Congress is dead,Long live Congress

In the 15th century on ascension of Charles VII to the throne after the death of his father, the reigning king, the French proclaimed 'Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’, The King is dead, Long live the king.

Much the same holds for the Congress today. What the outcome of state 2017 polls should bring home to party leaders is that its legacies of the freedom movement, sacrifices, tall leaderships, contribution to nation building or to put it all succinctly, its hoary past, are layered too deep down in archaeological remains of time to resonate with millennials or even the generation before it. Seventy years is a long time in political history of a post-war world . So, the present legatees of INC must acknowledge, however agonising it may be, the king is dead. 

Yet as the French said, the king must live long. The liberties, more importantly, the freedom to create and exploit opportunities in all fields of human endeavour and peaceful enjoyment of its fruits; the three D’s, freedom to discuss, debate and dissent; the freedom to pursue one's religious ethos subject to the common weal, lie at the core of a democratic body politic. State, by all reckoning is a necessary evil, deserving of an unending vigil by the lay. As Thomas Jefferson said ' A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have '. And that is best thwarted by an able and strong opposition voicing the counter view.

And who knows the virtues of dissent and consensus better than the Congress? Its founding premise was consensus building. It may seem confounding that the Congress A O Hume founded was an amorphous party; an umbrella organisation seamlessly accommodating leaders with various bents of ideology, from a Fabian socialist like Nehru, a Swarajist C R Das, a moderate G K Gokhale, an Arya Samajist Lajpat Rai, or a Hindu fundamentalist Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. Remember, Subhas Chandra Bose founded Forward Block 'within’ the Congress. So there never was a dearth of dissenting voices  and consensus building in the party.  

Post-Independence, as splinters broke off from Congress to chart their own fortunes, it kept ,unwittingly, creating more political space for its opponents outside its fold. S P Mukherjee broke off to form Jan Sangh, JB Kripalani formed the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party to give company to Socialist Party formed earlier in 1949. And not to forget, The Jharkhand Party of Jaipal Singh Munda. In fact, the subsequent history of Congress is one of ceding more and more of its political space to offshoots. 

What now remains is a pale shadow of itself, a shrunken hulk beaten down from all sides. So much has been written and talked about and requiems sung, often with unconcealed malicious glee, on Congress's impending demise, that further recounting is superfluous. 

One, however, wouldn’t have mourned building a cemetery for Congress had it not held an insidious portent. While Congress's downslide has been contemporaneous with rise in political space for the opposition, including BJP, contrarily, BJP's ascendency has seen a concomitant and unobtrusive contraction of space for others. As BJP goes about creating a Congress-Mukt Bharat, what used to be opposition domain, contracts. But there is a qualitative change from the past . Take for instance Arunachal Pradesh. Congress, stands obliterated in the wake of BJP's Congress mukt 'pogrom' and there is none to take its place. Shiv Sena is slowly but surely asphyxiating and ceding space, not to the opposition, but to BJP. Again, sure-footed BJP is steadily pushing BJD to the brink. Most non-BJP, non-Congress parties have little pan India presence. The possibility of any acquiring a national footprint is too remote. So, there is  real apprehension that in the present scenario of an effete Congress, any regional party or the Congress getting pushed over by BJP there will be an enduring, unexpansive shrinkage of political space for opposition. The trend will only accentuate further as one- man parties lose their fountainhead. Unless Congress, the only other party with a national footprint, emerges from its moribund existence and fills this breach ,loss of opposition space becomes enduring. Hence the king must live long.

Not the 'dead ' king, of course! INC must exuviate and emerge with a skin and sheen adapted to the rigours and opportunities inhering in an upwardly mobile aspirational society. First and foremost, it must de-learn the way it used to carry on business, learn to offer political dreams in consonance with those of the millenials who are now increasingly driving political agendas. That is the biggest challenge before INC ,how to reinvent itself by burning its boat, by  abandoning its legacy baggage. The party does not lack intellectual capital. If invested properly it can conjure up a right fit of ideas, strategies and boots on the ground to implement it in right earnest. And it must, if freedoms are not to be imperilled and risk of ‘Hinduisation’ of a secular socio-polity allayed.

Will Rahul Gandhi show party the way? Well, if popular media is to be believed his political epitaph was written way back in 2012, when his first intensive foray into poll campaigning in UP state polls flattered only to deceive collecting a measly seats haul of 28. Each round of subsequent electoral flops merely itched deeper the writing on the epitaph. Success and failures speak different languages. So, the standards by which media judges the poor fellow are much harsher; a Modi can get away with telling people of Alexander and Taxila being in Bihar or distorting Rahul Gandhi (RG) reference to pineapple juice to coconut juice, but RG speaking of potato factory while talking of food processing factory gets mentioned by Modi and splashed in the media. This, sadly, is symptomatic of the gradual evolution of a uni-directional media narrative with nothing in it for the opposition. Besides an uncharitable press, RG has also inherited a decadent organisation. At the same time his probation period in Congress leadership is getting interminably prolonged. He must come up with a winning political recipe and make national polity truly bipolar. The party must do a genuine manthan, and better do it open to public gaze and participation. Why not revive the practice of holding, unfailingly, annual Congress conventions open to all workers?

And no matter how critical the party maybe of media pre-empting a call on RG leadership, one that is only the party's take, its feedback is valuable nonetheless. Party honchos will ignore it only at it peril. Though in throes of an existential threat, INC must stand a national vigil for the values that animated the freedom movement and got enshrined in the constitution. It’s a big ask.

Uneasy must lie the head that shoulders this burden!