It is wrong to say the Congress faces an existential crisis. It is too big and too experienced a party to evaporate with just two failures to regain power in Delhi. It is facing a personality crisis— a crisis of personality of both its leadership and its ideology. And Raipur gave no signs of the party overcoming this crisis.
Who will lead in General Election 2024?
Who is the Congress ‘leader’? Who is going to lead the party campaign against the BJP in 2024? Rahul Gandhi or Mallikarjun Kharge or Mr/Ms X whose name is not revealed yet? That is the question common voters are asking. The question becomes even more important to them, since the party says it alone can lead the anti-BJP opposition front.
The common voters are confused. Rahul resigned as president after the party’s second failure to take Delhi in 2019. For three years, senior partymen and workers kept on praying to him to change his mind, but he refused. At the same time he played a commanding role in the party’s campaign in state elections during the period, leaving no one in doubt that he was its de facto leader.
There are many theories about why Rahul did not want to be president. One is that he is by nature more of an ‘ideologically oriented politician’ and less of an ‘organisationally oriented politician’. He is not the kind of politician who would devote all his hours to planning, directing, managing and scheming as the organisation’s leader. He would rather love to be an architect, an originator of ideas, an inspirer for rebuilding the party and redefining its ideology. Another theory is that he wants to deny any room to the BJP to question the party’s ‘democratic legitimacy’ with a dynastic leadership. That was why he did not want even his mother or sister to take the president’s office.
So, we have Kharge. If the party’s idea was to neutralise the BJP’s dynasty missiles, it should have chosen someone with exceptional organising ability and a personality of his own and much younger. On one hand, you make an 80-year-old partyman with no extraordinary leadership ability as the president. On the other hand, you amend your constitution at Raipur to incorporate the rule of ‘50 under 50’, giving 50% of party organisation and delegate offices to men and women under fifty. How can the party hope to inspire younger party workers and new recruits with a dream of upward mobility if it gives the president’s office to someone past eighty? The farce is too obvious for anybody to miss. No wonder Kharge is seen as a figurehead. The very purpose of electing a non-Gandhi president to counter the BJP’s dynasty diatribe is defeated.
At Raipur, the party’s 45-member steering committee led by Kharge claimed to have taken ‘important’ decisions without the physical or virtual presence of any of the Gandhis. This was presented by party spokespersons as further proof — apart from electing a non-Gandhi president — of the dynasty not being dominant. However, it failed to work. Rahul Gandhi was everywhere. At the public squares of Raipur, along the roads leading to the venue of the plenary, and in the pandals (pavilions) where meetings were held, hundreds of posters of Rahul Gandhi from the Bharat Jodo Yatra — Rahul hugging children, Rahul walking with commoners, Rahul giving a speech dripping in rain — were put up. A significant part of every speaker’s address was devoted to praise for Rahul Gandhi for his ‘tapasya’ of undertaking an incredibly challenging Kanyakumari-to-Kashmir yatra. Rahul is now going to lead a Pasighat-to-Porbandar yatra to cover the states not touched by the earlier yatra.
Does that leave anyone in doubt about the Congress being identified with Rahul Gandhi? The Congress thinks the way he thinks; it moves where he moves; it does what he does. It is pointless for Rahul to keep presenting a paradoxical image of himself to the nation’s electorate: “It is I who lead the party, but I am not the leader.” He should be out in the open. He is the biggest vote-getter for the party. With him heading the campaign, the party got about 11 crore votes in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019.
Dynasty does not matter. Succession has a social legitimacy in India. Our traditional value system holds that gyan (knowledge) and yogyata (ability) are passed on from generation to generation. Sons of farmers inherit their farms, sons of businessmen their businesses. Professionals beget professionals. People have made Ranbir Kapoor, a fifth-generation descendant of the Kapoor clan, a star. How could they see succession in political families as immoral when they see succession in other vocational families as moral?
In election after election, people have shown that parentage might count in the primary analysis but not in the ultimate analysis. People might have accepted Indira Gandhi primarily because she was Nehru’s daughter. However, as voters they voted for Indira Gandhi when they thought she was going the right way, and voted her out when they saw her going the wrong way. It is your character and attitude, your policies and performance that matter more than your parentage.
Rahul Gandhi must lead the Congress from the front
For the Congress under the present circumstances, there is even otherwise not much of a choice. Maybe in the future the Congress can build up a leader competent and popular enough to be a PM candidate. But today it does not have anyone other than Rahul.
However, Rahul alone will not do. The Congress has to go to the electorate with a vision that is more attractive to them than Narendra Modi’s. Defeating Modi has become an extremely challenging task, primarily because he has seduced a major part of the constituencies of the poor away from the Congress and other opposition parties. He has now laid out a plan to lure even the poor among the Muslims — supposedly the bedrock of their support — away from them. Rahul needs not only to lead the opposition against Modi but also to offer a convincing promise to give the poor a better life than what Modi has given — or claims to have given — them.
Arun Sinha is an independent journalist and author
