26 October 2023 is the first anniversary of Mallikarjun Kharge as Congress president, the first non-Gandhi to helm the party in 25 years. Don’t expect any gala cake-cutting ceremony, though. You won’t see Congress leaders queuing up outside his office or home with bouquets and garlands — they would rather sing paeans to him in private. Real or imagined, three eyes are believed to watch them all the time. But don’t blame their obsessions. They are just being Congressmen and Congresswomen.
Away from the gaze of the three eyes, these Congress leaders tell you in private how Kharge’s first year has been a “watershed” period in many ways. No, the Gandhi family’s grip on the party hasn’t slackened — look at the Working Committee that Kharge reconstituted. It has become an 84-member jumbo body because family loyalists had to be accommodated to banish dissidence for good. Kharge hasn’t made any significant organisational overhaul at the top level because he can’t drop Rahul Gandhi loyalists and paper tigers like KC Venugopal and Randeep Surjewala who either run away from electoral contests or lose even assembly polls. When it comes to Venugopals and Surjewalas of the party, Kharge looks helpless.
But he is not losing his sleep over this. The Gandhis, for all their privileges, have shown due respect for the post of the Congress president. For instance, at party events, they ensure that they wait for Kharge to arrive and leave. His unquestionable loyalty to the family and the party has also been a contributing factor to the high trust quotient between the two sides.
This harmony with the Gandhis marks a positive in Kharge’s first year as the party chief. But his real achievement is using his equation with the Gandhis to implement what looks like poll strategist Prashant Kishor’s ‘4 M’ formula to revive the Congress—Messenger, Message, Machinery, and Mechanics.
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Two ‘Ms’ that worked
Let me talk about the last two first — the party organisation and the way it functions. Before Kharge took over, the Congress looked like a drifting ship without a captain. Leaders and workers didn’t know who to approach and how, the Gandhis remained largely inaccessible or reluctant to act, and self-proclaimed family loyalists were having a field day. Ascending to the top party post, Kharge, a bigger loyalist, didn’t proactively disempower them. He only made their backroom games irrelevant by becoming a hands-on party chief who was all ears to workers and leaders. He isn’t afraid to crack the whip if need be and doesn’t believe in deferring decisions.
In one year, Kharge has turned out to be a plain-speaking president—who could talk tough with Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot over Dalit atrocities in his state: “What face will I, Dalit president of Congress, show to the people?” He even instructed the CM to fulfil rival Sachin Pilot’s demands.
At the same time, Kharge told Pilot to have patience and win back party workers’ and leaders’ trust, reminding him that he didn’t get the Karnataka CM’s chair but kept working in the party’s interest. The Congress president’s tough, non-partisan talks have ensured a truce between the two gladiators of Rajasthan politics. Gehlot is still at his provocative best, declaring that the CM’s chair doesn’t and will not “let me go” in future either, but Pilot has so far chosen to follow the party president’s advice.
This no-nonsense approach of Kharge resulted in the truce between Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar in Karnataka, and Bhupesh Baghel and TS Singh Deo in Chhattisgarh. Party insiders say that when a group of Telangana Congress chief Revanth Reddy’s detractors met Kharge to complain against him, the president categorically told them that there wouldn’t be any leadership change and they had to work with Reddy. He, however, gave a piece of his mind to Reddy, instructing him to take his colleagues along. When former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s detractors—Kumari Selja and Randeep Surjewala—came to complain, the Congress president gave a patient hearing but did little to encourage them. He knows Hooda remains the party’s best bet in Haryana.
Kharge’s style of functioning has worked. The Congress is looking relatively cohesive after a long time. Moreover, he is aware of the party’s limitations — the Congress is not a cadre-based party. It doesn’t have the support of an organisation like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a formidable supply chain for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to draw ideologically committed cadres. The RSS also lays the groundwork for the BJP to build on. Given decades of neglect and decay in the Congress organisation, the BJP model of grassroots structures like booth committees and panna pramukhs or page committees is difficult to replicate overnight.
Kharge is, therefore, not trying to bring a revolution in the Congress. He is building it one brick at a time, relying more on oiling the existing party machinery and motivating the current leadership to deliver. It seems to be working fine for now.
“The so-called booth committees and panna pramukhs are overhyped. If the people want a change, they do it, no matter what. The BJP has them but where did they go in Delhi or Karnataka? The thing is when the BJP wins, Amit Shah’s organisational skill is given the credit and when it loses, local leadership is blamed,” a Congress MP told me recently. This assessment may not be fair to booth workers or panna pramukhs who can actually build a narrative on the ground so people can make up their minds. But, yes, the effectiveness of the machinery and the mechanics largely depends on the other two Ms in PK’s playbook—message and messenger.
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Two ‘Ms’ Kharge can’t do much about
PK argues that the messenger doesn’t have to be the same person who runs the organisation or engineers its mechanics. Their role is to strike a chord with the people and deliver the message effectively—something Prime Minister Narendra Modi does for the BJP, leaving the rest for Amit Shah and his team. For long, Rahul Gandhi was all in one. With Kharge’s ascension as Congress president, Rahul assumed the messenger’s role full-time. He seems to be enjoying it, too. Whether he is Modi’s match or not is beside the point.
Modi’s charisma makes him a great messenger, but what also helps is the message he carries. In the BJP’s case, as PK says, the message comprises Hindutva, hyper-nationalism, and welfarism. It has proved to be a formidable message for the opposition to outmatch. As it is, the Congress doesn’t have a coherent message yet — it’s largely banking on anti-incumbency by focusing on failures of governance. But it seems to be working on a message now. It is experimenting with Other Backward Classes (OBC) politics through caste census demand, rich-versus-poor narrative through attacks on big businessmen and industrialists like Gautam Adani, freebies to match welfarism, love-versus-hate, and Kamal Nath-style I-am-a-bigger-Hindu campaigns to counter Hindutva. Jury is out on whether this message can counter Modi’s or the BJP’s in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Kharge looks conscious of the importance of a coherent message. His intervention in the party’s stance on the ongoing Middle East crisis came as an indicator. As per his directions, Congress’ communication chief Jairam Ramesh had condemned the Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel while supporting the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. It was a perfectly balanced view. Then came a CWC resolution, skipping any mention of the Hamas attack. It drew flak from political adversaries who found in it another instance of minority appeasement. Congress insiders, who work closely with Kharge, claim that he never wanted a reference to the Middle East crisis in the resolution. It was mentioned because of some ‘clerical error’ at the time of its release, and Kharge was upset about it, they say. Well, that Kharge was upset was evident when he tweeted on Thursday to reiterate the party’s stand as spelt out by Ramesh. He would surely know by now who got that paragraph inserted in the CWC resolution.
In a nutshell, Kharge has set the 138-year-old party’s rusty wheels in motion in his first year—to an extent, by working on its machinery and mechanics. There is nothing he can do about the party’s messenger and whether or not Rahul Gandhi is a match for Modi. As for PK’s last M—Message—in 2024, it remains a big challenge. Results of the upcoming assembly elections may be crucial in this context. As it is, the Congress is looking relatively better with a non-Gandhi at the helm.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)