Congress Battles Familyar Conflict

It took over a year, an ugly spat among the senior-most colleagues of her party and questions raised over her leadership to ultimately force interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi to revamp her organisation. Yet, there is not much about the mega reshuffle of the All India Congress Committee which inspires any real confidence about the party’s willingness to shed its organisational inertia. Nor does it addresses concerns about its internal rot raised recently by 23 leaders in their letter to Sonia.

The mammoth exercise gave no clear blueprint of reform nor provided a glide-path to the Congress’s electoral recovery. Instead, the reshuffle endorsed what has always been known about the Congress—the undisputed supremacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family. It was made known to the 23 dissenters that their fate within the party is at the mercy of Sonia, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The undeniable imprint of Rahul Gandhi on the entire exercise reinforces the impression that though he may be in no hurry to return as Congress president, he will continue running the party through proxies.

Soon after effecting the changes, Sonia left for the US with Rahul for her routine medical check-up. She is likely to be back by early-October. Neither Sonia nor Rahul are likely to attend Parliament’s monsoon session. The task of coordinating with other Opposition parties and putting the Narendra Modi government on the mat over still rising Covid cases, China conflict, economic crisis, et al will be with Congress MPs Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Gaurav Gogoi, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Jairam Ramesh, Digvijaya Singh and others.

Congress sources say that Sonia and Rahul, once they return, are likely to get back to setting the house in order. “There are over three dozen departments, cells, committees and sub-groups in the AICC and none of them presently do anything of consequence. These are expected to be revamped when the Congress president returns,” says a senior party functionary. The leader tells Outlook that a “more definitive indicator of how Sonia and Rahul plan to deal with the letter writers will be the revamp of these intra-party panels”.

Several of the 23 signatories either head or are members of these departments, cells and committees. Ghulam Nabi Azad, seen as one of the main authors of the letter bomb, is part of the party’s communication strategy group and two other panels while his co-signatory Anand Sharma is part of five such departments and committees. The party’s in-house panel to identify future challenges is, ironic as it may seem, packed with the letter writers—Veerappa Moily, Sharma, Prithviraj Chavan, Mukul Wasnik and Sandeep Dikshit. Similarly, other signatories like Kapil Sibal, Renuka Chowdhury, Milind Deora and Vivek Tankha are also part of various panels. Manish Tewari is also member of four departments and committees, including the 11-member consultative group formed by Sonia in March to discuss the party’s stand on various issues of current importance.

Whether Sonia retains these renegades or shuns them will show the full extent of her tolerance of dissent—or the lack of it. The AICC reshuffle, however, gives mixed signals about her intent. The letter writers, with the exception of Kapil Sibal, have refrained from publicly commenting on the reshuffle and some, like Wasnik and Jitin Prasada, indeed have welcomed the new responsibilities given to them. Unofficially though, the pro-reform group claims they would wait and watch Sonia’s next move before carrying out an appraisal of their seemingly failed push for reform. The reshuffle, many of them say, is “high on tokenism, low on substantive reform and more of an attempt to create divisions within us”.

Much of the criticism against the Congress’s organisational drift in recent years has stemmed from the fact that most of its leaders—CWC members, general secretaries or in-charges of states—are handpicked by the Nehru-Gandhi family on a ‘love at first sight’ basis. It was this principle that the 23 letter writers—a majority of them beneficiaries of this very process in the past—wanted changed. However, the reshuffle, once again, falls back on the same selection criterion. Though predicting the outcome of the rejig may be too early, it needs to be emphasised that most of those given new roles have remarkably failed in similar assignments in the recent past.

“The only way in which the reshuffle should be approached is by asking a simple question—will this team propel the Congress to a path of electoral recovery? Unfortunately, no,” a former Union minister who was among the 23 signatories to the letter tells Outlook. He adds, “Look at the in-charges of states. You have Ajay Maken for Rajasthan after he dug the grave of the Congress in Delhi; there’s Randeep Surjewala for Karnataka even though he lost two consecutive elections and, as the party’s chief spokesman, continues to preside over our humiliation by the media. Who among the new in-charges inspires any confidence?”

The other big condemnation that comes the Congress’s way is that it relies too heavily on deadwood while routinely stifling younger leaders capable of toiling in the field. Sonia has tried to address this imbalance through the rejig by relieving most of the veterans from the job of party general secretary or in-charges of states and placing some of them in the party’s internal house of elders—the Congress Working Committee. Thus, senior leaders like Motilal Vora, Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Ambika Soni and Luizinho Faleiro have all been divested of their charge as general secretaries.

However, the letter writers are not impressed. “The basic principle that has guided the appointment process is, ‘you show me the man and I’ll show you the rule’. If replacing the elders with younger faces was the idea then what explains retaining septuagenarians like Oommen Chandy and Harish Rawat (in-charges for Andhra and Punjab respectively),” says another signatory to the letter. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that the task of tilling the soil in difficult states where the Congress is facing an electoral drought has been given largely to a bunch of relatively younger leaders. The problem with a majority of the new office bearers, though, is that they draw their elixir of political relevance from Rahul and not from actual electoral or organisational clout.

The new list of general secretaries and in-charges of states includes Jitendra Singh (Assam), Manickam Tagore (Telangana), Devender Yadav (Uttarakhand), Vivek Bansal (Haryana), Rajni Patil (Jammu and Kashmir), Rajeev Shukla (Himachal Pradesh), Jitin Prasada (West Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Dinesh Gundu Rao (Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Goa), among others. Singh’s previous stint as in-charge of Odisha saw the Congress steadily lose ground in the state but his proximity to Rahul has ensured his longevity in crucial roles within the party. Bansal was the secretary in-charge of Rajasthan when Sachin Pilot led the rebellion against Ashok Gehlot. He has now been promoted to the rank of general secretary, been assigned in-charge of Haryana in place of Azad and also got a place in the CWC. No doubt, Tagore and Yadav have come up the ranks through decades of hard work and gained Rahul’s confidence in the process but their ability to handle organisational matters as in-charges of states remains untested. Shukla has never contested an election while Rao’s stint as Karnataka Congress chief did little to strengthen the party in his home state.

Those who criticised the letter writers for demanding reform claim Prasada’s “elevation” shows that Sonia and Rahul hold no ill-will against him. However, sources close to him tell Outlook that the so-called olive branch by the Gandhis is actually “a sentence of exile” for Prasada. Assembly polls are due in Bengal next year and the Congress isn’t even a major contender for power in the state. The new role seems cleverly crafted by Rahul and Priyanka, the party in-charge for UP, to keep Prasada away from his home state, which is bound for elections in 2022. Priyanka has already ensured that Prasada, who was trying to position himself as a Brahmin leader, doesn’t figure in any of the committees formed recently by the Congress for poll-preparedness in UP.

The party’s largesse towards Wasnik puts him at odds with his 22 co-signatories. He has been retained as general secretary in-charge of MP, where crucial assembly by-elections are due next month; he also saved his spot on the CWC and been made part of a six member special committee that will help Sonia run the party till a full-term president is elected. The letter writers had sought a collective leadership formula to help revive the party. This panel is now being passed off as that concession. However, the party has made it clear that this is just a temporary panel. It includes A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni, KC Venugopal, Randeep Surjewala and Wasnik. Antony, Patel, Soni and Venugopal had caustically attacked the letter writers at the last CWC meeting and it remains to be seen whether Wasnik will be given any quarter by them when the panel begins its work.

Sonia has reconstituted the CWC, expanding its strength from 51 members to 57—that’s four more leaders than what the Congress currently has in the Lok Sabha. While it’s true that pro-reform leaders like Azad, Anand Sharma, Wasnik and Prasada have retained their spot in the party’s apex decision-making body, none of their co-signatories to the letter who have vast organisational and electoral experience were deemed fit for this panel. However, a wide range of leaders with much less organisational and electoral experience have found a seat at the high table.

Votaries of reform like former chief ministers Veerappa Moily, Bhupinder Hooda (though his son Deepender Hooda has been retained as a special invitee) and Prithviraj Chavan, former Union ministers Sibal, Tewari and Shashi Tharoor have all been kept away from the CWC. Salman Khurshid, Jairam Ramesh, Digvijaya Singh, Meira Kumar, Pramod Tiwari, Devendra Yadav, Manish Chatrath, Vivek Bansal, Chinta Mohan, Kuljit Singh Nagra, Bhakt Charan Das, Rajeev Shukla are all in the CWC along with old loyalists Dr. Manmohan Singh, AK Antony, Ambika Soni, Ahmed Patel, and others. The most remarkable comeback has been that of Tariq Anwar who was expelled from the Congress in 1999 when he joined ranks with Sharad Pawar and P.A. Sangma to rebel against Sonia’s leadership while raising the bogey of her foreign origin. Anwar, who returned to the Congress a year ago, has been appointed general secretary in-charge of Kerala and Lakshadweep and made a CWC member.

The party’s central election authority has also been reconstituted. The reconstitution of the panel and the inclusion of another pro-reform leader, Arvinder Singh Lovely, appear to be Sonia’s way of conceding to the demand of the letter writers for elections to various organisational posts. However, here too the committee comprises leaders handpicked by Rahul—Madhusudan Mistry, S. Jothimani, Krishna Byre Gowda and Rajesh Mishra.

The AICC revamp came in the backdrop of a major push for organisational reform by some of the party’s and Nehru-Gandhi family’s staunchest loyalists. The expectations prior to the letter bomb were of dynamic changes, in keeping with the party’s current political needs, and of a vibrant organisation that could fight its nemesis on the streets and not just on social media. After the letter controversy, the anticipation, however, was whether the 23 signatories will have their wings clipped or whether Sonia will attempt a meaningful reconciliation. What should have been an exercise for course-correction was reduced to a measure of damage control and mending fences.