An inside report: What is happening in the Congress?

What’s the problem with the Grand Old Party? What are its roots and symptoms? And what’s the way out? HT spoke to Congress leaders, activists, and former partymen to decode all that has gone wrong

New Delhi:  The Congress is confronting the most serious crisis in its electoral history since 1951. 

Since the 2019 debacle in the Lok Sabha elections, the second in a row, it has not won a majority in a single assembly election on its own. (File Photo)

Since the 2019 debacle in the Lok Sabha elections, the second in a row, it has not won a majority in a single assembly election on its own. The party has 690 legislators across state assemblies in the country; its national rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has almost double that, with 1,376 legislators. 

The failure to win power in even one of the five states that recently went to polls — Uttar Pradesh (UP), Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur — doesn’t just diminish its position ahead of the Presidential elections in July, but also threatens to increase its already alarming attrition rates among the rank and file. 

So, what’s the problem? What are its roots and symptoms? And what’s the way out? HT spoke to a range of Congress leaders and activists, in Delhi and outside, as well as those who have quit the party in recent years for greener pastures. There is a deep sense of foreboding about the future, with the party struggling to find a formula to tackle the Narendra Modi-led BJP. While many argue that the slide is not irreversible, they acknowledge that a course correction will require a set of radical measures.

The story of legislative numbers 

The first challenge seems to be to acknowledge the enormity of the problem. Take the story of the party’s legislative strength.

The figure of 690 Congress legislators — which some have used to attest to the party’s strength — hides the fact that regional parties have a far greater say today in the Opposition space than they ever did in relation to the Congress. 

The Trinamool Congress (TMC), with 233 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), the Aam Aadmi Party (156 MLAs), YSR Congress (150), Biju Janata Dal (114 MLAs) and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (103 MLAs) — which are often seen as possible constituents of so-called federal front — together have more legislators than the Congress Party.

Or take the Rajya Sabha. 

By June this year, the Congress may not even be in a position to claim the status of having the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha; in the House of 250 members, that requires a minimum of 25 members of Parliament (MPs). The party has 34 MPs at the moment in the upper house, but there are many who are due to retire by June. This will bring the party’s strength to 20 MPs. While the party is set to gain four more MPs (from Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh), at 24, it will be the Chairperson's prerogative on giving the party the official status. Note that the Congress will fall to this low from 68 MPs it had in 2014, while, in the same period, the BJP will go up from having 46 to 100 MPs.

These numbers are revealing for they don’t just show how far the Congress is from winning power, but how it is struggling to even register a strong legislative presence as the Opposition. In a political system that depends on mediation by elected representatives — who give access to state institutions to their voters and workers — the shrinking number of elected representatives, both MPs and MLAs, has a direct impact on reducing the party’s political influence. And it reduces the incentive for leaders with electoral ambitions to stay on in the party. 

The story of talent management 

According to the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) data, in the period 2014-21, 177 sitting MPs and MLAs left the Congress. And those who have left are not just neglected fringe leaders, but key leaders in official positions, such as general secretary Jyotiraditya Scindia and Congress Working Committee (CWC) members Sushmita Dev and Jitin Prasada. And when a leader quits, workers and voters loyal to that leader in a particular geography or from a particular social group leave. More significantly, it sends out a message to the workers on the ground that the party’s prospects are weak.

Anil K Antony, national co-coordinator of social media and digital communications of the Congress, said, “There has to be an introspection on why so many are leaving. It’s certainly disappointing. A house divided cannot stand. Most of the current leaders pushing for certain reforms have also contributed many decades to the cause of the party, and they are now giving suggestions. Everyone hopefully will be taken on board under Mrs Gandhi’s leadership and will move forward.”

Take the case of Bhupender Chaudhary, 32, a young party worker from Haryana who was actively involved in the farmers' protests but quit the party last week. Chaudhary's social media profile with 32,000 followers carries a tag of “Proud Congressi”, but the recent assembly results made him rethink his options.

“A party worker like me is not going by the top leadership. We need a strong tier 2 and tier 3 leadership to guide us. That is completely missing,” he said. “I don't understand the decisions the party takes. What was the point of appointing Navjot Singh Sidhu as the President of Punjab Congress when he attacked even the CM?”

As an active participant in the farmer protests at the periphery of Delhi last year, he was certain that the party would return to power in the next Haryana elections. Now, he is not so sure.

Electoral losses only explain one part of the story of the exodus. The party’s inability to use the talent that remains is another part. In the recent elections, Chaudhary worked for Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) leader Jayant Singh's campaign rather than his own. Why? The RLD offered him work while his own party hadn't given him any assignments. 

That is also true of other senior leaders who seemed to be languishing in the Congress, but are now active in other parties. HT spoke to two such leaders who did not wish to be named because they didn't want to be linked with the Congress anymore.

“The biggest difference in the BJP is that I am working all the time. During elections, I didn't come to Delhi for 90 days because I didn't have the time. I did three meetings every day and even when there was no meeting assigned to me, I would just go and meet my community people because that's the culture here. If my boss is doing so many meetings, then I will have to work too,'' he said. He is happy that he was able to deliver the four districts that were assigned to him in the state. “Delivering is the only thing that matters in the BJP.”

The second leader didn't join a winning party, but has been travelling for public meetings. “The problem for the Congress now is that politics is a 24x7 job and so you have to take quick decisions,” said the former MP. “For instance, they took months to declare a replacement for Rajeev Satav who died of Covid-19 last year. How could they have left Gujarat, which is heading to elections, headless?''

The leadership seems dismissive of these concerns and these exits. In an interview to HT, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that the party was better off sticking with those who wanted to stay. But this view ignores not just the party leadership’s culpability in creating circumstances that have led to exits, but also the enormous drain that it represents in terms of the institutional investment that the party has made in these leaders.

The challenge of the feedback loop

One of the key demands of Congress leader and now change-seeker Ghulam Nabi Azad at a recent meeting was that the Congress President should be accessible. While Sonia Gandhi's health concerns have limited interactions during the pandemic, what upset the rebels was that the decision-making process excluded seniors like them. In their statement after a stock-taking meeting, they said, “The only way forward is for the Congress to adopt the model of collective and inclusive leadership and decision making at all levels.”

This charge of not being inclusive in decisions is countered by other party leaders and even those who are no longer with the party. In fact, many believe that the Congress has a greater level of democracy than the BJP, with general secretaries and state-in-charges deciding tickets and several other key issues. However, where senior leader Kapil Sibal's charges on this issue stick is the difficulty in meeting the Gandhis to resolve issues. 

In a political party plagued with infighting, there are always complaints of lack of fair play or key feedback to be conveyed. Here, the leadership, particularly Rahul Gandhi, seems to be relying on general secretary (organisation), KC Venugopal, and CWC member and chief spokesperson, Randeep Surjewala, to be their intermediaries. This has led to resentment among key leaders who feel that their messages are not being relayed properly.  

To be sure, every Congress President has had their favourite aides. For instance, it was Ahmed Patel and Pranab Mukherjee for Sonia Gandhi while Rajiv Gandhi had his own kitchen cabinet with the likes of Arun Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar. However, since Venugopal is low-key and doesn't have an established relationship with various power centres, the communication gap gets magnified.

“It is unfortunate that someone would question Rahul Gandhi's accessibility because he has been with party workers and been their voice as well,'' said party MP and close Gandhi aide and loyalist, Manickam Tagore. 

However, dissenters point out that if the leadership was so accessible and received accurate inputs, the party would have known soon after the voting in recent assembly polls that they were losing all the elections. “All the people surrounding the Gandhis obviously told them that they are winning Uttarakhand and Goa. After voting day, if you don't know the truth, then obviously you are totally disconnected from reality or someone is misleading you because they don't want you to be upset,” said a leader who worked on the 2021 assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry, which the Congress lost as well. 

A symbol of this weakness in the feedback loop is the party's failure to do any kind of course correction. For instance, when the Congress lost the polls last year in Puducherry, Kerala, Bengal, and Assam, the party set up a panel led by former chief minister Ashok Chavan. This panel spent 30 days doing some serious research and travelling to the states to find out what went wrong. For instance, they found that the tie-up with All India United Democratic Front in Assam led to polarisation and gave an advantage to the BJP. Similarly, the alliance in Bengal with a Muslim outfit was seen as a factor in the party being wiped out; the panel also found that ticket distribution had been mismanaged in Assam. However, after all that work, this information was tightly locked up, with very few getting word of the findings. This is not surprising as reports by AK Antony about several elections, including the 2014 one, have never been circulated within the party for them to learn from it.

So here is a mix of diminished legislative strength, diminished hope in the party’s electoral strength and future, diminished incentives of leaders to stay on in the party, diminished morale of party workers, the diminished ability of the party leadership to use and manage talent, and diminished accessibility. To this, add uncertainty about actual decision-making, and a convoluted leadership structure, and the contours of the crisis become clearer. 

The challenge of professional decision-making 

Rahul Gandhi resigned as party president in 2019, but the overwhelming — if not unanimous — perception in the party is that he is in charge and takes all the critical decisions. This unofficial status undermines any possibility of professional decision-making. 

The Congress’s office-bearers look only towards him or seek his counsel to take key decisions. Every appointment is suspected to be reserved for those who are favourable to the Gandhis or their selected intermediaries, even when this may not necessarily be true. Loyalty, or perceived loyalty, trumps competence. 

The group of dissenting leaders — G-23 as they have come to be known — point out that if decisions were taken only on merit, then articulate MPs such as Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari would have had a starring role in the Lok Sabha.

The arbitrary manner in which leaders are chosen for assignments and roles was also evident during recent elections. Critics point out that those who have never fought elections or fought them a long time ago were made observers in states such as Manipur and Goa. And they ask why Harish Rawat was made in-charge of Punjab when Uttarakhand was going to polls at the same time?

The party also appears to lack outside support mechanisms that are now a staple of Indian election management, and this is reflected in its approach to hiring core election management professionals. The party has been too slow in adapting to change and the role strategists play in winning elections. 

The Congress is still dependent on “mahaul” (mood) of voters when this election has shown that it’s the silent voter who is really at play. An external professional agency that does mood surveys and homework along with social media analysis may have conveyed the right picture to the party in Punjab. Rahul Gandhi informed CWC members that his surveys showed that Sidhu had a high 45% popularity across the state, when Sidhu couldn't even retain his own seat in Amritsar. The obvious question then would be how the surveyors came to this conclusion, or whether they have been held to account. However, that cycle of expected accountability is missing. 

The party recently inducted a former Prashant Kishor aide and election strategist, Sunil Kanugolu who will set up such an election cell to work on Karnataka and then for 2024. However, one insider pointed out a glaring issue. “Kanugolu has joined the Congress and now, but as a Congressman, will he be able to speak truth to power? Will he be able to tell [Rahul] Gandhi when his idea is not working on the ground? That is why a consultant is needed,” they said.

The flaws in decision-making send out a negative message to voters outside, but it also creates a system where power operates without accountability, where decisions are taken by the leadership or by others in the name of the leadership without adequate rigour, resentment builds up further, and the gap between leadership and the party grows.

The challenge of leadership 

Any discussion on the way forward begins with the question of leadership. 

“Earlier, many thought that the BJP had too many resources or used investigating agencies to get an unfair advantage, but not anymore. I think people now think and know that the blame lies internally for our dismal performance,” said a senior leader. As the ones leading the party, dissenters believe that the blame falls on the Gandhis. 

But the leadership’s loyalists believe this is unfair. “Too often, we look upon the Gandhis to have all the solutions,” said party MP Gaurav Gogoi, adding, “but that also absolves others of their individual duties. We should see how we can all contribute.”

Others offer a way out. “I think the first thing the party needs to do is to ask voters across India who they want to see taking on Modi. If we can find out who the people prefer and whether it is Rahul Gandhi, that will immediately solve many of the party’s problems,” said a former MP, who didn't want to be named. She clarified that Gandhi could head the party but if the survey threw up someone else’s name, then that person should be portrayed as the party's face for 2024 elections.

When election strategist Prashant Kishor presented his formula to win the 2024 polls to the Gandhis, he was very clear on one point. The leadership issue needed to be fixed and a non-Gandhi needed to play a top leadership role ideally as the party president or as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would still play very important roles as, perhaps, parliamentary party leader and election in-charge respectively, but giving the top post to a non-Gandhi would blunt the dynasty factor that is constantly used to attack the party. 

Kishor’s other key idea was to reach out to all those parties that emerged out of the original Congress — the TMC, Nationalist Congress Party, YSR Congress, and other key allies such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the National Conference. The G23 also consistently refers to the need to reach out to like-minded parties. 

While it is easy to conclude that these suggestions were considered too radical for the Gandhis — which is why Kishor's talks fell through — till September last year, the top leadership seemed willing to accept these changes. Even after that plan collapsed, the need for such a team has been keenly felt.

“I think we just need a core team of people with a winning track record that will work consistently across the country and especially in key seats where we will come face to face with the BJP,” said Gogoi.

But beyond team building, the core challenge is Rahul Gandhi’s image, which party insiders claim, needs to be projected much better. “Gandhi is loved by many but a leader needs to be feared. Maybe that's his failing. Punjab leaders like Sidhu and Sunil Jakhar publicly fought without fear of angering the boss,” said a person who worked in close proximity with Gandhi for years. A systematic BJP campaign, according to the party, has eroded Gandhi’s image — and the Congress has failed in countering it. 

“The momentum that was there last time with my Una campaign and Hardik's Patidar agitation is frankly missing,” admits new entrant in Gujarat, Jignesh Mevani. But he also adds, “I have enormous faith in RG (Rahul Gandhi). I know that this man will never ditch this country.” Mevani may have the faith, but India’s citizens have not yet shown this faith. And time is running out.