A mere leadership change at the helm will not be enough to revamp the Congress

The Congress is all set to witness yet another generational transition in the next few weeks. If Sonia Gandhi’s plans go as per the script, she will relinquish her charge as party president and pass on the baton to son Rahul. An otherwise celebratory occasion, however, is dimmed by resistance from a section of the old guards who question his ability to lead, and fear that Sonia’s premature retirement from active politics may undermine their personal interests as well as that of the party’s.

There are talks of a supervisory role for Sonia as a bulwark, if and when Rahul digressed from the Congress script. A third group is rooting for a bigger role for sister Priyanka. A new twist to the tale is that Rahul himself may offer her the party post to cushion himself. The old guards do not have the organisational muscle to challenge the Gandhi scion and his elevation, therefore, is unlikely to trigger a vertical split in the Congress, though the possibility of a few disgruntled leaders leaving the party cannot be ruled out.

Settling the leadership issue is a good move. However, a mere change of Gandhi nomenclature at the helm will not help. The party is in a deep crisis, something for which the Gandhi scion is only partly responsible. He needs several other props to reinvent and restore the credibility of the party. He will need a mix of age, experience and youth. Rahul has a Herculean task and may need at least a decade to bring the Grand Old Party out of the intensive care unit.

His well-wishers in the AICC have been adverting that he could not deliver because he was not given full control of the party, and that he inherited huge anti-incumbency of UPA-II government. The old guards contest this premise saying he had a major say in the election strategy in 2014. 

That the party has not learnt any lesson from the humiliating defeat is evident from the fact that pro and anti-Rahul factions continue to blame each other for the rout with one acknowledging that the 2014 drubbing was due to the monumental failure of collective leadership.

Sonia, Rahul, Manmohan Singh, the old guards, young turks, chief ministers of Congress-ruled states, et al, failed. Over 50 Union ministers, including high profile ones, could not save even their own seats.  Even after being in politics for decades these veterans need the Gandhis to win their elections and the family need them for the party to win.

As Rahul Gandhi starts rebuilding the party, the biggest challenge before him will be finding talent in a moribund party. The party does not have strong regional leaders in UP, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and a few other states. The last Congress government in Tamil Nadu was in 1967. It lost UP and Bihar over 30 years ago. And for about two decades it is struggling to unseat BJD in Odisha.

Over the years, the party lost a number of astute politicians with the passing away of Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot, Arjun Singh, Vilasrao Deshmukh, YS Rajasekhara Reddy, K Karunakaran, Jitendra Prasada, Devendra Dwivedi and a few others, while over a dozen geriatric veterans were packed off to various Raj Bhavans. Barring one or two, the entire Congress leadership in Chhattisgarh perished in a devastating blast triggered by Maoists a few years back.

Nobody paid attention to the depleting human resources in the Grand Old Party after the death of Sanjay Gandhi. Among the last few seasoned politicians, Ambika Soni, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kamal Nath were the products of Sanjay era.

There was no corresponding accretion to the leadership mass to make up for the loss in the last 30-odd years. Neither Sonia nor Rahul addressed the issue seriously. Rajiv Gandhi took over as Prime Minister in 1984 under tragic circumstances and spent much of his time and energy fighting Bofors and other ghosts before his untimely death. His successor PV Narasimha Rao did not show any interest in building leadership.

Though Rahul was made AICC general secretary in-charge of Youth Congress and NSUI in 2007, the two youth bodies have not produced a single leader of standing so far. As talent crunch became more pronounced by 2004, when the UPA wrested power from the BJP, Rahul began importing outsiders. Some among them are: Madhusudan Mistry (who ran an NGO), Beni Prasad Verma, (Samajwadi Party), Mohan Prakash (Janata Dal), Rasheed Masood (SP), PL Punia (BSP), Sanjay Nirupam (Shiv Sena) and Raj Babbar.

Senior Maharashtra Congress leader Narayan Rane from Shiv Sena and Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah (Janata Dal-Secular) are among other notable imports to the Congress. Barring Siddaramaiah, most of them proved to be failures. Their induction caused a rift between jealous traditionalists and the Rahul camp. This friction later amplified the disconnect between Rahul and Sonia camps.

The talent crisis is such that the party had been mulling to replace the non-performing Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee president Manikrao Thakre for the last three years and he was finally shown the door last month, but who is his successor? Ashok Chavan, who was forced to quit as CM in the wake of Adarsh housing society scam. 

In Jammu and Kashmir, the party picked up Ghulam Ahmed Mir as PCC chief who was accused in a criminal case and jailed a few years ago. In Delhi, incumbent PCC chief was replaced with Ajay Maken, who had lost the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 and lost his deposit in the assembly elections last month.

In 2003, at the Shimla conclave, Sonia had announced that the party would set up a Congress training academy to train future leaders. No follow-up action was taken. Four years ago Rahul himself talked about converting the Jawaharlal Nehru Leadership Initiative into a university to impart training to Gen-Next leaders, but no tangible action was taken. And in the 2013 Jaipur brainstorming session he lamented the leadership crisis in the party. Post coronation, he will have no more excuses.

The writer is a political commentator.