“Even if we want to hasten party elections, how do we do it?” wondered a senior Congress leader who was part of the ginger group of 23, which wrote to Gandhi in August 2020, advocating an organisational revamp to face up to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s political challenge. He said the virus on the rampage has changed the ground situation as people were dying for want of essential medical services. The battle against the pandemic, in his view, was as much a battle of perception the party should seek to win by speaking for the people and standing by them.

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How much the Congress can do by way of providing relief to the diseased and their loved ones, especially in the states it governs, remains in the realm of uncertainty, with the chaos on the ground being the same everywhere.

Organisational mechanics

In terms of organisational mechanics, however, Gandhi has done well by reaching out to Ghulam Nabi Azad, former Union health minister and a prominent G-23 face, to give him charge of the Congress’s Covid-19 task force. Besides senior leaders, the panel includes BV Srinivas, the youth Congress president who has earned encomiums for his Good Samaritan acts with a team of committed workers.

There certainly is some freshness in the teams Gandhi has constituted for pandemic related work and to study the party’s disappointing show in the assembly elections. Another member of the pro-change group, Manish Tewari, has a seat on the panel led by former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan to evaluate the causes of the Congress’s defeat in the polls, especially in Kerala, Assam, Puducherry and West Bengal.

The co-option of Anand Sharma, also a signatory to the letter written to Gandhi, is evident as much in the statement he recently issued on the Israel-Palestine conflict as chairperson of the All India Congress Committee’s foreign affairs department.

These short-term initiatives do not take away from the fact that the party needs a full-time, hands-on president who’s accessible and willing to carry colleagues along across age groups. Several party persons informally shared ideas that they thought could be implemented in the immediate, middle and long time-frames to place the party back on the rails.

Preparing for polls

For starters, many felt the Chavan panel’s report on poll debacles should be discussed threadbare in the CWC and shared perhaps in full or in a redacted form at various tiers of the party organisation.

“The leadership should build upon the report and turn it into a sort of blue book to be followed during election time,” remarked a CWC member who declined to be quoted. He said an honest narrative of “how the party managed to lose could be the best lesson on how to win”. It’ll be a creative short-term move to promote accountability with transparency.

Thr Chavan panel is working overtime — virtually — to wrap up its task in about six weeks. Its findings should be factored in for preparing the party in states due for polls next year, proffered an AICC secretary with a state portfolio. The corrective steps, he said, should be taken right away, be it undertaking organisational changes, deciding the party’s CM face or sewing up alliances.

For instance, former chief minister Harish Rawat is the Congress’s most prominent face in Uttarakhand but is currently the AICC in-charge of another poll bound state of Punjab. Likewise, the Congress has to look for a formidable successor to the 87-year-old Virbhadra Singh in Himachal.

Requiring an immediate resolution in Punjab is the growing friction between Capt Amarinder Singh and Navjot Sidhu. The latter has taken to the social media to voice the resentment shared by other party legislators over the CM allowing the bureaucracy a disproportionate control of the state administration.

“These issues need to be immediately addressed,” said a state unit head of the Congress. He felt the party often paid the price for prevaricating on key changes in the lead-up to elections when the best approach is to name the leader and leave it to him to sort out local angularities against his elevation in consultation with the AICC general secretary concerned. For such decisions to be fruitful they’ve to be taken much in advance and not when the elections are a whisker away.

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“The template can work if power is genuinely devolved by the high command and exercised fairly at the state level,” noted a party veteran, calling it a “gingerly first step” towards nurturing leadership in provinces without which the party cannot be federally structured. “The central leadership has to be a planet with satellites.”

Alliance-building

The planet-satellite imagery is a long-haul process requiring, in the middle term, a neatly held organisational overhaul reflective of the party rank and file’s support and sentiments. Once in place, the architecture will be best suited for myriad objectives, notably the alliances the Congress needs at the state level.

Here one’s reminded of Sharad Pawar’s formula that did not reach fruition in the run-up to the 2019 polls. The Nationalist Congress Party patron had then said that the Congress should extend and take primacy in seat sharing through an objective assessment of its strength in comparison with regional stakeholders. Illustration: it can be the senior partner in Rajasthan or Gujarat, not in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

Be that as it may, an alliance making team comprising the party’s provincial and central leaders should be constituted in the not too distant future for the impending assembly polls. The same body can liaison with other parties to nationally carry forward the task closer to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. If it works, the arrangement might well throw up a core group of policy makers the party has lacked since the demise of the Ahmed Patel-Motilal Vora duo and the marginalisation of Janardhan Dwivedi.

To make the experiment work, Gandhi or whoever takes over as the Congress president after her, will at once have to be a disrupter and a consensus builder. For her part, the interim chief is more of a consensus person — a trait currently needed to assuage ruffled sentiments but not quite effective when hard decisions must to be taken.