The meeting of the Congress Working Committee on Tuesday showed the party’s first stirrings of wakefulness after the drubbing it received in the last Lok Sabha election, but it is legitimate to wonder if the deliberations go far enough, or deep enough.
What it did achieve, though, was to scotch speculation that Rahul Gandhi was about to take charge as party president from his mother Sonia Gandhi. This is hardly the time for a change of that order.
Mrs Gandhi’s steadying hand is very much required at a time when the Congress is attempting to recover from a major electoral setback.
The recovery process has not quite begun yet. Besides, before Mr Gandhi can be considered for the highest organisational office, he must do so with some laurels in hand.
The way things stand, at the visible public level, the party has shown few signs of playing the role of an effective Opposition with ideas, working agendas and a plan, although, to be fair, Mr Gandhi has been going about the country analysing causes of the watershed defeat, and discussing ideas for the future, with party units in the states and key officials at various levels.
Nevertheless, this should have been accompanied by the Congress vice-president playing an active part in Parliament with cogent, meaningful interventions through substantive speeches on a range of issues that may have allowed the country to assess his capabilities as a leader who can project carefully worked out ideas on public issues.
Mr Gandhi showed at the CWC that he is serious about ending the culture of nominations, which is a bane of the Congress (and of nearly all other leading parties).
Hopefully, the organisational elections will deal with the problems if they are genuine. But a warning shot comes from UP, where the AICC was presumably pressured to give in to the demand of having a state executive of more than 400.
Mrs Gandhi drew attention at the CWC to the omissions and commissions of the Narendra Modi government. Many may be inclined to agree with the criticism that the ordinances and some of the policy prescriptions of the BJP-led NDA government may hurt the rural areas.
But the Congress, like the BJP, is a multi-class party. Nothing that was said at the CWC, in what was effectively its first substantive meet since its defeat, addresses the concerns of the country’s differentiated middle class, the industrial and trading sectors, or indeed the urban poor.
The Congress president also referred to need for change in leadership style. This needs clearer articulation through example from the top levels. What’s clear is that the grand old party cannot hope to carry on in the old way.
