The Erosion of Congress Over The Years

The New Indian Express writes:

The picture of Congress erosion:

• In Tamil Nadu, the last Congressman who took oath as chief minister was M Bhaktavatsalam. That was October 1963. It lost power in Tamil Nadu in 1966 and has not discovered the route to popularity ever since.

• In West Bengal, there has been no Congress CM since April 1977, since Siddhartha Shankar Ray.

• In Uttar Pradesh, there has been no Congress chief minister since December 1989, since N D Tiwari.

• Bihar has seen no Congress chief minister since March 1990, since Jagannath Mishra.

• Take Gujarat. No Congressman has occupied the post of CM since Madhavsinh Solanki in 1989.

• In Tripura, a Congressman was last sworn in as chief minister in February 1992. The Congress has been out of power since April 1993.

• In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Congress has been kept out of power by the BJP since 2003.

• In Odisha, Naveen Patnaik has rendered the Congress irrelevant since 2000. In 2014, the party scored 0/21 in the Lok Sabha polls and 16/147 in the Assembly polls.

The crux lies in an eroding leadership and corroding core, the idea of what the Congress is about. In power, the Congress does not stand up for what it claims to represent. Out of power, it can’t articulate what it stands for. The Congress is wracked by an absence of ideas and a void in its leadership. The singular Gandhi —the Mahatma—has been appropriated, and the plural—the Gandhi family name —has been rendered ineffective by a reluctant heir.

Politics cannot be conducted on blue-tooth connections sans ownership. To appreciate the value of leadership and ideas, one has to only look at the BJP before and after 2013. Narendra Modi took the remnants of the BJP in 2013 and converted it into a winning unit. He took ownership, redefined the core with his ideas and passionately engaged with the party and the people. The 2004 and 2009 victory afforded the Congress and its leadership an opportunity for renaissance. It was squandered when the leadership opted for the CEO-model, where power was shielded from responsibility, and authority was divorced from accountability.

Power may or may not be poison, but in politics the quest for power cannot be a part-time occupation. The dictum ‘shape up or ship out’ holds true in politics too. Congress needs new ideas and leadership. If survival is the imperative, the choice is binary: either the leadership finds new ideas or the Congress gets the idea and finds a new leadership.

There is, of course, always the Gandhian option of dissolving into oblivion.