The Missing Notes In Congress RaGa
What the Congress needed to do is illuminated by what it did not do. The parade of Congress presidential poll nominees symbolises how disconnected the party is from the polity of India. In keeping with traditions status quo is being presented as change.
Shankkar Aiyar | 08:48 AM IST, 14 Oct 2022 | BQ PRIME | Opinion
It was billed and presented as the battle for the first among equals. On the ground it is morphing into a test of first among loyalists. The process of election for the President of Indian National Congress is essentially yesterday once more.
For nearly a decade after his anointment as heir apparent Rahul Gandhi promoted disruption as the panacea to revive the Indian National Congress. It is/was not a unique proposition. Indira Gandhi retired Nehru’s loyalists, Rajiv Gandhi sent many of Indira’s loyalists packing and Sonia Gandhi crafted a hybrid of the old and the new. Rahul Gandhi struggled to overthrow status quo and in a final gambit told the party he was unavailable to formally lead the party.
In keeping with traditions in the Congress, status quo is being presented as change. The parade of nominees, marching to the tune of the high command, symbolises how disconnected the party is from the polity of India.
The Demographic Disconnect
The first choice of the votaries of status quo was Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot. Age: 71. The wily Gehlot, who pipped Sachin Pilot at the post to be chief minister, is better known for managing the balance of power in a caste-conscious state. He exited the contest after he found his interpretation of loyalty benefits to be exaggerated as he couldn’t keep the chair and claim the post.
After much drama he was followed by former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh. Age: 75. Even before he could count his blessings and present his candidacy the Raja of Raghogarh found he was not ‘the’ nominee. Someone in 24 Akbar Road discovered he didn’t fit the caste calculus. Enter Mallikarjun Kharge, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha before he lost the 2019 polls from Gulbarga and leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha till recently. Ostensibly Kharge fits the optics matrix. Age: 81.
The disconnect between the party and the electoral demographics of India is stark. The median age of India’s populace hovers at 27, and nearly half of the 1.4 billion people were born in the nineties. Shashi Tharoor, at 66 years and seven months, represents the young face in the fray.
The profile of the people proposing the candidacy of Kharge — the average age of the first ten proposers is 70 plus — is an eloquent testimony to the Congress culture. Not so long ago, Tharoor, with 22 others of the now dissipated G23, argued for a new way for the Congress.
The irony of ironies is that those who argued for a new way along with Tharoor chose to go back to the old ways and back the candidature of Kharge.
The Decade of Drift
What the Congress needed to do is illuminated by what it did not do. There is no dearth of templates the party could have drawn upon. The BJP is visibly a centralised and formidable electoral juggernaut. The Congress lacks the organisational coherence to confront the behemoth.
Rahul Gandhi could have like Sonia Gandhi leveraged the old and fashioned the new. The Arthurian legend of The Round Table offers a way to capitalise on the experience of the old. The British tradition of shadow cabinets provides a legitimate way to induct younger talent to critique and challenge the thesis of the ruling front.
Structurally, the template of a holding company managing subsidiaries affords regional leaders the space and incentive for bold thinking and breakthrough action. The party could have been the incubator for fresh political capital.
The inadequacies of the party organisation and the whimsies at the top, hinted in the communique of rebellion authored by the G23, perpetuated the state of drift across a decade.
The party did not win in 2019 but the manifesto had ideas — such as quota for women in government jobs and the income support scheme — which could have disrupted the dominant narrative and created a demonstration effect. That the ideas were not implemented even in Congress-ruled states underlines the level of organisational incoherence and dysfunction.
The Existential Challenge
It is impossible to overstate the perilous state faced by the Congress. Imagine the Congress as a conglomerate. Imagine a company with two failed IPOs. Imagine an auto giant with a series of failed product launches. Imagine a consumer durables company losing its market share season after season. Imagine an FMCG company whose dealerships across the country are collapsing. Imagine an info-tech company losing its young talent to the competition.
Imagine a company board facing executive rebellion from within? Imagine a bank without a full-time CEO. Imagine a stressed conglomerate flailing to reinvent its operating model, knocking at the doors of the NCLT.
Reinvention is possible, and there are enough success stories. Management gurus have created an industry of revival mantras using case studies of corporate comebacks. Apple was teetering on the edge of extinction, losing a billion dollars and more every year before Steve Jobs came back to reinstall focus to nurture innovation and success. General Motors and AIG pulled back from the brink of oblivion following the bailouts.
IBM which was better known as the Big Blue found itself draped in red and needed Lou Gerstner to shake its innards to recast it back in limelight. Dell refurbished its appeal with ‘Inspirion’ to appeal to the tech savvy. Old Spice found ways to be cool again. McDonalds recast its menu and represented itself. Walmart blurred the line between offline and online.
There are Indian success stories to leaf through too. Ratan Tata wrested the group back from the satraps to scale up and go global. More recently, N Chandrasekharan stirred and shook the group out of complacency to make it a lean and mean salt to software transnational. Anand Mahindra turned a jeep and tractor company into a diversified global entity. Sunil Mittal reconfigured a device-making company into a connectivity giant.
Inventing Political Relevance
As in economics, lessons in Schumpeterian creative destruction are relevant for politics too. The chapters on comebacks are not limited to the corporate world or even cricket.
History is paved with instances of how political leaders brought their party back from the brink of irrelevance. Politics, after all, is defined as the art of the possible.
A quarter of a century ago, a young Tony Blair revived the Labour Party, which had been in wilderness for over 17 years, by weaponising the simple idea of improving the everyday lives of the people. To arrive at the doorstep of success, Blair inducted management tools like focus groups to test policy ideas and response, broadened the outreach of the party through the media, widened public engagement, expanded affiliation, expanded membership and party capacity to compete for office.
Barrack Obama delivered on the audacity of hope by creating both a template of ideas and a structure for engagement to emerge as the first African American President of the United States. Obama didn’t depend on the usual cache of consultants and canvassers. Obama evangelised the need to engage in a democracy among the young and disenchanted and created a formidable army of over two million volunteers to bring home his message to constituents across communities.
The most recent success story of resurgence is that of the BJP in 2014. After two successive defeats, the civil war within the BJP triggered the coinage of the phrase ‘PariWar’. Narendra Modi rendered the party machinery irrelevant by running on a parallel track. He bet on the idea of muscular Hindu nationalism, presented the contest as one between the under-privileged and the pedigreed, and contrasted the ‘Gujarat Model’ with the UPA model to promise ‘Achche Din’. The bludgeoning blend of money and messaging saw the BJP romp to power with the first majority government since 1985.
The Ownership of Leadership
The optics of events is amplifying the missing notes of the Congress RaGa. There is the imagery of Rahul Gandhi gaining attention by leading the Bharat Jodo Yatra, and then there is the spectacle of candidates aggregating affiliation in the election.
It is arguable that the election will deliver a CEO for the party. That, however, will also trigger the bipolar disorder — the divorce of authority and accountability — the UPA was afflicted with for a decade.
The memorable dialogue “it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you” from the movie Batman Begins is instructive. Indira Gandhi led from the front after the stinging defeat in 1977 to return to power in 1980. Rajiv Gandhi didn’t shy away from the responsibility of leading the party after its defeat in 1989. Sonia Gandhi stayed put after successive defeats and crafted a sum of pieces alliance with anti-Congress entities to lead the party back to power in 2004.
Political fortunes are built around ideas, organisational skills, persuasive messaging to propel affiliation and, above all, ownership of leadership.
Shankkar Aiyar, political-economy analyst, is the author of ‘Accidental India — A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change , ‘Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12-Digit Revolution’ and The Gated Republic: India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions.
You can email him at shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @ShankkarAiyar. This column was first published here. Previous columns can be found on Thought Capital @BQPrime.
