Congress desperately needs to reinvent itself
In the mid-1960s famous political scientist Rajni Kothari theorised on the Congress' political system.
According to Kothari, the Congress was a very flexible political organisation that could accommodate different political views and groups from the Right to the Centre to the Left. The other political parties viewed the Congress as a party that accommodated various shades of political opinion. So a very broad spectrum of opinion would put pressure on the Congress to get their demands met. These were called "parties of pressure".
But this model broke down a few years after Jawaharlal Nehru's death, in the 1967 elections, in which the Congress was routed. Indira Gandhi brought the Congress back to the Centre through her "garibi hatao" campaign in 1971. Apart from promising to remove poverty, the Congress nationalised banks, wholesale trade in foodgrains, and abolished privy purses for the erstwhile princes.
But by 1974, the Congress was in severe trouble, especially because of the very popular and massive anti-corruption campaign by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) which sharply dented the reputation of Indira Gandhi.
The next year, the prime minister lost an election petition, and by late June 1975, Emergency was declared.
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| Congress needs to wake up from its slumber. |
After that, though the Congress returned to power in 1980, its political strategies were for the most part not very successful.
The return of the Congress thereafter was largely a reaction to Opposition follies. For example, the imploding of the Janata Party government of 1977-'80 led to the return of Indira Gandhi. Over time, from UPA-1 through UPA-2, the Congress-led coalition was unable to adequately deal with its challenges. From the 1970s onwards, a number of regional parties and coalitions rose, and with the BJP, the erstwhile Jana Sangh, also captured new ground, especially in the north.
With the increasing spread of the Sangh Parivar backed by the media which claims the sole victory of RSS leader O Rajagopal in a seat in Kerala after many attempts a significant victory, the Congress desperately needs to reinvent itself.
Manmohan Singh gave the Congress a fillip in 1991. Earlier a critic of such policies himself when he was the general secretary in the South Commission, Manmohan didn't try to ward off the inequalities of neoliberalism through egalitarian policies for the poor and middle class. All the centrist parties, in fact, rushed to wear the emperor's clothes. And poverty increased significantly.
By 2013, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, calculated poverty to be 68.7 per cent, as estimated by the purchasing power parity approach, which is more than two-thirds of the population. Economic statistics since then have been "tweaked" to serve political interests.
But poverty persists, and no party, with the partial exception of the largely politically static Left, has taken up the issue, since political memories are short, and not even the Congress has resurrected the "garibi hatao" strategy of Indira Gandhi.
Tragically, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), pushed by Sonia Gandhi, was virtually forsaken, with the average days of work by a rural family, dropping from 100 days to as low as 40 days.
The same Narendra Modi who mocked the MGNREGA was forced to provide (in)sufficient funds for the Act. Average days of work has not only dropped to 40 days now, but the wages take a month or so to be paid to the rural poor. They do not have the capacity to wait so long, and as a result, a large number of work days are lost.
In spite of this, similar programmes have not been monitored by the Congress and its allies. But there is no option but to move from poverty alleviation to poverty eradication. Since the creation of new jobs has fallen to almost zero, this issue is immensely important.
It is also a vote-catcher. If the Congress can put together a comprehensive poverty eradication and job creation programme, it will bring it back to the centre stage in national politics. However, the Congress must start implementing these economic programmes in states ruled by them at the earliest. A lot of the braggadocio of the RSS/BJP will diminish sharply then.
Further, the Congress must be careful of the tricks of the RSS/BJP. It used to be earlier, but has become insouciant since then. For example, the issue of International Yoga Day. Did the secular parties think the date chosen was an accident? It isn't. International Yoga Day is the birth anniversary of the first sarsanghchalak of the RSS, KB Hedgewar, and Modi and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat knew exactly what they were doing, while the secular parties were sleeping.