Editorial: Crumbling citadel

As the Congress party is getting ready for its mass contact programme 'Bharat Jodo' Yatra, a five-month-long pan-India march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, what it urgently needs to do is a Congress Jodo Yatra.

The exit of veterans has become so commonplace in the beleaguered Congress that the latest resignation by the septuagenarian leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, after a five-decade long association with the party, should not come as a surprise. What is surprising is that the grand old party continues to be in denial mode regarding its existential crisis and persists with the obfuscation of its own predicament. The hard-hitting, five-page resignation letter of Azad, who had served under four prime ministers and as the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, comes as a damning indictment of the party leadership and its inability to carry out course corrections at a time when it is required to be battle-ready to take on the BJP’s juggernaut. More damaging is the former union minister’s no-holds-barred attack on Rahul Gandhi for “demolishing the consultative mechanisms” and being responsible for downslide of the party due to his “childish behaviour, immaturity, non-seriousness”. Instead of acknowledging the bitter realities and organisational loopholes highlighted by Azad and acting on them to arrest the slide, the party establishment has once again chosen a familiar narrative of attributing motives to the leaders leaving the party. It is clear that the revival of the Congress cannot happen if its top leadership continues to be quarantined from the change. As the party is getting ready for its mass contact programme ‘Bharat Jodo’ Yatra, a five-month-long pan-India march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, what it urgently needs to do is a Congress Jodo Yatra.

Azad has identified three main areas of concern– the sidelining of senior leaders and old-timers in favour of an inexperienced coterie, the deliberate discarding of recommendations made by internal panels for reform in the party, and the targeting of a group of leaders who wrote to Sonia Gandhi two years ago, highlighting problems in the party’s internal organisation and demanding a raft of changes in the functioning and structure of the party. Infighting has severely enfeebled it in recent years and undermined its already precarious position as the main Opposition outfit. The recent setback was the resignation of senior leader Anand Sharma from the chairmanship of the party’s steering committee for Himachal Pradesh, which goes to the polls later this year. It is obvious that the party’s feeble attempts to win back disgruntled veterans has come a cropper, with interim chief Sonia Gandhi failing to set the house in order. The party would be doing a grave disservice to its supporters if it fails to take Azad’s prescription in the right spirit. The problems flagged by him are real. The Congress has organisational issues arising from a moribund leadership that is not up to the task of rejuvenating the grassroots cadre demoralised from a string of electoral reverse. And, it has political issues with decisions being made by leaders with little ground connect.

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