Congress Working Committee meetings have become damp squibs

Congress President Sonia Gandhi (File Image: PTI)

In the end, a familiar script played out at the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's so-called decision making body that sat for four hours on March 13 to discuss the reasons for the poll debacle, and a way forward.

The marathon meeting ended with the CWC rejecting an offer by Congress President Sonia Gandhi that not only she but even Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are ready for any sacrifice and step aside from leadership roles if required for the revival of the party, or if the leaders and workers so desire.

The only proposal that was floated at the meeting and was promptly accepted is to hold a chintan shivir (brainstorming session) after the culmination of the ongoing budget session of Parliament.

As usual, there was too much hype around this CWC meeting, but no fireworks or any concrete suggestion on how to make the organisation a fighting-fit poll machine once again.

It's not that the CWC meetings in the past were all futile. Old timers recall how the CWC would guide the party out of any crisis situation. In fact, a CWC meeting on May 15, 1999, saw Sonia Gandhi resigning from the party chief's post after three senior leaders — Sharad Pawar, PA Sangma, and Tariq Anwar — raised her foreign-origin issue. She took back her resignation only after the party expelled them.

A change in the script also came at a CWC meeting on May 25, 2019, when then Congress President Rahul Gandhi resigned from the post following the devastating defeat of the party in the Lok Sabha elections. That move further plunged the Congress in deep crisis, and is unable to come out of that mess since then.

There are several other examples, but over the years the CWC seems to have lost its relevance. One of the major reasons for that is the dilution of its authority due to the nomination culture that has replaced the elections. The last there was an election to the CWC was way back in 1997 at the Kolkata plenary.

Ironically, senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, the prime mover of the group of 23 dissidents who in a letter to Sonia Gandhi in August 2020 sought elections to the CWC, had in the past explained at length why the polls to the party's highest decision-making body cannot and should not be held.

At the 84th plenary in Delhi in March 2018, Azad even claimed that in the history of the Congress, the elections to the CWC had been held only about a dozen times. He and other seniors dissuaded Sonia Gandhi from discontinuing the practice, arguing that the nomination culture would strengthen the high command's grip over the party.

That said, the Congress has not been able to counter the super-efficient election machinery of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). By now, India knows that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah are 24x7 politicians, and Rahul Gandhi is dismissed as a leader who is unwilling to take responsibility. It may be an image created by his rivals, but the Gandhi scion too hasn't done anything to prove his detractors wrong. He hasn't been able to inspire confidence among the Congress leaders and workers across the country or for that matter the voters, especially the aspirational youth.

After the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the grand old party has failed to stem the electoral slide. At the CWC meeting, Azad said the Congress has lost 39 of the 49 elections after 2014. That's a big number! One of the factors responsible for this slide is the disconnect between the Congress leadership and the workers.

Though Rahul Gandhi has been a strong votary of communication between the leaders and the workers, that dialogue has ceased to exist. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would hold 'Janata darbars' every week to interact with the leaders, workers, and the common people to understand and address their problems.

Sonia Gandhi had a strong communication network in the form of master strategist Ahmed Patel, and his death in 2020 has left a void in that respect.

Rahul Gandhi doesn't have a political person for guidance and his coterie largely includes foreign-educated MBA graduates who have no connect with the people, or with ground realities.

Even at the CWC on March 13, a member pointed out how the workers from different states go back disappointed without meeting anyone in the party headquarters in Delhi as no office bearer sits there during their stay in the national capital. The member mentioned how in the past when there were only four general secretaries all of them would spend a considerable time in the party headquarters interacting with cross section of the people. Now, when there are nine general secretaries and 17 in-charges of states, no one is available to meet the workers who visit Delhi with the hope that they would be heard by the leadership.

For the revival of the country's oldest political party, it is imperative to revive that communication link as also the top-down approach, and empower the leaders with their ear to the ground.

Aurangzeb Naqshbandi  is a senior journalist who has been covering the Congress for 15 years, and is currently associated with Pixstory.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.