Here’s an exercise, when you have a moment — pick up a recent newspaper, select a report about the “crisis” in Congress, change the date, month and even the year. The odds are, it makes little or no difference.
The point is not to waste your precious Sunday moment on a party that doesn’t seem to give itself any time for sorting out its deshabille. It is only to underscore that, since 2014, in a changing national landscape, when the rules of politics and government are being rewritten and larger cultural shifts are underway, Congress-in-crisis remains an unvarying freeze-frame. That’s bad news for a democracy where the ruling party came to office with a large mandate, a formidable machine and a will to conquer all, and has got almost a free pass to do so.
This week began with Congress joining hands with civil society groups ahead of its Bharat Jodo Yatra that is scheduled to take off in September, and concluded with the exit of senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad.
In another time, the outreach to civil society groups may have been a good idea. As we wrote in our editorial, “both civil society groups and political parties have their bounded spaces but they also play a complementary role in making democracy’s mosaic and holding up its equilibrium. A partnership of the robust civil society organisation with the strong political party promises benefits to both — while the former deepens popular mobilisation, the latter aggregates issues and locates them in institutional frameworks for resolution”.
But a Congress that is headless for over three years now, a party that has not taken clear and coherent positions on national issues, much less mobilised the people on them, only appears to be latching on to NGOs now as a part of its flailing.
The bitter parting shot of a leader who has worked in and for the party for five decades turns the mirror to the problem within. Ghulam Nabi Azad’s resignation letter is unsparing about the Congress’s top leadership, its flickering presence and wavering accountability — Rahul Gandhi, who stepped down as party president in 2019, refuses to return to the post but also won’t let go of presidential powers, running the party through a “coterie” and by “remote control”.
The exit and the letter throw up a fundamental question: If Congress cannot flourish with the Gandhis, can it survive without them?
And: How long can Congress stay locked in that tight airless space in between living with the Gandhis and imagining itself without them?
At the same time, of course, the Congress crisis is bigger than the Gandhis and thinking that it is not so may be yet another dangerous prevarication. It is not just Congress that is besieged today, but also the wider consensus it once presided over. Any Congress revival today, therefore, will also mean facing up to larger currents that are coming to the fore and resetting the equilibrium between the individual and community, majority and minority, society and politics, identity and nation — many of these shifts are being represented and shaped by non-Congress parties, especially the BJP.
A Congress revival will mean, most of all, not blaming the people for its steep decline. Because a party that puts the people in the dock is only backing itself into a corner — because it shrinks all the spaces to do politics and because you can’t elect a new people.
It is the death of political imagination and strategy, for instance, to call voters communal or bigoted. Democracy, after all, is about power shifts and impermanent conditions. It is sometimes about walls, but much more often, it is about the cracks in them that let in light and shadow.
As I write this letter to you, the CWC meeting is underway to finalise the schedule for the election of Congress president. For Congress, that will be a small but important step in what looks like a pretty long haul.
Till next week,
Vandita
Must Reads:
Editorial, “Listen to Azad”
Mrinal Pande, “Laddoo Gopal in Amrit Kaal”
Editorial, “Chief and Justice”
Sanjib Baruah, “The question in America”
Editorial, “Outsourcing politics”