At a crossroads
The Congress must decide whether its leader will be chosen on merit or going by the last name
The provisional president of Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, checked the organisational pulse at a meeting of general secretaries and said State-level leaders lacked clarity and cohesion. She blamed hierarchical loose ends for communication from the headquarters not often percolating down to the grassroots workers. She obliquely criticised the dissident group known as G-23, saying personal ambitions were bad. As a result, she complained, the Congress was found wanting in its ideological fight against the BJP-RSS campaign. When the supreme leader herself has complaints about the organisation, something is wrong somewhere. To begin with, what is the position of secularism in the Congress ideology when the leadership adopts soft Hindutva as a strategic tool? Recent party debates, if any, on this critical issue are not available for perusal. Two, how does the party approach elections in current times; does it go it alone or, if in partnership, as a senior or junior partner? The party leadership is yet to shed its mystic image that, one, as a national party, it is the natural challenger to the BJP; and two, it is the natural leader of the rest of the Opposition for any joint challenge. Amid confusion on this count, the party has faced this quandary in the run-up to several Assembly elections. In Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav rued that the Congress demanded 70 seats as its share as a junior partner but managed to win only 19. Should seats be left to the Congress to lose, he asked, putting a full stop to their alliance.
It was said after the 2020 Bihar elections that a more practical seat-sharing formula could have seen the RJD pip the BJP as the single largest party by a bigger margin. The Congress leadership’s writ, ideology-wise or organisationally, is being questioned by insiders than by outsiders. The fruitless leadership tussle that still festers in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan is a prime example. The use of Navjot Sidhu to unseat Captain Amarinder Singh has boomeranged, with the latter now on the verge of forming a party with links with the BJP. That can only mean avoidable electoral woes for the Congress. Within the party, the G-23 has created a space for itself and its growing resonance is beginning to matter to the leadership. The tallest leaders after the Gandhi family are part of this group. Taking action against them means erasing the entire second-rung leadership. The group is raising one demand: elections to the Congress Working Committee and the Central Election Committee because that would end the culture of patronage. Twelve of the 25 members of the CWC and half the members of the CEC are supposed to be elected members though, in Sonia’s tenure, they have always been nominated. The G-23 believes that it will be difficult to remove elected members and wants collective leadership to replace family leadership. The latter will have to decide whether the organisational elections in early 2022 are to be democratic.
Source: The Pioneer
