‘Indira Bhavan’, the brand-new headquarters of the Congress party, was inaugurated on January 15, 2025. The walls are adorned with pictures of its prominent leaders from 1885 till now. A sage step was to include the names and pictures of the leaders who left the Congress, joined other parties or formed new ones and were critical of the party thereafter. This step will go a long way in asserting its leadership tradition being usurped since 2014 as well as the democratic culture of dissent and multitude of opinions that has fed into its ideology.
However, the naming of the headquarters as Indira Bhawan is myopic as it curtails the organisational roots by over eight decades; aside from bringing in the avoidable blemish of ‘Emergency’. Dadabhai Naoroji Bhawan should have been more appropriate, or even Gokhale, Tilak or Mahatma Gandhi.
Befuddled as this move is, the Congress’s recent political strategies in the wake of the Delhi Legislative Assembly elections also indicate the grand old party’s inability to adapt to contemporary India’s intricate political scenario; it has already started with a self-perception of an also-ran.
This is when Delhi, though important as the national capital, is a Union Territory with a highly truncated power structure that is continuously mauled by a highly partisan Lieutenant Governor. A partnership with INDIA ally Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) could not work out and the two parties are fiercely lacerating each other; a strategy under which they will eat into each other’s votes, benefiting the BJP. How this could happen is baffling.
The elections in 2024 – one national and eight in the states – have only exposed the party’s multidimensional frailty. Though the addition of 47 Lok Sabha seats in the general elections was a morale booster and despite its convincing success in Telangana, Jharkhand and J&K as a junior partner, it faced flailing in Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim.
It’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Haryana and loss as the junior-most partner in Maharashtra, once a Congress stronghold, stresses the decrepitude in India’s ‘epochal party’. It now needs to strengthen itself in terms of leadership, ideology, party organisation and political recruitment, continuously update its programmatic content nationally and state-wise, and a sound strategy of responding to rivals, the BJP in particular.
Ideology under question
Indeed, under the circumstances, a range of issues relating to the Congress’s leadership, organisation and, most importantly, ideology are under question. How does the party leadership situate itself in India’s constitutional framework and the institutional ecology that it envisages? The significance of this question lies in the fact that for any election – national, state, even local – it needs to spell out how it stands out from the BJP as well as AAP and other regional/state parties across the country with whom it has been in alliance with.
The question is staring now at the Congress leadership which welded together the INDIA coalition so arduously, and with the generosity of an elder partner, that it rattled the BJP during the general elections. Today, it is clearly coming apart, not only in Delhi, but also in UP and West Bengal.
The political situation demands that the Congress must clearly respond to the BJP’s ideological focus on Hindutva. While the AAP has been pedalling Hindutva without stating it as its ideology by staging ritualistic Hinduism, the Congress too feels compelled to follow. For example, responding to the aggressive display of the organisation of the Mahakumbh, in which UP’s Adityanath took a dip with his cabinet and held a meeting, the Congress spokesperson highlighted its initiative in organising the Chhath festival for the Poorvanchalis.
Also read: Delusion, Distraction, and Lack of Direction Plagues the Congress and INDIA bloc
This temptation is visible in stressing the party’s agenda as well. The Kejriwal-AAP model of free electricity and cash transfers to different sections of the society has been adopted by the BJP despite criticising the revadi culture. The Congress too feels compelled to follow their footsteps instead of stressing on well-constructed programmes in the areas of health, education, child and women development and infrastructure development that was the hallmark of Sheila Dikshit’s prolonged administration in Delhi.
A robust inclusive path
The Congress needs to chart a robust inclusive path that historically evolved in the party. While moving Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly on December 13, 1946, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stated that the intent was ‘to proclaim India as an Independent Sovereign Republic and to draw up for her future governance a Constitution’. He unequivocally stated, ‘India is bound to be sovereign; it is bound to be independent and it is bound to be a republic. I will not go into the arguments about monarchy and the rest, but obviously we cannot produce monarchy in India out of nothing. It is not there….. It must inevitably be a republic.’ This statement should be the underlying theme of the Congress to reassert the party ideology.
Jurist Rajeev Dhawan described today’s India as an ‘elected dictatorship’ while speaking at the India International Centre on January 25, 2025 during a panel discussion on 75 years of the Indian Constitution. His enlightening exposé highlighted the attacks on India’s diversity, secularism (by aggressively saffronising the institutions), federal character, suborning of the institutions of governor, the Election Commission and the civil service.
For the Congress, that is guilty of imposing emergency in 1975; misusing the office of governor and the Article 356; talking of a committed bureaucracy and superseding judges twice in appointing the Chief Justice of India; raising such issues may not be easy. But it can invoke the Nehruvian ideals of constitutionalism stated above at any time to rebuild a democratic India to strengthen the party. And there is no better moment than now.
It has recent legacy of bringing in the Right to Information, the Right to Education, MNREGA and liberalising the Indian economy. There cannot be a better occasion than now to make a beginning by reasserting these ideals for the nation and the party.
Of course, leadership, organisation and popular base are the vertebrae and disks of the spine of a political party. The leadership at the top is sorted. An elderly, non-controversial and universally respected and non-Nehru/Gandhi president like Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi’s emergence out of the BJP orchestrated ‘pappu’ propaganda and his firm political moves give the party the substance it needs. However, it needs leadership at each level.
An articulate leadership in states and below with a popular connect is still a deficiency that the party needs to fill. An intense programme of political recruitment to reach the grassroots will make the party sturdy enough to face the emerging challenges of the country.
Ajay K. Mehra is a political scientist. He was Atal Bihari Vajpayee Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2019-21 and principal, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Evening College, Delhi University (2018).
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
