Each time the Congress party faces an election, suffers a loss or grabs a rare victory, the question that floats up is: what does the Congress stand for? Or what does it believe in, really?
This question has invariably come up, yet again, after the latest round of election results on December 3 and 4 to five state legislatures.
A question like this about the BJP is rather easily answered in the minds of the electorate. They are unambiguous about the primacy the party accords to religion and its ideological expressions—Hinduism and Hindutva, respectively. The party’s narratives of development, triumph or victimhood emanate from this central idea. It is relatively straight and simple.
But what does the Congress stand for in the minds of the ordinary voter?
We are not here trying to understand how the Congress is perceived by self-serving liberal gangs, hectoring ideologues, hair-splitting academics in distant realities or a bunch of snooty anglophone elites. We are trying to worry about how the party is perceived by a non-descript, unlabelled voter.
What is it that creates an emotional bond between him or her and the party?
Voters have a transactional relationship with political parties depending on the material promises they make from election to election. But there is something beyond this transaction, something that invades their hearts and creates a space.
In the case of the BJP, it is clear, but is there any such thing happening for the Congress?
The categories of people we listed above would argue that Congress stands for secularism. But secularism is a mediated thought. It is a rational consensus that one arrives at, not an emotional arena. More importantly, how does a negotiated, abstract idea get communicated to an ordinary voter? Even if one boldly assumes that secularism is an emotive idea for which people are willing to give up their lives, the talk of the Congress and secularism has mostly been a peacetime, seminar-room engagement.
When election season kicks in, no Congress contestant or strategist will ever make a bold case for secularism. Their only concern would be to avoid antagonising the majority community and not appear as appeasing the minority community. This pushes us to think that the party does not believe that secularism will lead it to a victory dance. It is about political correctness. Therefore, in the recently concluded polls, the top Congress leaders, especially in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, were in near embrace of the BJP’s Hindutva agenda.
In its search for an emotional connection, the Congress, independent of its dealings with religion, has attempted to appropriate the social justice agenda of the regional or Mandal parties. Rahul Gandhi suddenly became a champion of the backward classes and the biggest advocate of a caste census in recent months. The party must have thought that the best counter to the BJP’s religion argument was to make a caste argument. The Congress now is therefore unenviably caught between two identity battles, and tragically, both sides disbelieve their conviction. They see it as a desperate tango. The collateral damage for Congress in picking the caste identity debate in singular haste has been to make its 'INDIA' allies suspicious of its motives. Mandal parties made space in the 1990s at the expense of the Congress using the caste argument. They may not want to revive the Congress in 2024 by sharing seats in states they dominate.
This unsure journey of the Congress on two boats—religion and caste, makes it apparent that it is struggling to find an emotional leverage with voters. This by extension would mean the party does not have a cultural narrative to call its own. A cultural narrative is focused on hard work and its incubation time is long. Congress wasted the last 10 years without paying much attention to this crucial aspect. It has been randomly experimenting and as a result, the voter is left with no idea as to where the party stands on issues that make an emotional bargain. Quite simply for the voter, the primary custodian of the religion or caste arguments is not the Congress.
If this confusion was not enough, the party has tried to project the federal as a counter to the centralising impulse of the BJP. Rahul Gandhi started emphasising that India was ‘not a nation’ but a ‘union of states’. In his electoral education, it appears he has been taken in by the cultural and linguistic autonomy that Tamil Nadu under the Dravidian parties has espoused. The exclusivity of Dravidian ideas perhaps made him aspire to such an ideological frame for the Congress. It was by no means applicable to the national image of the Congress and ironically, the Dravidian model was developed as a counter to the Congress’s flattening national instinct.
Since emotional connection has been difficult to build for Congress, it has tried to arrange, with its default technocratic mindset, an economic substitute. The latest avatar has been the ‘guarantees’ it has dispensed. These schemes have turned the welfare and development model in Karnataka, where it was first applied in May 2023, topsy-turvy. The state government was in such a tearing hurry to build an ebullient narrative for 2024 that even before the schemes were fully rolled out, it commissioned surveys to hail their success. Now Telangana has been won on a similar set of unsustainable promises.
Anyway, the Congress’s welfare plans have failed to work in states where the BJP has had a serious cultural connection—the Hindi heartland with its Hindutva. Culture any day trumps economics. Also, economic schemes are a universal game that parties across the divide offer electorates as a supplement to their emotional and cultural connect. But in the case of Congress, there is only the supplement—there are bogies without an engine of an argument. That makes the party vulnerable and insecure.
The Congress’s unsure experiments with ideas, identities and ideologies before each election season have made the party appear with new spots. This has confused the electorate so much that they have often opted for the consistency of the BJP. The Congress has never been re-elected in any state since 2014 and that should hold a mirror. The many avatars of Rahul Gandhi in recent times are also emblematic of the party’s confusion. He has been a Bharat yatri, a Shiv bhakt, a biker, a social justice champion, a federalist, a democrat, a secularist, a crusader against crony capitalism, an avuncular figure and of course, an archetypal dynast, among others.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi
(sugata@sugataraju.in)