Will Congress be able to make a strong comeback again?

The discussion on the Congress crisis has become boring now, it has been going on for a very long time. After the defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, this crisis of his has only deepened. After the resignation of Rahul Gandhi in 2019, this crisis itself has started looking directionless. But here two incidents happened in the Congress party, one is the change of leadership in Punjab and the other is the joining of Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mevani in the party.

It is not a small decision for the Congress party to remove a leader like Captain Amarinder Singh from the post of Chief Minister and to include young leaders with solid ideologies like Kanhaiya, Jignesh in the party. So can this be considered as a step towards establishing the leadership of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi over the party and forming a new Congress party according to them? If so, the Congress can hope to find a foothold in this seemingly endless crisis.

Today the Congress party is going through a double crisis which is both internal and external but the internal crisis is deeper due to which the party is not able to function as a political organization. The long-running process of generational change is stuck in the party, causing a stampede among the restless youth leaders of the party. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, between 2014 and 2021, around 399 Congress leaders have left the party, including 177 MPs and MLAs. On the other hand, the leaders of the older generation continue to stand in the way of Rahul Gandhi, who is now known as the G-23 group.

While resigning after the 2019 defeat, Rahul Gandhi had asked Congress leaders to take accountability, take tough decisions to reorganize the party and elect a non-Gandhi president. But some of this could not happen, on the contrary everything has become more complicated than before. At present, Sonia Gandhi is the interim president and Rahul Gandhi remains the biggest and most influential leader of the party without taking any responsibility. There is also confusion about ideology in the party. The party is swinging between soft Hindutva and secularism/liberalism.

Today the Congress party is going through a double crisis which is both internal and external but the internal crisis is deeper due to which the party is not able to function as a political organization. The long-running process of generational change is stuck in the party, causing a stampede among the restless youth leaders of the party. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, between 2014 and 2021, around 399 Congress leaders have left the party, including 177 MPs and MLAs. On the other hand, the leaders of the older generation continue to stand in the way of Rahul Gandhi, who is now known as the G-23 group.

While resigning after the 2019 defeat, Rahul Gandhi had asked Congress leaders to take accountability, take tough decisions to reorganize the party and elect a non-Gandhi president. But some of this could not happen, on the contrary everything has become more complicated than before. At present, Sonia Gandhi is the interim president and Rahul Gandhi remains the biggest and most influential leader of the party without taking any responsibility. There is also confusion about ideology in the party. The party is swinging between soft Hindutva and secularism/liberalism.

Modi-Shah’s BJP and Sangh Parivar are already there as an external challenge for the Congress, but now many regional parties are also seeing this weakness of Congress as an opportunity for themselves, especially Mamata Banerjee’s TMC i.e. All India Congress. The Indian Trinamool Congress and Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party are hoping to realize their all-India plans on Congress soil. The Aam Aadmi Party has been showing such plans in the past, but this time Mamta Banerjee is seen moving in this direction very seriously and in a planned manner. In this work, election strategist Prashant Kishor is seen as his charioteer. In the last few months, the TMC has managed to induct several Congress leaders from Assam, Goa and Meghalaya into its camp.

Congress is also not unaware of this, in the past, Congress Parliamentary Party leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury has attacked Mamta Banerjee saying that she wants to make her own “Mamata” Congress by taking the place of Congress, that is why she sends Congress leaders from different states. Joining your party. There has also been an allegation of collusion between Prashant Kishor’s organization IPAC and TMC for this work by Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury. It is worth noting that recently, Goa Congress leader and former Chief Minister Luizinho Fellero, who left the Congress party and joined Trinamool, had given a statement that he had joined TMC on the advice of Prashant Kishor.

In Indian politics, the opposition has not been strong for most of the time but has never been so ineffective as in the present times. Congress’s weakness has a big role in this. Anyway, in today’s era as an ideology, the real challenge to the BJP and the Sangh Parivar is from the Congress and the Left. In this matter, other regional parties do not present any challenge to the BJP. That is why today the crisis of Congress has become the crisis of the opposition of Indian politics.

Today, as the opposition, the Congress is facing a party that does its politics on the basis of ideology. The Narendra Modi government of the BJP is busy building a new India on the basis of its ideology. With the legacy of independence and being the dominant ruling party during the last 75 years, the Congress had shaped India in its own way. Now it does not see any program or blueprint against the Hindutva nationalism of the BJP. Therefore, if the Congress has to return to the contest, it will have to work both at the organizational and ideological level. It will have to return to its roots and bring on its agenda the values ​​and ideas inherited by it during the freedom movement, to introduce the concept of inclusive and pluralistic nationalism as against the radical and singular nationalism, only then will it lose its lost The land that has been acquired can be regained.

The second big crisis is that of leadership, despite all the efforts, Rahul Gandhi has not been able to establish his supremacy in the party. Even after resigning from the post of party president, he is taking all the decisions of the party today. At the same time, as the leader of the “only” opposition of the country, he single-handedly tries to surround the Modi government. In this exercise, his party organization is missing. The leaders of the G-23 group are questioning this authority without any post of Rahul Gandhi, which cannot be called unreasonable.

Whatever may be the intention of Prashant Kishor, but one cannot disagree with his tweet regarding the Congress party in the past, in which he wrote that ‘Those who take the Lakhimpur Kheri incident as a revival of the old party. Seeing, they are bound to be disappointed as there is no immediate solution to the major problems and structural weaknesses of the party.

If the Congress wants to give a foothold to its crisis, then first of all it has to solve its three internal crises, ideology, leadership and organizational disintegration.

BY-Rajeev Choudhary