New Delhi: On Wednesday, the Congress’ sole legislator in the Uttar Pradesh legislative council, Deepak Singh, retired, leaving the party no representation in the UP council for the first time ever.
The development comes after the party faced a massive drubbing in the state’s assembly elections earlier this year, when it managed to win only two seats — it had won seven in the previous polls in 2017. Its vote share also came down to just about two per cent.
The party’s campaign for the 2022 polls had been helmed by state in-charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who with her women-centric campaign — Ladki Hoon, Ladd Sakti Hoon — had failed to significantly change the Congress’ fortune.
After the elections, the party’s state unit president, Ajay Lallu, was asked to resign, and the party is still struggling to find his replacement, said sources in the party.
“We have not seen Priyanka Gandhi and her team after the elections. No one knows what is happening. How can we be without a leader for over three months?” asked a Congress functionary from Rae Bareli, once considered to be the bastion of the party and a Gandhi-family strong-hold. The party’s interim president, Sonia Gandhi, is the Lok Sabha MP from the constituency. Her son, and Congress MP, Rahul Gandhi, lost their other bastion — the adjoining constituency of Amethi — to BJP’s Smriti Irani in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Sources in the Congress said that Gandhi-Vadra was still helming all decision-making in Uttar Pradesh, and was finding it difficult to fill the post of party president.
“There are leaders like Aradhana Misra-Mona, who she (Gandhi-Vadra) wanted to put in-charge but leaders like her — one of the few left in UP Congress who still have some clout — would not like to take charge of a failing state unit,” said an All India Congress Commitee functionary.
“Other senior leaders like P.L. Punia are too old to take up the mantle. Unlike in Punjab and other states, the younger crop of leaders in UP are not yet competent enough to take on the mantle,” the AICC functionary added.
While political experts point out that the party’s UP unit has traditionally been “remote controlled” from Delhi — which became an issue once the Congress lost power at the Centre — sources in the party said the problem had more to do with Priyanka and Rahul’s lack of connect with the cadre.
In the recently held Rajya Sabha elections, the party sent three candidates from the state to the Upper House, ostensibly on Gandhi-Vadra’s insistence, said party sources.
“Congress fought the 2022 state assembly elections strongly. We raised the issues of the public, but the results have been opposite. Since the Vidhan Parishad election results are mainly reflective of the assembly poll results, the Vidhan Parishad seats are vacant as the Vidhan Parishad members are chosen after the state assembly polls,” Uttar Pradesh Pradesh Congress Committee spokesperson, Sachin Rawat, told ThePrint.
ThePrint also reached senior UP Congress leaders Ajay Lallu, Aradhana Misra, Pawan Khera and Supriya Shrinate on call and text messages for comment on the issue, but received no response till the time of publication of this article.
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Remote control revival
Talking to ThePrint, Gilles Verniers, associate professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, said that historically, the Congress has found it difficult to bounce back in states where its vote share falls below 20 per cent. The reason, he said, is lack of leadership.
“Most of the party’s cadres, when the Congress declines in a state, leaves the party or shifts to other parties. Either another party is created like the YSRCP or the NCP, or cadres just shift to other parties, including the BJP. So, the crisis then is structural. It’s not just the disenchantment of voters, it’s also an organisational problem. And the party just doesn’t have the resources, or the leadership, to rebuild the organisation,” Verniers said.
In UP, the Congress in the past few years has lost many senior leaders. While Jitin Prasada and R.P.N. Singh have moved to the BJP, Lalitesh Pati Tripathi has moved to Trinamool Congress, as that party plans its expansion in the Hindi heartland.
According to Verniers, the party’s discourse in Uttar Pradesh, for the past 20 years, has been about rebuilding the organisation, but nothing has come out of it.
There is also the problem of the central leadership imposing itself on the state unit.
“If you go back to books about the Congress that were written in the ‘60s — like those by (political scientist) Paul Brass, for example — they talked about the fact that the UP unit of the Congress was run by Delhi. It’s been a long-standing feature of the party to run India’s largest states from Delhi. One cannot remember a strong Congress figure from UP who derived their authority from their own embeddedness in UP. But that’s worked only as long as the Congress was in power at the centre,” said Verniers.
He added: “Now that they are not in power at the Centre, they obviously cannot remote-control revival from Delhi.”
‘Gandhis lack connect’
While Verniers’ hypothesis regarding the state unit being remote controlled from Delhi is true, according to party sources, leaders from the Gandhi bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli said that the problem is not with the remote control being in Delhi, but the fact that it is now in the wrong hands.
“When Indira Gandhi was around, she would know the names of all the state and district functionaries and even recognised them by face. She came and met the people. She knew what they wanted. The siblings (Rahul and Priyanka) hardly ever come here, unless there’s an election campaign. Even then they don’t know more than 5-10 people who surround them. They lack connect with the state unit as a whole,” said the Congress functionary from Rae Bareli, quoted above.
“There is a sort of arrogance as well,” he added.
“When Aditi Singh (former Congress leader, now in the BJP) announced that she would run from here (in this year’s election), we were strictly instructed to make sure that she doesn’t win. But that is not how it works. Her father has more goodwill here than the two Gandhi siblings,” the Rae Bareilly functionary added.
A district functionary from Amethi, on the other hand, said that the leadership is “paying too much attention to getting social equations right” and not enough on retaining and grooming state-level leaders.
“There is no one we can turn to. The organisation doesn’t have any heft, our cadres are demotivated and our suggestions never reach the leadership. The ticket distribution during the elections was also not up to the mark, with people using their influence and closeness to Gandhi-Vadra’s team to secure tickets,” said the Amethi functionary.
“I’m not sure what the plan ahead is, but all of us are in the dark,” he added.
With inputs from Sikha Salaria
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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