Can Prashant Kishor stem Congress' slide?

The Congress is essentially a party of patronage and nepotism - qualities that prevent new entrants from flourishing. Prashant Kishor's proposal also requires a continuous flow of funds

The decks are cleared for poll-strategist Prashant Kishor’s entry into the Congress party. Since May 2021, when he first made a presentation for the revival of the electoral fortunes of the Congress, the grand old party has lost Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa, and Manipur elections. Then he was rebuffed. Now, facing an existential crisis, the party high command has chosen to engage with Kishor once again. He has already held six rounds of talks with the Congress leadership. The stage of mounting a resistance to his entry into the party has long passed.

The resounding defeat in the recent state elections has perhaps prompted the Gandhis to provide wind to his sails realising that the family brand has become more a liability than an advantage against a formidable political adversary like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Although the BJP itself is rapidly filling up with dynasties, the longevity of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty makes it an easy target.

Enter Prashant Kishor, with his 85 slides, claiming that he can put the brake on the party’s descent. Like a good marketing expert, he demonstrates the dismal state of the product, contrasts it with the competition, underlines its market weaknesses, provides solutions by restructuring and repackaging, and, finally, elaborates a messaging strategy.

He attributes the decline of the Congress party to the disadvantage of being a legacy incumbent party, target of four major organised mass movements (JP movement, Bofors, Mandal and Ram Mandir, and India Against Corruption), failure to capitalise on its legacy, organisational weaknesses, and lack of mass connect. The path to ‘reincarnation’ of the Congress he proposes, using the metaphor of the six mudras (hand gestures) of the classic Nataraja sculpture – “Srishti” or Creation (a new Congress), “Stithi” or Protection (legacy, core values and principles), “Anugraha” or Liberation (from inertia, mediocrity and status quo), “Samhar” or Destruction (of entitlement, lack of accountability and sycophancy), “Tirobhava” or Concealment (of nepotism and corruption), and “Apasmara” or Connect (end of evil and connecting with the masses).

To operationalise this, he has suggested that the party must fix the leadership issue, solve the alliance conundrum, reclaim its founding tenets, create an army of grassroots leaders and foot soldiers, and fashion a supportive media and digital ecosystem for propagating its ideas. The party leadership is sought to be restructured with Sonia Gandhi as Chairman of United Progressive Alliance, an elected non-Gandhi party president, Rahul Gandhi as Parliamentary Party Leader, Priyanka Gandhi as General Secretary (Coordination) and a Working President or Vice President (unnamed but, presumably, Kishor himself) working directly under the Congress leadership.

On alliances, the optimum solution he suggests is  “Congress Plus” – i.e, going alone in 70 per cent to 75 per cent Lok Sabha seats and alliances elsewhere, based on the principle of maintaining its national character while forging strategic regional alliances. The alliance formation, he feels, should be based on no ideological contradiction with allies, with parties against whom there have been no direct contests recently, and in states where there is no regional breakaway party of consequence or where the Congress has not been in power or Opposition for 20 years or more.

For democratising the Congress, he has suggested the following principles: one-person-one-post for all nominated posts, elections for all organisational bodies, fixed tenure for all office bearers including Congress President and Congress Working Committee, technology-enabled solutions to prevent manipulation of organisational elections, and “one family, one ticket” to curb nepotism. In addition, all decision-making bodies, both national and regional, should have half their members elected and the other half nominated from existing MPs/MLAs. In addition, from the existing “Congress families” only those who have completed seven years as active members would be allowed to contest internal party elections; the party’s organisational bodies will reflect the demographic indicators of caste, gender and social groups in the population; the party would exclude those charged with heinous crimes from all posts and would make its funds and their utilisation transparent.

For creating grassroots workers, a dual-party structure is proposed: one wing focussing on a pan-India organisational mechanism and the other, on creating a robust electoral machinery. For communicating the party’s programmes and ideology, the suggestion is to build synergy with non-political influencers, launching campaigns against the ruling dispensation and fashioning a favourable ecosystem of supportive media and digital influencers. 

This prognosis is not radically new within the Congress but the line of treatment was never operationalised. The reason why the resistance to Kishor has become muffled may be because Congressmen believe that with direct access to the Gandhis, he might be able to do what they could not as an “outside catalyst”.

However, it remains unclear how much space the party would be willing to give to Kishor or the new blood he hopes to infuse in its veins. The Congress is essentially a party of patronage and nepotism – qualities that prevent new entrants from flourishing. His proposal also requires a continuous flow of funds.

The main reason why most Congressmen may not openly stand against Kishore is because of the need to win a majority of the six big state elections due before the 2024 general election. In these states, in the last legislative election, the Congress vote share was above 38 per cent -- Himachal Pradesh (41.7 per cent), Gujarat (41.44 per cent), Karnataka (38.14 per cent), Madhya Pradesh (40.89 per cent), Chhattisgarh (43 per cent) and Rajasthan (39.3 per cent). If with such a vote share the Congress loses these states, then the party could disintegrate before 2024.

There are, however, some loopholes in Kishor’s rejuvenation plan, especially the tough ideological issues facing the party. While talking of reappropriating Gandhi among other legacy issues, he is silent on how to tackle BJP’s version of Hindu nationalism. The time to implement these big plans is also short, with barely seven months for Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat and two years for the general election.

Although most Congressmen believe that Kishor has the necessary skills for the job, they would like his activities to be monitored by, say, a committee of the Congress Working Committee. However, not being endowed with magical skills, wags on social media may be forgiven for punning on whether Kishor’s slides can stop the slide.