Congress Conclave In Gujarat Highlights Strategic Drift, Misses Opportunity To Present Credible Alternative To BJP

The Congress conclave in Ahmedabad last weekend was rich in symbolism but lacking in substance. Rather than a meta-narrative of revival, what emerged was a stubborn adherence to unproductive strategies and a failure to acknowledge the shift in the voters’ horizon of expectations towards economic development, technological progress and a stable government.

The main outcome of the Gujarat session was greenlighting organisational reforms aimed at democratising the party by empowering district units. While this is commendable, it is far from enough. If the Congress is to be seen as a serious alternative to the BJP, it must first cast itself in the role of a constructive and credible opposition.

An opposition is, by definition, a government-in-waiting. In a multi-party system, a party or a coalition of parties can reasonably expect to replace the incumbent after the next election. So, the role of Leader of Opposition is institutionalised and regarded as indispensable to the functioning of Parliament. The Opposition is both a watchdog tasked with holding the government accountable and a safety valve for dissent (lest tensions escalate into revolutionary action).

The Opposition is expected to foreground public interest. This does not mean shooting down any and all initiatives of the incumbent government but rather ensuring that those initiatives are better aligned with public interest. To cite the International Parliamentary Union (IPU): “The opposition in parliament must show itself to be responsible and be able to act in a statesmanlike manner. It must engage in constructive and responsible opposition by making counter proposals. In its action, the opposition must not seek to hinder pointlessly the action of the government but rather endeavour to encourage it to improve such action in the general interest.”

A constructive Opposition does not hinder good governance but ensures it. Rather than rejecting proposals as a matter of principle, it comes up with counter proposals. In this way, it positions itself as a viable alternative to the incumbent. But when the Opposition privileges nay-saying over constructive criticism, it loses credibility, as the Congress did after publicly denouncing UPI and the Balakote air strike.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has the moral courage and strategic savvy to speak his mind. A trenchant critic of the ruling dispensation on issues such as the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and abrogation of Article 370, he nonetheless praised the government’s Vaccine Maitri initiative, its neutral stance in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the outcomes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s US visit. He also expressed appreciation of the CPM-led Kerala government’s policies. The Congress leadership would have been well-advised to take a leaf from Tharoor’s book, give credit where it is due, and come down like a tonne of bricks when it is not.

Sociologist Andre Beteille in his Democracy and its Institutions (2012) observed that the Congress has the right to believe it can govern better than the incumbent, but the belief that no other party, especially one with a different political stance, has the right to govern, smacks of entitlement: “If the leaders of the party are so possessive about their hold over the nation as to deny to any other party the moral right to govern it, then they must ask themselves what democracy means to them.”

He further observes that a trust deficit between the Opposition and the government impairs the functioning of democracy. Mistrust at one end breeds evasion at the other. While the Congress tends to blame the government for high-handedness, lack of transparency and tendency to bulldoze, both are responsible for their mutual alienation.

Never has this trust deficit been wider, with the Congress leadership in the dock for alleged financial irregularities. The courts will decide whether the allegations against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in the AJL case and businessman Robert Vadra in a land scam are politically motivated, but the perceived attack on its ‘first family’ will further harden the Congress stance.

The build-up to the Gujarat session predictably drew on the narrative of the freedom struggle. It was the grand old party’s sixth session in the state and marked the 150th anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. But the illustrious history of the Congress is no longer relevant to voters. What it needs is a conceptual framework that factors in the all-encompassing cultural shifts of the last decade, and this, in turn, calls for political imagination, ideological clarity and unambiguous goals.

The lack of serious reflection is evident in its 12-page resolution titled ‘Nyay Path’, which could pass for a pamphlet written by a college student. Clearly, none of the party’s illustrious intellectuals, like Tharoor, Jairam Ramesh, Salman Khursheed or P. Chidambaram, had a hand in crafting the BJP-bashing, chest-thumping rant that passes for a statement of policy.

The resolution reveals just how out of touch Congress is with the zeitgeist. Consider, for example, its positioning of women as hapless victims in need of state protection at a time when the government is speaking in terms of ‘lakhpati didis’ and ‘drone didis’, putting women in SWAT teams and commissioning women officers in artillery regiments and as IAF fighter pilots.

The fact is that the public has not made up its mind on One Nation-One Election, the New Education Policy and other “diabolical designs” of the incumbent government. It is for the Congress to come up with reasoned arguments to bolster its stance against these initiatives. The party also needs to justify its push for a nationwide caste census and full statehood for Jammu and Kashmir.

Instead of falling back on empty rhetoric, the Congress could deploy or induct leaders who are domain experts to create fact-based and well-researched position papers, rather than ideological rants. The suggestion for creating a ‘shadow cabinet’, along the lines of the one set up by BJD leader Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, has considerable merit. Meaningful interaction between shadow ministers and their counterparts in government could well achieve a spirit of accommodation rather than confrontation.

Bhavdeep Kang is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author