The one significant outcome of the Congress’s recent Chintan Shivir in Rajasthan was Rahul Gandhi’s acknowledgement that the party has lost touch with the people. Nothing demonstrated this disconnect more than the steep fall in the party’s Lok Sabha tally to 44 in 2014 and 53 five years later. However, what the Congress’s uncrowned king did not care to explain was the reason why the party was so summarily rejected by the people. Given its stellar pre and post-independence history till the early 1970s, the party’s ignominious decline calls for serious introspection. There is nothing to indicate, though, that Congress has undertaken any such exercise in recent years. Instead, it has seemingly attributed the party’s dismal performance to the people’s inability to appreciate its intrinsic value and has been waiting for them to realise their mistake and return the party to power.
Even then, notwithstanding Rahul Gandhi’s belated admission, what is missing is an understanding of why the party is in such dire straits. This inability to assess the reasons for the party’s weakness is behind Rahul Gandhi’s bizarre belief that only Congress can take on the BJP and not the regional parties. The people desert a party because of the flaws of the leadership. Unless Congress focuses on these defects, there is little hope of it recovering lost ground. Perhaps the party should realize that one of the reasons for its current predicament is that it lacks the three ingredients of the BJP’s success – energy, articulation, and a clear-cut ideology. On all these counts, the BJP is way ahead. Its energy is boundless as its leaders at various levels are constantly on the move, visiting virtually all corners of the country. They are also highly effective speakers hence it becomes easier for them to forcefully present from one only viewpoint. As for Congress, it is not only about secularism that it has seemingly lost its way, it is in the same quandary about “socialism” as well. Its embracement of socialism even after the doctrine’s worldwide demise after the fall of the Berlin wall made the party take the foot off the accelerator of economic reforms, as P. Chidambaram said, and pave the way for Narendra Modi’s rise. If Manmohan Singh had continued what he had started in 1991, the BJP would have remained in the doldrums.
But while the BJP uses cow and communalism to push ahead, the Congress is either marking time or retreating. The Congress’s earlier success was due to the presence of numerous leaders and pre-industrial policies exemplified by the construction of steel plants (“dams are the temples of modern India”, as Nehru said) and the setting up of the IITs. The termination of the license-permit-control raj in 1991 marked the next stage of the party’s forward movement. But a fascination with socialism and dislike of capitalism ensured that the party could not push forward with economic reforms. Hence, its present stagnation even as the BJP’s mix of populism and communalism is stopping India from reclaiming its title of being the – ‘The Golden Bird’. But the stepping-in of regional politics and like-minded tech giants seem to be gradually rising, to fill in the gap in between, for only the perfect balance of all the ideologies together, is perhaps the key to achieving that goal.
