Gandhis In "Cuckoo Land"? | 'Hot Mic' With Nidhi Razdan

Hi, This is Hot Mic and I'm Nidhi Razdan.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi has spoken out on the recent election debacle of the party, describing the results as shocking and painful. She has also said that she has received many suggestions on how to strengthen the party and that she was working on many of them. But is the Congress really doing anything apart from just calling for introspection? It's been nearly four weeks since the results of the assembly polls in five states. Polls that saw the Congress routed from Punjab, marking its worst performance ever in UP and losing Uttarakhand and Goa despite anti-incumbency against the BJP.

The rumblings within the Congress exploded immediately after the results with senior leader Kapil Sibal, the first to openly come out and say it - the Gandhis need to go. The leadership is in cuckoo land, Sibal had said. Well, he was promptly hit by accusations of speaking the language of the RSS and the BJP by Gandhi family loyalists in the party. And there are plenty of them. Since then, rebel leaders have gone virtually underground and all the murmurs of forcing a drastic change have taken a back seat. It only reveals that the party is back to status quo.

Sure, there was the drama of resignations being offered by the family soon after the latest defeats, but unsurprisingly, this was rejected by the rest of their colleagues. It's pretty much now the same cycle after every election setback since 2014. Get defeated, hold meeting promise change and back to same old.

The Congress is in a classic catch-22. Many party leaders believe the party will not survive if the Gandhis aren't there but they also admit, privately anyway, that the leadership has not exactly inspired any great revival. The Congress's highest decision-making body, its working committee, may have asked Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead for now. But the fact is she's not been in the best of health. And even though he doesn't hold a formal party post, Rahul Gandhi has been the de facto president. And that, according to many Congress insiders, is part of the problem. Rahul Gandhi does not want to be president. He resigned after the 2019 Lok Sabha defeat just two years into his presidency. But even now, he holds all the power. As many have asked, who was he to then announce Charanjit Channi as Congress Chief Minister when he doesn't even have a post in the party? The family clearly does not want to let go of its grip on power, but it also wants a hardcore loyalist to take charge whenever elections to the top job are held, which they say will happen in August or September this year. But let's just take a look at some data.

As former Congress spokesman Sanjay Jha tweeted, the Congress has lost 39 out of 49 state elections since 2014. Still, there has been no change. They got a historic low of 44 seats in 2014 and that only increased to 52 MPs in 2019. Still, no change. A series of leaders have deserted the party - even those close to Rahul and Priyanka. From Jyotiraditya Scindia to Jitin Prasada to RPN Singh, Sushmita Dev, Ashwani Kumar. But still, no change. And now, even in the Rajya Sabha, the Congress will not have representation in as many as 17 states and union territories. Coming back to the data again, figures compiled by the Trivedi Center for Political Data at Ashoka University show that from 1962 to 1984, Congress had a strike rate of above 50% in elections. The only exception was 1977 right after the Emergency when it scored only 31%. In 1984, the party had a strike rate of 82% winning 404 of the 491 seats it contested. Since then, it has been a gradual decline for the Congress. It has never reached the 50% strike rate ever again. In 2004, when the party formed the government in coalition with other parties, their strike rate was 35%. That jumped to 47% in 2009 when Dr. Manmohan Singh won a second term. But in the Modi wave in 2014 it was reduced to just 9%. And experts say it's not just the Modi factor. The decline has a lot to do with organizational weaknesses and the rise of regional parties. Some of the key regional players today are offshoots of the Congress formed by leaders who broke away like the NCP and the TMC, the YSR Congress.

Today, the Congress's tag as the principal opposition is in tatters. Allies don't want to cede space any more than they have to, to the Congress, a party that has always assumed that it was the core of any opposition structure. But no longer. The clearest sign of that was an acknowledgment by senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, who recently told NDTV that the Congress is ready to fight future elections with the AAP and the TMC in the leadership position. He said, the fight to the BJP needs to be taken state by state. His admission that the Congress is ready to be a junior partner in alliances is important. Ultimately, though, the problem may not even be dynasty. Across India, dynasties are still elected to power, and the BJP too, clearly has had no problem admitting dynasts into its fold. But the BJP has succeeded in creating a narrative around nepotism and the Gandhis and their sheer mishandling of the political challenges before the country only adds to that narrative. With each election becoming more and more personality centric, it suits the BJP to have a Modi vs Rahul campaign. Today, the Gandhi family represents entitlement and alienates a more aspirational voter. If the Congress really wants to reinvent itself, it needs to do something drastic. Now.