Rahul’s Congress

The party’s heir apparent has seen his youthful experiments in electoral democracy succeed and is now ready to shake the party up

THE EUPHORIA OF a historic win will settle down as Manmohan Singh’s government gets down to work on 22 May, but for Rahul Gandhi—the new face of a freshly recharged Indian National Congress—the party has just begun. Yes, the party and not government is just where the young Gandhi says he wants to begin, sources close to him say. “My job, as I see it right now, is to try to change the politics in this country using youngsters and unleashing the energy of these youngsters in this country,” the ruling party’s youngest general secretary said in Sultanpur on 16 May, the day the election results came in.

The Congress’ success in Uttar Pradesh (UP) only makes the job easier. Congress leaders from the UP state unit talk about how for the first time in many years the average Congress worker—a species seen to be in terminal decline since the 1990s—in the state is charged up about the party re-emerging as a political force there. This paves the way for the first in a series of Rahul Gandhi-backed initiatives after the 2009 Lok Sabha election. The Congress is all set to go it alone in state-level assembly elections both in UP (in May 2012) and Bihar (November next year). All this is the upshot of the success of Rahul Gandhi’s formula in the just-concluded polls. “Rahulji will spearhead the campaign in these states,” reveals Digvijay Singh, Congress general secretary. The two campaigns will also coincide with the process of democratisation of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) that Rahul began in 2007. At the time, he expected it to take three to five years, but Digvijay Singh now says, “By 2010, he will finish that process and focus his attention on the parent organisation.” According to him, this is part of “Rahulji’s agenda to bring more inner-party democracy and decentralised functioning to the party.” Don’t be surprised if 2010 sees Rahul Gandhi appointed the party’s working president.

Of course, that will happen only if and when he feels he is ready for it. At the Congress’s Plenary Session in Hyderabad in January 2006, sycophants in the party had raised demands of bestowing a general secretaryship on Rahul Gandhi to such a level that the din seemed to drown everything else spoken. As was his wont, the Gandhi scion accepted the party position only once he felt up to the job.

But once ensconced in his new position, (after a few more rounds of din, that is) expect some changes to follow. What was seen in the Youth Congress is likely to be replicated on a large scale in a party that has perhaps never seen such change. The Future Challenges Committee, which was created when Rahul Gandhi became a general secretary, has already recommended changes that include doing away with the process of the High Command nominating people as office bearers or selecting candidates for elections. Unlike so many noises that have been made in the party earlier, these ideas are for real. Rahul Gandhi is serious about their implemention.

Expect candidates in the near future to be short listed for their winnability, as determined by data stored on a laptop, as much as by the leadership’s choice. Much the same procedure was used to pick several candidates for this election by Rahul Gandhi. Their success and the considerable support that the party is thought to have attracted among the youth are now touted as a clear vindication of the open selection approach. “What else can explain first-timers like Manik Tagore defeating Vaiko in his backyard or Meenakshi Natrajan defeating Laxminarayan Pandey who had been the Mandsour MP several times over in the last 40 years?” asks a party leader. Tagore, a first-time contestant, was general secretary of the IYC that Gandhi has been trying to turn around since he took over as Congress general secretary in charge of youth outfits in September 2007. Natrajan is a Congress secretary in charge of the National Students Union of India (NSUI), also under Rahul Gandhi’s aegis. Both are among the 11 first-timers picked by him (mostly from Youth Congress stables) for contesting the 2009 general election on Congress tickets. Nine of the 11 have romped home victorious.

To ensure this success, the IYC pushed its newly recruited cadres and office bearers to make direct contact with voters at the booth level, reveals Ashok Tanwar, IYC president, who is now also a newly elected MP from Sirsa, Haryana. “Now with the results out, we will evaluate the performance of each team, get feedback and find out where we need to focus more to improve our performance,” says Ashok Tanwar.

This rejuvenated IYC cadre will serve as the core around which the party in general is likely to be rebuilt. Old faces will have to yield to new. And while the initial steps may be taken at Rahul Gandhi’s behest, over the long term he wants to ensure that the process takes on a life of its own.

In his own constituency in Amethi and Sonia Gandhi’s Rae Bareili, Rahul Gandhi had initiated a pilot project in 2007 to extend the reach of the Congress. The programme aims at revitalising the party at the lowest level—instead of a village, the party organisation is now built from the level of a neighbourhood: each cluster of 50 households in a village has been put under the charge of a samooh pradhan or a cluster in-charge, a Congress worker who acts as a bridge between the party and the people. The cluster in-charge reports to the village in-charge and so on.

“Both Rahulji and Priyankaji have been overseeing this programme themselves. We have held training sessions for volunteers and made them aware of centrally sponsored schemes like NREGA and the (Right to) Information Act. Now, they in turn will go back to the people and talk about the UPA’s work,” explains Kishori Lal Sharma, a long-time associate of the Gandhis who oversees the pilot project. A Congress leader feels that the project will now be replicated in other constituencies. “Once Rahulji is convinced of the effectiveness of new ideas, they will get carried out elsewhere,” says a Congress leader.

It is exactly in this sense that the IYC has already served as a laboratory for Rahul Gandhi to try out his ideas in the crucible of party democracy. The IYC has conducted elections to elect office bearers in three states, starting with Punjab. It began a massive membership drive once Rahul Gandhi took over, and has already managed to attract a large crowds. In Gujarat, for instance, the IYC recruited about 700,000 members, up from 25,000, in just three weeks. Similar drives have been conducted elsewhere.

This recasting and broadbasing of the party in terms of memberships and procedures has a bearing on how it projects its appeal in the electoral arena. “In this election in UP, caste combinations didn’t really work,” says Digvijay Singh, “Caste politics has peaked and will taper off.” That newly elected young MPs should rave about the development-over-caste model of electoral success is hardly unexpected, but for such an observation to be made by a Hindi heartland veteran is remarkable. Surely, something is astir in a region many had given up as forever lost to the crass politics of identity. Rahul Gandhi’s 2009 rescue act is an achievement in itself.

In all, it has taken two decades (since the Mandal and Mandir mobilisations of rivals) for the Congress to breathe again in the Hindi belt with relief. Not that the Congress has been entirely caste agnostic in its calculations. Ground realism meant that even as Rahul Gandhi voiced his opposition to caste politics, the Congress did not ignore caste combinations in plotting possible electoral outcomes and selecting candidates for the 2009 polls accordingly.

The point, though, is larger. The Congress’ UP success is obvious. The party has doubled it voteshare even in Bihar, to over 10 per cent, by going it alone and contesting almost all seats. With Rahul Gandhi heading the campaign in both these states, the cadre has got a morale boost strong enough to consider the party a serious contender for power even in Lucknow and Patna. This was unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago.

That explains the buzz in the party, a bouncy feeling its members had grown unaccustomed to over the decades, at least in north India. Old timers contend that the last time the IYC got such attention was in 1976. During the Emergency, Rahul Gandhi’s uncle Sanjay Gandhi managed to make the IYC more important that the parent party, using its cadres to snuff out threats to his unauthorised authority. The IYC has taken decades to live down the shame of that period.

Rahul Gandhi, by turning the IYC’s image on its head, has turned it into a force that can actually power the Congress’ much-needed rejuvenation across India. This time around, senior party leaders need not fear any goons prowling New Delhi to have their brash young leader’s writ enforced. What they fear, instead, is a breath of fresh air that has the backing of India’s youth, “restless” as they are, in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s approving adjective.

CongressdemocracyIYCNehru-Gandhi dynastyRahul Gandhi