Rahul has to focus on ideology, cadre

C P Bhambhri

The issue of Rahul Gandhi’s leadership of the Congress has been settled once and for all, and beginning 2017, all are looking only towards him for providing an effective leadership to a party that has been decisively weakened, even ejected from larger states of the North, North-West and South India.

The Congress at present is competing against authentic regionalists in some states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh or Orissa. At the all-India level, it is challenged by its ideological antagonist, the BJP, which is a political extension of the Hindu Sangh Parivar of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The task before Rahul Gandhi is not only to prepare the Congress to fight periodically elections for the Lok Sabha, state Assemblies or local bodies but also to prepare the party for meeting the political and ideological challenges of its main adversary, the BJP, and the well organised RSS. Pracharak Narendra Modi for the first time in a public speech at his Parivartan Rally in Uttar Pradesh directly attacked Rahul Gandhi. Its implication is quite clear: Rahul has to confront the challenge posed by Modi and his party.

The task before Rahul Gandhi is not to simply evolve political strategies to confront the Modi government’s policies and programmes such as the neglect of farmers’ interests and farmer suicides, socially disastrous consequences of ‘demonetisation’, or other routine issues, because the real challenge is not just to play the role of an opposition party. The leader of a party in a highly competitive multi-polar political system cannot meet the challenge of an opponent without analysing and understanding the essential issues that separate one party from the other. The present reality of India is that the Congress occupies one pole of politics and the other is occupied by the BJP, and these two fundamentally “opposite poles of politics” are in confrontation with one another.

Concretely, Rahul Gandhi has to confront the BJP, which is the Congress’ real opponent because on the basic issue of political and cultural ideology, these parties are miles apart. If on one hand, the Congress has a historical tradition of social inclusion, on the other, the BJP is committed to social exclusion. The Congress’ political platform is open for all religions, castes, sects, language groups, and tribes, and follows non-discriminatory policies towards every cultural and religious diversity and plurality of the country, while the BJP believes and practises every idea that is just the opposite. The BJP has a distinctive ideology that is non-inclusive of social groups and communities whose religious reference points are “outside India”, like Holy Mecca and the Christian Pope, and hence these “outsider” religious groups are not considered the children of Bharat Mata.

The idea of Indian nationalism of the Congress and the BJP also flows from their above mentioned beliefs. The BJP is committed to the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra and Hindu State, because this is the only logical conclusion of its belief that only Hindus are the real children of Bharat Mata. The real contest is ideological and the “idea of India” divides the two political formations.

Rahul’s task is to prepare the Congress to fight political-ideological battles against the BJP and its ideology of exclusivist Hindu Rashtravad. He has assumed leadership of the party at a time when fundamental political and ideological battle lines have been drawn on one hand between the secularist, pluralist democrats and on the other Unitarian nationalists represented by the party of Hindus only. Challenges for Rahul do not end here because the BJP is backed by a formidable paramilitary-like hierarchical organisation of the RSS. The RSS is not only the ideological fountain source of the BJP and all its affiliates but also gets its hundreds and thousands of ideologically committed and trained cadres to work during the elections. It is the RSS that manages election booths for the BJP.

This fact of active involvement of the RSS cadre in elections cannot be ignored because none of the other democratic, regional or all-India parties like the Congress has at its disposal a similar cadre. The Congress party organisation has lost its vision, energy and commitment. The candidates nominated by the party for elections have to mobilise their own supporters. They make individual efforts, and even Sonia Gandhi’s election has to be managed by her daughter, Priyanka Gandhi. How can the Congress confront the BJP in the absence of a committed Congress cadre?

The ideology of Hindutva has spread far and wide in India on the basis of hard work of the RSS workers. It is not only that the Congress has become weak in large parts of India, it has also been seen that the management of elections is left to “mercenaries” because at the grassroots level either the party is non-existent or weak. The consequence is that workers have to be hired to work for Congress candidates.

The Congress needs an organisation to carry the message of its ‘ideology’ of secularism, pluralism and unity in diversity, and also to confront the cadre of the Hindu Rashtravadis and expose their ideology of Hindutva. And Rahul has to perform this task. Democratic parties such as the Congress always have a problem when faced with a political and ideological challenge from fanatics committed to a puritanical ideology of one country, one religion and one language, because the organisational structures created by democratic parties follow democratic procedures, including dissent and factionalism within the party. They are “open” to debate, and the consequence is that party workers of these parties cannot behave like the RSS’s. 

It is not expected that Rahul Gandhi will be able to create a party structure on the pattern of the Sangh Parivar, however, the present shapeless Congress has to be reformed and committed Congress workers have to be recruited. The upshot of the above narrative is that the challenges for Rahul Gandhi are many and there is also an urgency. If the Congress is not able to contain the onward march of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, not only will parties like the Congress become irrelevant, but also the secular, democratic, and pluralist republic of India will cease to be a reality, and it will be replaced by a Hindu republican state.

Rahul Gandhi in 2017 has to create a Congress that can integrally link its political-electoral goals with the ideology of secularism and the values of an Indian constitutional republic, just as its main opponents have integrated electoral politics with their ideology. Can Rahul revitalise and re-energise the Congress or will his main challenger, Pracharak Narendra Modi, have a walkover?

The writer is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Political Studies, JNU