What’s wrong with Congress? Everything, going by how well-prepared it is for elections

Rahul Gandhi has managed headlines but his party has no clarity on alliances, no plan except Modi-baiting & no organisational preparedness to take on BJP.

Representational image | Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg

New Delhi: At a meeting in February, Rahul Gandhi asked state Congress chiefs and legislative party leaders to specify the number of seats the party could win in their states in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot was unsure. Extrapolating the assembly election data, he said the party could win 12 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats, and needed to work on the remaining seats. Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam, meanwhile, was confident of winning “at least three” of the six seats in the city. Most other leaders, however, chose not to get into specific numbers.

“How could we predict the seats? We will get an idea closer to the elections, once the alliance is in place,” the Congress chief of a northern state told ThePrint.

Even today, Gandhi may not have an answer, as the party hasn’t been able to finalise its alliance even with committed allies. He had a meeting with Delhi Congress leaders Tuesday over the issue of stitching up an alliance with the Aam Admi Party (AAP) in Delhi and the latter shot down the idea.

In the meantime, the ruling BJP has sewn up its alliances and taken the fight to the next level by revving up its organisational machinery — with Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself addressing booth-level workers and party chief Amit Shah taking a series of meetings with office-bearers of Shakti Kendras (clusters of booths) across the country — and setting the electoral discourse on national security.

The Congress seems to be in disarray, with no clarity on alliances days before the elections, no narrative except Narendra Modi-baiting, and no organisational preparedness to take on the BJP’s well-oiled electoral machine.

Alliance conundrum

Left out of the SP-BSP tie-up in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress’ hard bargain with other regional outfits has stalled the formalisation of its alliances in many states — with the RJD in Bihar, the JD(S) in Karnataka, and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (JVM) in Jharkhand, to name a few.

In Karnataka, for instance, the JD(S) wants to contest 12 of the 28 Lok Sabha seats, but the Congress isn’t ready to concede more than six. The two ruling coalition partners in the state met Monday to sort out their differences but it remained inconclusive.

In Jharkhand, the proposed Congress-JMM-JVM-RJD alliance hasn’t taken off because the Babulal Marandi-led JVM wants to contest the Godda seat, held by BJP’s Nishikant Dubey. It claims that its MLA Pradeep Yadav’s agitation against land acquisition for an Adani power plant has made him popular, but the Congress isn’t in a mood to give up this seat as its candidate was the runner-up in 2014.

In Jammu & Kashmir, National Conference leader Omar Abdullah told ThePrint last week that his party was preparing to go it alone as the Congress was yet to approach it.

“Rahulji has left it to the state units to take a final call. He will go by what they say,” a Congress general secretary told ThePrint.

Another party functionary, however, blamed the Congress president for “confusing” workers on the ground. “He shares the dais with Mamata Banerjee and Chandrababu Naidu, and also wants party workers to fight against them in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. We must decide whether our priority is to dislodge Modi or strengthen the party.”

In West Bengal, the CPI(M) and the Congress, bitter rivals once, are now engaged in negotiations but there is no agreement in sight yet.

Sanjay Kumar, director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a Delhi-based think tank, summed up the party’s state of affairs in one word: “Poor.”

As for the alliances, he had a succinct explanation: “Hypothetically, if there is no chair of the Prime Minister, it won’t be difficult for them to come together.”

As Congress workers in many states keep their fingers crossed about their alliance partners, there is no activity on the ground even as the BJP’s campaign is moving at full throttle.

Organisational unpreparedness

At Gandhi’s February meeting, Haryana Congress chief Ashok Tanwar had sought the party chief’s help to forge an “internal alliance”, triggering laughter all around. He was referring to his tussle with former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda who, along with his MP son Deepender, has kept the BJP government on its toes with a series of farmers’ rallies over the past four years.

Although Tanwar failed to woo Dalits into the Congress fold — the strategy behind his appointment five years ago — his tug-of-war with the former chief minister has brought the party to a standstill. The Haryana Congress website is a testimony to it — the last activity it registers on its home page is a memorandum submitted by Tanwar to the Governor in May 2018, and also a picture of Gandhi’s rally in Sirsa in October 2014. The website has the picture of Kamal Nath as general secretary in-charge of the state, six weeks after Ghulam Nabi Azad replaced him. Thanks to infighting, Tanwar couldn’t appoint any district Congress committee presidents for five years.

The example of Haryana illustrates the party’s state of preparedness — or the lack of it —across the country. The party is hitting headlines in states for all the wrong reasons: Tanwar-versus-Hooda in Haryana, Kamal Nath-versus-Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh, Ashok Gehlot-versus-Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, Sanjay Nirupam-versus-Milind Deora in Mumbai, and so on.

In the past decade, Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly attributed electoral losses to organisational weaknesses but failed to address it. Instead of trying to connect with the people by raising issues of their concern and activating the party’s rank and file through programmatic actions, Gandhi has resorted to quick-fix solutions.

In Bihar, for instance, he appointed Ashok Choudhury, a Dalit leader, the state president in March 2013. He was sacked in September 2017 as he was allegedly trying to split the party, which he did six months later when he along with three MLCs joined the JD(U). The Congress president has now appointed a Brahmin, Madan Mohan Jha, as Choudhury’s successor.

Since 2007, when Gandhi started playing a role in organisational appointments, he has made several experiments in Uttar Pradesh, too — replacing a Muslim face, Salman Khurshid, with a Brahmin face, Rita Bauguna Joshi (now a minister in Yogi Adityanath government) in 2007, and then replacing her with a Vaish, Nirmal Khatri, in 2012. Khatri was replaced by actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar in 2016, who resigned about a year back but Gandhi has been unable to find his replacement. While his experiments in UP continue, the party’s fortune has been on a continuous downslide.

The latest in the series of Gandhi’s experiments is in Tripura, where the Congress was wiped out in the last assembly elections. Last week, he appointed 40-year-old Pradyot Manikya Debbarma as the new Tripura Congress chief. His credentials for the post: Son of a Congressman and sole heir of the 800-year-old Manikya dynasty.

Gandhi versus Amit Shah: An Unequal Match

It’s not just his inability to match up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity. Gandhi is found wanting even in matching his BJP counterpart’s rigour, perseverance and single-mindedness in terms of pursuing organisational goals.

Sample Amit Shah’s activities in the last week of February: Shakti Kendra sammelan in Palakkad (Kerala) and Ramanathapuram (Tamil Nadu), and a review meeting of delegates from 18 parliamentary constituencies in Madurai on 22 February; Kisan Morcha convention in Gorakhpur and Sahkari Bandhu Sammelan in Lucknow on 23 February; Shakti Kendra sammelan in Hisar, workers’ meeting in Amritsar and Vijay Sankalp Sammelan in Jammu on 24 February; a TV channel summit on 25 February; launch of the Kamal Jyoti Yojana in Ghazipur and Chaupal pe Charcha on 26 February; and a meeting with Akali Dal leaders and later at the Delhi BJP headquarters for the ‘mera booth, sabse mazboot’ programme on 28 February.

Rahul Gandhi’s engagements during the same period were: A public meeting at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh and interaction with students in a Delhi stadium on 22 February; a rally and a meeting with party leaders from the Northeast in Guwahati on 26 February; and an opposition parties’ meeting in Delhi on 27 February.

Congress leaders countered the common perception about Gandhi working in fits and starts, saying that no Congress president was as hard working as he is.

“You have seen him campaigning relentlessly for days and weeks during elections but you people only highlight his vacations. You find Amit Shah a superman just because his party has been winning,” said one of them. She, however, looked away when asked how else a party president could be judged.

Failure to set a narrative

If there is one thing Gandhi has got right, it’s his social media strategy. He has been sharp and witty in his Twitter posts, which has started getting more retweets and likes than what even Modi, with a much larger following, gets. But there is a flip side to it: Gandhi and his team seem to treat the small universe of Twitter as the barometer of his popularity. And a section of ‘old-fashioned’ party leaders is conscious of this.

“It’s good that his tweets have started making impact. But the game has now moved to Facebook and WhatsApp, and the BJP has already enlisted lakhs of groups,” said a Congress functionary who is not a part of Gandhi’s social media team.

Over the past two years, Gandhi has managed to be in the headlines, thanks largely to his no-holds-barred attacks on Modi. But the Congress president has failed to build a cogent narrative. He has been inconsistent, shifting from one subject to another — suit-boot ki sarkar, communal harmony, atrocities against Dalits, farm distress, demonetisation, crony capitalism, unemployment, Rafale, minimum income guarantee, and, last heard, the Congress’ ideology of “love” as against that of “hatred” of the BJP.

Most of these issues may not find resonance with people in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack and the subsequent India-Pakistan face-off. As it is, the Congress looks clueless as it struggles to counter the BJP’s poll narrative centred on national security.