Congress imploding

With less than two years to go for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the beleaguered Congress is getting ready for its Bharat Jodo (unite India) Yatra, a five-month-long pan-India march which is scheduled to take off from Kanyakumari and conclude in Kashmir. However, what the grand old party badly needs right now is a Congress Jodo Yatra. Infighting has severely enfeebled it in recent years and undermined its already precarious position as the main Opposition outfit. The latest setback is senior leader Anand Sharma’s resignation from the chairmanship of the party’s steering committee for Himachal Pradesh, which goes to the polls later this year. Sharma, one of the G23 rebels, has cited ‘continuing exclusion and insults’ to justify his decision. Another G23 leader, Ghulam Nabi Azad, had quit as chairman of the campaign committee in Jammu and Kashmir recently.

It’s obvious that the Congress’ attempts to win back disgruntled veterans has come a cropper, with interim chief Sonia Gandhi failing to set the house in order. This year, the Congress first helplessly watched AAP wrest power from it in Punjab and then witnessed the collapse of the Shiv Sena-led Maha Vikas Aghadi government in Maharashtra. The party has been practically rudderless after Rahul Gandhi stepped down from the president’s post in the wake of the 2019 General Election debacle. His reluctance to take over the reins again has inordinately delayed the party president’s election. The all-important question — should a non-Gandhi be finally given charge? — remains unaddressed and unanswered, even as there are contenders such as Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot and Leader of the Opposition in Haryana, Bhupinder Hooda.

Though Sharma has averred that he remains committed to ‘Congress ideology’, his dissent does not bode well for the party in HP, where it is aiming to dislodge the well-entrenched BJP. In a typically self-destructive approach, the Congress seems to be frittering away the gains it had made in the Himachal bypolls last year. At the national level, the party’s instability will adversely impact the Opposition’s ability to take on the BJP in 2024. The Congress must resolve its leadership and organisational issues urgently.