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Oct 03, 2022

Is a New Ginger Group Emerging Out of the Congress's Bharat Jodo Yatra?

politics
The task that Rahul Gandhi and his colleagues seem to have set themselves is to ensure that the party does not slide into the moribund state in parts of the country where it remains relevant.
Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, Shashi Tharoor and others during the 'Bharat Jodo Yatra' in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Photo: Twitter/@ProfCong  via PTI

The long foot march led by Rahul Gandhi has the potential to impact the affairs of the Congress party. Those who had hoped for the Congress to meet its end in Kerala – where the march went on for 19 days since its entry into the state from Kanyakumari – are left disappointed. Gandhi seemed to have prevented this.

It is important to stress here that Kerala is among the states where the Congress, even if it lost in the 2021 assembly elections, can claim to possess a robust party organisation. The experience of clientelism that political scientist Rajni Kothari had said of the Congress in most parts of India has not been true with the party in Kerala.

Political awareness and agitational politics in Kerala had impacted the Congress in the region in a big way as much as it guided the growth of the political left. In other words, Kerala perhaps is among the states (as is Karnataka where Gandhi and the volunteers are scheduled to go after walking through Kerala) where the Congress has a base to talk about.

The task Gandhi and his colleagues seem to have set before themselves is to ensure that the party does not slide into the moribund state – like it had in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal since the 1980s – in parts of the country where the Congress still remains relevant. It can be said this seems to have been achieved.

The criticism among political commentators that the march has taken too long in Kerala was unfounded; the crowds that gathered on the path and in the public meetings wherever held is evidence that the yatra, if not anything more, has galvanised the party’s cadre and also garnered support from a host of thinkers and politically sensitive sections in the state.

In any case, for a generation of political commentators who have been groomed in an atmosphere where politics happens in the drawing rooms of leaders in Lutyens Delhi, a sustained programme on the roads is indeed new. That Gandhi did not abandon the march and fly into New Delhi (or Jaipur) to join the theatre of the absurd staged there is another important point to show that the 52-year-old former president of the Congress seems determined.

Also read: Just as Things Appeared to Be Falling in Place, Congress Is in Crisis Again

And even in his absence in New Delhi, the developments there – Gehlot and Digvijaya Singh opting out of the Congress president’s contest and Mallikarjun Kharge emerging as the most preferred candidate by the Gandhis – have established the efficacy of Rahul Gandhi in the developments. Apart from being a committed Congress leader, the election of the veteran Dalit leader from Karnataka may prove to be a bonus for the Grand Old Party in the state’s next assembly elections.

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi with senior leader Mallikarjun Kharge to the right. Photo: PTI

Unlike Gehlot or the party seniors on whom Sonia Gandhi has depended hitherto, the emergence of Kharge as the man who will, in all probability, emerge as the Congress party’s president, is reputed to be on the side of Rahul Gandhi – as was seen in the Udaipur Chintan Shivir earlier this year. He is committed, in his own way, to the issues that Rahul has foregrounded in the course of his foot march and even before:

To affirm the Congress party’s commitment to pluralism and democracy in the social and political sense against sectarian and majoritarian ideas.

To stress on the need for a course correction from the path the Congress party had chosen beginning in July 1991 and internalise the imperative for reversing the inequalities in the domain of the people’s daily life.

To restore the streets as the terrain for politics as against drawing room confabulations.

While it must be said that Gandhi had shown streaks of such imagination even while the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance wielded power at the Centre between 2004 and 2014, his interventions were in fits and bouts rather than framed in the manner he has managed to do in the past fortnight.

Also read: Rahul Gandhi’s March Is a Good Idea, but What About a Congress Jodo Yatra Too?

The impression he had sought to make at the time he steered the Congress party as the president, and especially, with the minimum income support programme (NYAY) in the party’s manifesto in 2019 was not taken up with conviction by the party’s entrenched leaders at that time.

It is this realisation that seems to have led him into gathering a “ginger group” in the party, and the foot march from Kanyakumari, without a doubt, is showing signs of this initiative maturing into a distinct possibility.

Those accompanying him in the yatra are distinctly the ones who have come into the Congress fold when the party seemed to become a thing of the past. They are men and women who did not seek pastures to preserve themselves unlike leaders such as Ghulam Nabi Azad or Himanta Biswa Sarma. And, this is evidence that a restoration of the Congress party is possible.

The role of ginger groups

A short foray into the role that ginger groups played in the past in the history of the Congress – from the days when it was called the Indian National Congress – will help underscore the importance of Gandhi’s agenda now. Those held in the Nasik jail after their arrest for participating in the Civil Disobedience Movement in the early 1930s gave this idea a shot. At that time, Jayaprakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan, Ashok Mehta, N.G. Goray, S.M. Joshi, Yusuf Meherally, along with the redoubtable Ram Manohar Lohia, resolved to bring themselves together and formed the Congress Socialist Party in 1934. They contributed immensely, conducting themselves as a ginger group within the Indian National Congress; Lohia himself acknowledged, many years later (in 1956), that this was the phase when the socialists were most effective.

Listen: ‘Congress-Mukt Bharat Not About a Party but an Idea of India – Bjp Wants One-Party State’

Then, in the 1960s, the Congress party was beginning to lose its pre-eminence, and this was evident in the reverses in 1967 when the party’s shift away from the Nehruvian socialist ideas to free-market ideas was challenged from within by yet another ginger group that came to be called the Young Turks. Among them were Chandra Shekar, Mohan Dharia, Ravindra Verma and others whom Indira Gandhi shielded and paraded against the Syndicate that pushed for the free-market ideas.

Former prime minister Chandra Shekar Singh with N.J. Antony. Photo: Manu Antony

The result was the decimation of the Syndicate and the Congress party’s restoration. This time, the party’s restoration was soon followed by its shift into a command mode and the authoritarian phase, the Emergency of 1975-77. And lest we forget, all those who constituted the ginger group this time stood up for democracy and played important roles in the Janata experiment too.

It is in this sense that one can see the Bharat Jodo Yatra on which Rahul Gandhi has set out as pregnant with potential for a change in the Congress party’s organisation, at least in those parts of the country where all is not lost – Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, apart from the central Indian states such as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

A far more important impact of this can be seen in the rise and consolidation of a ginger group within the party apparatus – the Pradesh Congress Committees and the All India Congress Committee – that can push those entrenched in these bodies into oblivion and thus push the Congress party closer to the ideas such as pluralism and democracy in the social sense. It can push the party to agree to the need for a course correction in the priorities set out in the reforms of 1991 and, most importantly, take politics to the streets from the drawing rooms in Lutyen’s Delhi.

A lot of this will depend on how the long march and its leader, Gandhi, manage to confront the challenges that will mount when it enters the north Indian states, particularly Uttar Pradesh, where it has very little organisational muscle. In any case, those who held the party’s reign in Uttar Pradesh and helped it land where it is now are not involved in this programme, even when the marchers are scheduled to travel between Bulandshahr and Ghaziabad a couple of months from now.

And here is a message: Gandhi seems to have set himself on a task to unsettle those entrenched in the party’s echelons as did the Nasik group in the 1930s and the Young Turks in the 1960s.

A task far more difficult now than in the past. But this is where Majrooh Sultanpuri’s verse assumes immense relevance:

Main akela hee chala that
Janibe manzil
Magar
Log saath aate gaye
Aur karvan banta  gaya

V. Krishna Ananth teaches history at Sikkim University, Gangtok. Among his books is Between Freedom and Unfreedom: The Press in Independent India.

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