious of popular leaders and self respecting leaders. Hence a Modi turns into a hero, while an Ashok Gehlot, a Gogoi, a Digvijay Singh or a Sheila Dikshit, or even a P. Chidambaram, a Pranab Mukherjee or a Shinde spend their time defending themselves from their own party. The sniggering “high command” looks at this battle, satisfied that as they bow to lock horns with sponsored “opposition”, they remain with heads down in front of them. Hence, BJP parrots their schemes as ethereal and game changing and we only look and highlight what our governments have not or could not do? How come, all the schemes repeated under Modi are heard today, but were just shown in departmental annual reports under UPA, or our state governments?
Where the party should step in to ensure that our governments work in consonance with our core beliefs, it fails. Rather than partnering with governments on policy and ideology interface, most AICC post holders are busy managing the patronage opportunities of governments.
The Congress revitalisation lies in becoming a political outfit that reflects its heritage but does not treat it as a legacy. We must sit and openly debate and rewrite our charters, and our ideological page. Our directive principles are our commitment to a plural, open, liberal and secular India, a social democracy framework, which unleashes the potential of our people and their enterprise, yet battles inequality, environment damage and ensures fairness and justice to all. We must fashion the party as a unit that reflects and respects talent and capability, treats its people with dignity and provides opportunity to grow. Which invites into its fold the new generation of leaders who are emerging in the vast spread of geographic, social, economic and political concentrations across India (some of this was tried in experiments with Youth Congress and National Students Union of India). To seriously engage with workers and the cadre by building them into foot soldiers through strong ideological orientation, role in party work and decisions, strong emphasis on a moral and ethical framework, pushing ability above financial and social assets, and constant engagement amongst party members through training, public service, and people’s issues.
It’s a party that came out of a movement and must remain a party of movements.
The author is Congress party’s member in Lok Sabha
