The Congress entered the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with a spring in its stride on the back of Assembly poll wins in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in 2018. The party hoped to win over voters by focusing its campaign around issues like the Rafale deal, demonetisation and GST, the undermining of key constitutional bodies by the NDA government and the poor state of the economy.
However, it was the BJP, which had the last laugh. Riding on national security and Hindutva, the saffron party-led NDA won 353 out of 545 constituencies, 17 more than its 2014 tally.
Despite bettering its 2014 performance when it bagged just 59 seats, the Congress-led UPA could manage only 91 seats this time around. While the Congress' 2014 performance (44 seats) was its worst ever, the party's 2019 efforts weren't much better as it bagged a mere 52 seats, three fewer than the number required to claim the principal Opposition party's post in the Lok Sabha.
After May 23, the party went into ICU mode, with Rahul remaining adamant about quitting from the party chief's post. He also trained his guns on senior party leaders Kamal Nath, P Chidambaram and Ashok Gehlot for fielding their sons in the elections.
The party barred its spokespersons from attending TV debates for one month except in Kerala where it got the lion's share of Lok Sabha seats. It is also mulling the idea of not allowing key post holders in regional committees from contesting the elections from now on, and of awarding its booth workers by inducting them in corporations and other organisations in states where it is ruling.
Besides, the party dissolved its Core Committee comprising A K Antony, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, KC Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Mallikarjun Kharge, Anand Sharma and Randeep Surjewala.
Many state Congress chiefs, along with a few MLAs, have already offered their resignations, with the party also starting to collect booth level data to dissect its poor show across the country, including Amethi, where Rahul lost to the BJP's Smriti Irani. On June 1, the party also elected Sonia Gandhi as its Parliamentary Party Leader.
On June 18, the Grand Old Party appointed the five-time MP from West Bengal Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury as its leader in the Lok Sabha.
What next then for Rahul and the Congress?
Since it looks unlikely that the party will agree to the Gandhi scion quitting the party chief's post, Rahul needs to embrace the Gandhi-Nehru family legacy which saw iconic names like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi showing resolve to rise again from the depths. But he will have to find a new way to tackle his nemeses in the form of PM Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah.
With the Congress facing growing infighting and defections, and crucial assembly elections approaching in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana, the party needs Rahul to transform himself from a black belt in Aikido into a political fighter.
Here is an eight-point agenda for Rahul and the Congress to turn themselves into a powerful opposition party again over the next two years:
Rahul has a point to prove as a legislator
The Congress chief neglected his own constituency Amethi though it taught his party a lesson both in the 2017 UP elections and the 2018 Panchayat polls.
Locals alleged that the Gandhi scion visited them only for photo ops and poll campaigns. Smriti Irani, in stark contrast, made efforts to connect with the voters. She camped there for more than a month-and-a-half after the announcement of the election dates. Smriti also reportedly helped bring roads to the area, provided scholarships to students and brought 50,000 people under the Centre's Life Insurance Scheme.
Rahul, however, got a face-saver in this Lok Sabha election in the form of his thumping Wayanad victory. The start this time is promising. He had an exchange of letters with Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan over farmer suicides in his constituency and also visited voters there and accepted memorandums and complaints from farmers, tribals and other marginalised sections. He met local representatives, party leaders and officials too to collect information about pressing issues in the area, which he needs to present in the Lok Sabha. Now, he needs to build on this.
Rahul must turn himself into a mass leader
To challenge Modi for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Rahul not only must transform himself into an efficient MP but also needs to start working on his image as a 'mass leader'. As per Congress sources, the Gandhi scion is planning to embark on a ‘Bharat Yatra’ soon to connect with the masses and familiarise himself with their issues. The plan is reminiscent of the ‘Praja Sankalpa Yatra’, which YSR Congress chief Jagan Mohan Reddy carried out in the last 14 months before transforming the responses into a mandate to dethrone TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu from the Andhra CM's chair.
It's not that the idea is new for Rahul. In fact, his tours in Gujarat in 2017 helped the party give a scare to the ruling BJP in the assembly elections. He needs to go back to the Congress' glorious pre-independence history, where the party won freedom from British rule through mass movements like the 'Non-Cooperation Movement' and 'Quit India Movement'.
The leadership needs new life to be infused in it
As much as Rahul needs a makeover as a 'politician', it's quite evident that he can't simply challenge Modi and Shah without the solid backing and active participation of the second line of leaders in the Congress High Command. The Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's apex decision-making body, doesn't have a member who has contested a Lok Sabha or Assembly election in almost 15 years. The Rajasthan in-charge contested his last election in 1985, while Dipal Babaria, who led the Grand Old Party in Madhya Pradesh, has never contested any polls.
It's high time that Rahul infuses a new life into the party leadership by bringing in faces like Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Amarinder Singh, Siddaramaiah, Adhir Choudhury and Shashi Tharoor, who have not only contested elections regularly in the last ten years but are also familiar with the caste equations that play their part in the election season.
Also, Priyanka Gandhi's impressive poll debut in Uttar Pradesh, along with her forthright criticism, be it of the Modi government's failures or the shortcomings of her own party cadres, makes her another good choice for inclusion in the Congress top leadership. With senior party leaders and party workers making a strong case for Priyanka being the party's Chief Ministerial candidate in the 2022 UP elections, the Congress must elevate her into the Working Committee.
Will the party's loose cannons go silent, please?
In a deleted blog post titled “The ‘Deshdrohi’ tag!”, Congress media coordinator Racit Seth attacked Gandhi family loyalist Sam Pitroda for hurting the party's chances in the Lok Sabha polls by including promises like reducing troops in Kashmir and the dilution of the sedition law and AFSPA in its manifesto, thereby allowing the BJP to question the Grand Old Party's credentials on national security. Also, Pitroda hurt the party's prospects even further by making comments like 'terror attacks happen all the time' while reacting to the IAF's Balakot Air Strikes or "hua toh hua" (it just happened), while talking about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Another loose cannon was Mani Shankar Aiyar, who reiterated his 'neech aadmi' jibe at PM Modi, besides calling him a 'coward'. And, last but not the least, Navjot Sidhu had his own share of digs at Modi, such as 'Feku Number One', 'Rafale Agent' and 'Bride who makes more noise and does not work'.
Rahul not only needs to reorganize the party leadership from top to bottom, he also needs to fix these 'leaders', who, instead of boosting the party's chances, end up hurting it by making such insensitive and abusive comments.
Factional wars are the bane of the party
Be it Kamal Nath vs Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh or Ashok Gehlot vs Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, the party is seeing messy personality clashes across states, not a clear-headed analysis of reasons behind the poll defeat. While both Scindia's and Pilot's followers are clamouring for leadership changes in their respective states, in Haryana too, the party in-charge Ashok Tanwar is facing a rebellion from the state's former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, ahead of the crucial Assembly elections later this year.
The Amarinder vs Sidhu battle in Punjab is already garnering enough attention. In Karnataka too, the attacks from MLA Roshan Baig and other Congress leaders on the state leadership is proving to be another headache for the Grand Old Party. The party has lost leaders like Himanta Biswa Sharma in 2015, who later went on to become BJP's chief architect in 'Congress-mukt northeast'.
With Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil also leaving the party ranks in Maharashtra just before the Assembly elections and 12 Congress MLAs switching over to the TRS in Telangana, it's evident that the party is facing another organisational crisis after the 1990s, when two of the titans of Indian politics, Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar, detached themselves from the GOP and went on to create the Trinamool Congress and NCP. With senior leaders like Veerappa Moily asking Rahul to step in to quell the internal rifts, the Gandhi scion needs to move quickly to stem the exodus.
Top brass must pay heed to party cadres
One of the reported reasons behind Rahul's Amethi loss was the local Congress leadership's failure to involve cadres in studying the ground reality and drawing up the Congress chief's campaign plans.
The party performed superbly in Punjab and Kerala, where the party has a dedicated and systematic cadre base. Elsewhere, Rahul faces a huge challenge in cheering up the demoralised cadres, as well as making them feel that they are equally important when it comes to formulating poll strategies.
One of the main reasons for the BJP's success in the last four years is the party chief's method of nurturing and rewarding ground-level leaders by either giving them Ministerial posts or ensuring a Rajya Sabha entry. Apart from strengthening the party at the grassroots level by building offices and libraries across the country, Shah is also credited with undertaking a massive membership drive. As per a 2015 news report, the BJP crossed the Chinese Communist Party in terms of its cadre base (88 million registered members, 1.3 million more than the CCP). The number has gone up even more in the last four years.
For the 2019 Lok Sabha elections alone, the BJP employed over 7,000 leaders to help the candidates in the 400-odd seats it contested, with the focus mainly being on reversing the results in 120 seats where it lost in 2014. A bigger number of ground-level cadres were entrusted with spreading the word about the Modi government's schemes.
Compared to that, the Congress' ground-level leadership earned the wrath from its own workers. For example, in Karnataka, its cadres were up in arms against their state leaders over the Mandya seat, where the coalition fielded CM HD Kumaraswamy's son Nikhil while neglecting Sumalatha Ambareesh, the wife of veteran Kannada actor and former Congress MP Ambareesh.
Maybe Rahul can again implement the Talent Hunt formula to give hardworking Congress cadres their due. Nine years ago, when Rahul launched the 'Talent Hunt' to identify the party's upcoming leaders, Remya, the daughter of a daily wage labourer and a champion of the Dalit movement in Kerala, impressed the Gandhi scion through her development ideas and creative arts. Following in the footsteps of her mother, who is the state Mahila Congress secretary, she first made her name as the Youth Congress Kozhikode parliament secretary in 2010, before touring Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka to attend the "Ship for World Youth Programme", an initiative launched by the UPA government. Properly groomed, she is now an MP.
Rahul needs to revisit his previous work as the party general secretary. He then not only revamped the Youth Congress and National Students Union but also applied revolutionary ideas such as data-driven analysis. Maybe he needs to adopt the data-crunching method again to formulate the party's booth-level strategies and identify local issues faced by voters. He should make the cadres a key part of decision-making, rather than put too much faith in the party high command.
The party needs to up its alliance game
Although the BJP achieved a majority on its own in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, it has also focused on stitching up key alliances. For example, during the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the saffron party formed pre-poll pacts with parties like the Apna Dal and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) to gain an edge in several parts of the state.
In the 2018 Tripura elections too, it toppled the Left rule by forming an alliance with tribal outfit IPFT. In the 2016 Assam polls, an alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad and Bodoland People's Movement helped the BJP topple the Congress. The BJP is also part of the National People’s Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) governments respectively in Meghalaya and Nagaland. In Mizoram and Sikkim, the saffron party stitched a political formation called NEDA, which backs the NDA at the Centre.
In Goa too, the saffron party's post-poll alliance with the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party and Goa Forward Party in 2017 helped them form the government, despite the Congress ending up as the single largest party in the 40-member assembly. In the build-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls too, the party was able to keep its alliance together in Maharashtra, despite some last-minute disagreements with the Shiv Sena. While the NDA lost Chandrababu Naidu, they compensated for it by forging an alliance with Nitish Kumar in Bihar.
The Congress, on the other hand, started its alliance talks only after May 19, the last phase of the Parliamentary polls. The party was dumped from the SP-BSP-RLD Grand Alliance in UP, while alliance talks with the AAP in Haryana and Delhi collapsed and internal bickering undermined the alliance with the JDS in Karnataka. This did not make it a viable alternative for voters. In fact, on May 23, while reacting to Modi's thumping win, the CPI blamed Rahul's inability to woo alliance partners. While there are no doubts about Rahul's leadership skills, alliance arithmetic is something which may be better left to his mother Sonia, who is a veteran at this.
Should the party leadership be revamped on the basis of caste?
The biggest reason for the BJP's UP dominance since 2017 is the reorganisation of the state party leadership along caste lines. Be it picking Keshav Prasad Maurya from the Kushwaha-Maurya caste as its state chief or fielding around 170 non-Yadav and non-Jat OBC candidates in the 2017 Assembly elections, while earning the support of upper-caste Thakur and Brahmins, the party successfully built up its caste vote banks.
Moves such as giving campaign responsibilities to Rajnath Singh in Thakur-dominated parts and Kalraj Mishra in Brahmin-dominated areas and importing BSP leaders Brajesh Pathak, Swamy Prasad Maurya and RK Maurya to break Mayawati's 2007 winning mantra of Brahmin-Dalit and non-OBC coalition formula, took the Opposition by surprise.
The Congress, however, has failed to evolve along the same lines. For example, in Maharashtra, while young Dalits were tilting towards Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, both the Congress and NCP did little to woo these voters or include them in the organisational fold. The VBA played a key role in the defeat of eight Congress-NCP candidates, including veterans like Sushil Kumar Shinde and former Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan. Even a Muslim candidate who won from Maharashtra -- the AIMIM's Aurangabad MLA -- did so with VBA backing. The Grand Old Party, which once used to represent all castes and religious groups, now seems to be too 'old' to understand 21st-century caste dynamics and its role in politics. This needs to change.