Though I spent much of Election Day (19 May) before the national English and Hindi media discussing the electoral debacle of the Congress, I did not do so in an official capacity. I am not a party spokesman, a member of the Congress Working Committee, nor of any of its decision-making bodies. But as an individual member and elected MP of the Congress, I am dismayed to be reading so many premature obituaries for my party.
Let it be said up front: Reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated. The Congress is very much alive and well and retains a significant hold on the affections of the public. That we lost four of five state elections hardly makes us an irrelevance in a competitive polity. We are in power in seven states (counting Bihar) and the principal opposition in almost all the others, and we retain a pan-national presence second to none. Yet the pattern of repeated defeats in state elections is sobering and points to the need for a course correction. What might that consist of?
For one thing, we need to recognize that, in the famous phrase, all politics is local, and state elections tend to revolve around state issues - they are not a referendum on national leadership. In Assam, for instance, after 15 years of Congress rule, voters were ready for a fresh face at the helm - what happened to Tarun Gogoi is exactly what happened to Sheila Dikshit, who was also a popular and effective Chief Minister for 15 years in Delhi. A certain amount of voter fatigue is inevitable when you've had one person in charge for a decade and a half. We live in an era of short attention spans; after 15 years, voters tend to be ready for a change. It is not a repudiation of everything they voted for earlier; rather just a readiness to embrace someone new.
In Kerala, similarly, local issues of corruption allegations, a juicy sex scandal over solar power, and intense factionalism and one-upmanship in the party, all contributed to the voters feeling they had had enough. Given that for over four decades, Kerala voters have regularly refused to re-elect any government, the Congress and its UDF partners would have needed to make history, but all these factors made it an uphill struggle to thwart the pressures for change.
Still, a significant number of the Congress' more youthful candidates in Kerala - men in their 30s and early 40s - won their seats, giving the Grand Old Party a Brand New Party look in the new Assembly. They will make for a youthful, vigorous opposition to the ageing Left Government, conveying the sense of a party with its sights set on the future rather than the past.
This may well turn out to be the recipe for the party's future across the nation. The Congress must rejuvenate itself, bringing in fresh faces and young blood into its leadership at all levels - village, block, district and state as well as national. Young Indians must believe we understand their aspirations and can be trusted to promote them in government.
This does not mean getting rid of the party's tried and tested leadership wholesale, but retiring some who have given yeoman service for decades and retaining a sensible blend of youth and experience. Change is also necessary to demonstrate to the public that it is not merely "business as usual" for the Congress after two years of electoral setbacks, beginning with the Lok Sabha election defeat of 2014.
Change should also involve reviving the party through restructuring its organization, which has atrophied on many places. The High Command structure must be balanced by encouraging the emergence of local, state and regional leaders, ratified ideally by periodic votes of party members. A clean, clear, coherent structure built on grassroots members with two-way communication is something that party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi has long hankered after. The time to start implementing it is now.
The Congress is rightly accused of having lost touch with the grassroots in many states. We must focus more on panchayat and local government elections, and pay more attention to the petty problems of governance and corruption that beleaguer most Indians and which voters blamed us for when they occurred under our rule.
Nor should the party merely be seen as an instrument for fighting elections every five years. There is a great deal that it can and must do between elections, helping citizens in their interactions with the government, the police, and the unfeeling petty bureaucracy they have to confront daily. We have to return to the ethos of politics as social work for those who cannot help themselves.
The Congress' core message has been the values it has embodied since the freedom struggle - in particular, inclusive growth, social justice, abolition of poverty and the protection of the marginalised, including minorities, women, Dalits and Adivasis. These have been distorted and portrayed as pandering to vote-banks rather than as the sincere, indeed visceral, convictions they are. Rahul Gandhi has begun speaking out for these sections of Indian society and he must do so with even more intensity.
The Congress is the political embodiment of India's pluralism and has been a strong and committed voice for the preservation of secularism as its fundamental reflection. We need to reaffirm our belief in these values and keep reiterating them at every opportunity. This means that our top leaders need to eschew their habitual reticence and speak out more often and more loudly, including on social media.
Doing so would set an example of accessibility and transparency about our values, our actions, our motives and concerns. If we share our thinking with the people, we will find it easier to bring them to our side. The media-driven mass politics of the 21st century requires open communication which the Congress in recent years has shied away from. We must do this through demonstrating the work, the convictions and the voices of those who embody the country's future rather than reminding it of its past.
All is not lost. Setbacks are common in electoral politics. So are comebacks. The Congress can and must embark on its bounce-back to the top right now.
(Dr Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.