Six ways Rahul Gandhi can get Congress ready for 2019

In an electric 24 hours, the newly-minted Congress President Rahul Gandhi can go from being a Pappu to Sheru, or plunge the depths again, depending on the results of the Assembly election in Karnataka—an electoral battle that has significant ramifications in the run-up to the general election in 2019.

Thus far, Rahul has been precariously swinging in between, of being more of a Billu—cat-walking the electoral landscape ever since he took over the party. In Gujarat, his first real political contest, Gandhi sashayed down the ramp, but demurred being the show-stopper. The Congress made a significant comeback, boosted by the three young disruptors in the state—Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mevani, Alpesh Thakur—and had it gone for the jugular, it could have stomped home with a decisive victory.

So what does Gandhi need to put a kick in the Congress’ political campaign against the Sangh Triumvirate of Narendra Modi, RSS and BJP, and its hydra-headed Hindutva hate factories and armies? It’s not the first time he has said that he will be prime minister if the Congress emerges as the single-largest party (not sure though if he meant within the Opposition coalition or an outright first!). He had also declared his intention some months ago, during his visit to the US. So, what does Gandhi need to do in this crucial poll year in the run-up to 2019 general elections?

Here are six ways he  can put a fix on his strategy and campaign, and save his party from going from bust to dust:

1) Stay single & tingle: Rahul has swung from giving his party the “ekla chalo” – go it alone – slogan in various states to being brow-beaten to accept the idea of political alliances for 2019. It cannot be a worse idea for Congress revival.

He was successful in the Bihar state poll. He even claimed credit for bringing the two warlords, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar, together. But the Congress was reduced to being a junior partner of the grand alliance after the poll.

The coalition unravelled in Bihar and the Congress lost half of its MLAs to rival BJP in the following coup by Kumar. Gandhi was snubbed again in Uttar Pradesh, two months ago, when Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati forged a victorious alliance in the by polls of Gorakhpur and Phulpur, but refused to give in to Congress’ demands of leaving a seat for the party. It forced the latter to go it alone and face a humiliating defeat at the hustings.

What does the Secular Coalition of Opposition Parties offer the Congress?

The present Coalition Formula of ceding parliamentary seats to parties with the sitting MP, or to the No 2 candidate (the runner-up in the last election) cannot be a worse idea for the Congress because it instantly reduces the party to contesting only in half the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. The Congress won 44 seats in 2014, and came second in 224 seats, thus allowing it to contest only 268 seats! It will be a suicidal move especially when the party is hoping to stake a claim in leading the next government at the Centre.

The lazy strategy of piggy-backing on political alliances to fight the 2019 election will reduce it to becoming a junior partner in at least half the states that have powerful regional parties and leaders.

2) Re-boot party election machine: It seems Gandhi has finally realised hard works pays and that it’s now crucial to play the game with deep understanding and seriousness, and with utmost craftiness. The last decade has seen him dawdle with sketchy plans for an organisational and party revamp—from holding elections and primaries to choose leaders from the outbacks and among the cadres, an honest move to democratise the party – only to abandon the policy once it came to nothing. 

If Gandhi hasn’t realised yet that an organisation takes decades to be built, he can at least fast-forward to put together an electoral machinery that can galvanise and mobilise potential voters to the polling booth.

The Congress, under Gandhi, has set up several internal think tanks to drive policy, and election research teams that focus on data-driven campaigns, from caste mapping and calculations in constituencies, voter behaviour, to collecting information on trends and rival parties. There are dossiers of figures and fact-checkers for state leaders and party workers to expose the Modi government on falsehoods and bombast, apart from outlining issues and strategy in states going to polls. But it lags miles behind the BJP election juggernaut led by its party president Amit Shah and Modi, who have outsmarted the Congress in Gujarat, Tripura, Meghalaya, and even the Delhi municipal elections.

It’s not good enough to just have laboured and made elaborate plans on paper, the test of a successful strategy is how it works on the ground – a dedicated workforce, perseverance, and commitment.

If Modi and AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal could inspire thousands of volunteers to enlist and engage voters and people with missionary zeal, it says a lot about the Congress and its leadership if it fails to galvanise people to the voting booth. Time’s only running out.

It could be a hard call for the Congress. 

3) Tech beckons: If the Shah-Modi duo ran away with social media savvy and ingenuity in the 2014 poll, the Johnny-come-lately Gandhi and Congress may have finally jumped into the game. But the BJP duo have speeded ahead yet again with their troll armies thronging WhatsApp groups bombarding users with fake news and propaganda, apart from super sample surveys, poll tracking tools and media management and outreach. Shah manages poll campaigns up to the micro level, from appointing ‘vistaraks’ who engage with voters on the street, mapping ‘shakti kendras’, a pool of voting booths that show voting trends, to evolving strategies upto the last day, besides running outreach programmes for the media and voters.

Gandhi must be thrilled that he’s a star in cyberspace with his new energized Twitter team, but is the Congress party bureaucracy doing him in?

4) Regional satraps: It begs the answer: Is Rahul’s swank tech teams, think tanks and in-house researchers working in another planet, out of reach with grassroots workers even as the former swoops down, takes charge, runs the campaign, and scoots out, to vanish again till the next election? That too, without accountability, incrimination and rap?

Worse, the Congress bureaucracy of central leaders, including Gandhi, has been known to drag its feet on crucial decisions like forming governments in the wake of hung assemblies. It has even had to face the humiliation of ceding defeat in the face of victory. Remember Goa, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland?

Mercifully for the Congress, in states where the party has powerful leaders, the party bureaucracy has been firmly told to keep away, and state leaders have held sway on crucial political decisions, from policies and electoral strategies.

It’s no wonder then that Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh asked to be left alone despite Rahul wanting his tech team to take charge (remember poor Prashant Kishor, Modi’s former election strategist, hired by Rahul, was told by Singh to back off). Similarly, in Karnataka, it is the doughty chief minister Siddaramaiah, who called the shots in the just-concluded state election.  

Perhaps Rahul should adopt the Gujarat model of elections – the state Congress was headless, bereft of any strong leader, but it was fortunate to be aligned by three powerful young disruptors – Jignesh Mevani, Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakur – who not only swept the once-caste combo of Dalits, OBCs and Thakurs back to the Congress, they also lifted the Congress campaign to take head on the steamrolling BJP in the poll.

It must be said that Rahul is finally willing to acknowledge the authority of regional Congress leaders, but he must entice and grab powerful caste group leaders, like the Gujarat trio, from Madhya Pradesh to Rajasthan, and forge a potent coalition to defeat the BJP. 

It remains to be seen if Rahul is crafty and astute in devising successful caste and group alliances within states, rather than aligning with dominant non-BJP Opposition regional leaders like Mamata Banerjee or Sharad Pawar.

5) Gift from Modi: The Congress and Opposition parties cannot be more thankful to Modi for offering emotive electoral issues on a platter—because of the BJP government’s abject failure in living up to its promises. Mounting job losses, a tanking economy, acute agriculture and farm distress, rising prices of daily commodities, escalating fuel prices, corruption among crony industrialists, bank defaults are all real issues that dog the nation.

While a shrewd BJP and thousands of its Sangh Hindutva affiliates drag the nation’s discourse to religious minority issues— beef eating and namaz in open places for instance—turning them into a political and electoral matter, it’s time Gandhi and his party took on the Modi government on issues that really matter to voters rather than help the BJP polarise people on communal lines.

The Congress leadership must agitate, charge, incite, and aggressively take the battle to the voter and the streets. Apart from coming out with a blueprint of new ideas for the economy, Gandhi must work out a strategy for social upliftment and sustainable development, economic empowerment and a truly equitable society.

As they say, it’s never too late to make an honest beginning. 

6) Secular vs Communal: Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s exclamation that the party is perceived to be a pro-Muslim party and that the image must change provoked howls of despair from secular commentators; but it’s precisely the leadership’s wooly approach to genuine secularism that has got the party to where it is on the issue of ‘minority appeasement’ and ‘secularism.’

In a macabre comedy of terrors, the Congress has typically fallen between two stools – it’s neither a Hindu nor a Muslim party – nor does it have its Dalit and upper caste voters.

The party does not take a stand on any issue, whether taking on Hindutva hate factories of communal murders and crimes from Kairana to Kathua or taking cognisance of reports by enquiry commissions and investigative agencies on communal riots and Hindutva terror attacks. 

Why did its governments throw the Srikrishna Commission reports on the 1993 Mumbai riots, or the Sachar Committee report on the plight of poor Muslims, into the bin?

Instead of getting tied in knots by the Modi-Sangh hydra-headed battalion of hate armies on fickle issues like pseudo-patriotism, nationalism, chauvinism and fanaticism, and foolishly falling into the Modi trap of creating a bi-polar vision of India, of Us vs Them, it’s time Gandhi and his party steered the national discourse and mended the ripped and gnashed fabric of a rich, vivid, and splashy republic.