In the absence of a formidable national Opposition, the desire for the establishment of a federal Congress Front has only gained ground, at least among the commentariat.
There are, of course, historical precedents of Opposition parties locked in lopsided competition with a dominant party, trading a portion of their autonomy to facilitate a joint bid for national power, examples being the Janata Party of 1975 and the Janata Dal of 1988.
In fact, a larger Congress union would comparatively stand on firmer ideological ground than the preceding ragtag Janata collections. There is arguably little ideological separation between the Congress and its splinter parties — having a broadly centrist, secular platform and relying on an umbrella coalition of voters.
Restoring the CWC’s role
However, the dream of a Congress family reunion begins to fade away on exploring its possible terms. One intractable problem is the size differential of the constituents; the Indian National Congress is many times bigger than the breakaway parties. The Janata parties could coalesce together because they were roughly equivalent in size and spread, thus precluding the possibility of a domination of one faction.
Theoretically, there is a way out, which is going back to the pre-Indira Congress. The Congress was once a party where the high command was synonymous not with the Nehru-Gandhi family (and its surrounding coterie) but with the Congress Working Committee (CWC), which functioned according to its stated role of being the highest decision-making body of the party. The CWC, in turn, was dominated by regional bosses, who drew their power from their hold on their respective State units. Admittedly, while Jawaharlal Nehru was a colossus within the party, decision-making in the CWC was generally sought to be made by consensus. That is the kind of federal, internally democratic Congress that can hypothetically entice the likes of Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar or Jaganmohan Reddy to return to the party fold and try staking a claim to national leadership. However, the nature of our political competition has fundamentally changed in the half century since the heyday of the “Congress system”. Would such a federal Congress even remain viable as a party today?
Autonomy of State units
There is no easy answer to this question. This is because a centrist political party in a diverse country such as India would always face a hard-to-resolve paradox: how to allow autonomy to State units while ensuring that the State units do not split from the parent party.
A centrist party has an inherent propensity to split owing to the absence of a core, ideological base which is immutably tied to the party brand. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for example, has seen no lasting split as no breakaway unit can hope to compete with the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh combine on the ideology of Hindutva. In contrast, the Congress has historically worked on the principle of minimising ideological distance with its primary rivals, co-opting both right-wing and left-wing leaders of opposing parties at different times. The Congress rarely set much store by ideological distinctiveness, because its social base has always been dependent more on leadership and organisation. Different caste combinations and interest groups dominated the Congress in different States; thus political scientists Chhibber and Petrocik (1989) described the Congress as a “coalition of state units” joined together in the pursuit of power. Despite their largely autonomous existence, the State units stayed with the national party throughout the “Congress system” phase because the Congress government at the centre controlled the big taps of patronage funnelled through party structures; there was inbuilt factionalism ensuring that few leaders were capable of commanding the loyalty of the majority of the State unit.
Indira Gandhi disturbed both these glues of party unity through her policy of “de-institutionalisation” of the party: disembowelling local and even State-level party structures. Unsurprisingly, the Congress suffered numerous splits, but these were often neutralised or forced into a brisk homecoming. This was because of the populist, charismatic appeal Mrs Gandhi managed to exert over the lower orders of the society, which had hitherto been excluded from the largely dominant castes-based architecture of the “Congress system”. Thus, the answer of Mrs Gandhi to the problem of keeping the umbrella party together was complete centralised control of the State units.
Splits, reasons
So, what holds the party together now? It is not the patronage provided by the central government, since the party has been out of power for close to a decade. It is also not quite the gruelling factional competition that marked the State units in the 1950-60s. Over the last three decades, State factions have tended to consolidate into bigger units under various pressures: the de-institutionalisation of party structures, financial devolution and the bourgeoning patronage powers of the Chief Minister, and the increasingly presidential nature of State elections. As far as the national glue provided by the leadership is concerned, both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have struggled to bring additional votes to the party.
In the absence of these centripetal forces, the Congress has suffered major and lasting splits in the form of the NCP, the TMC and the YSRCP. The reason Sharad Pawar merged his breakaway Congress (S) in the 1980s was because the Congress still happened to be the dominant party at the centre. The NCP has faced no such constraints to its bargaining power. And the ease with which Mamata Banerjee was able to walk away with the bulk of the Congress base in Bengal highlighted the decay in factional competition. The three other Congress factions (led by Pranab Mukherjee, Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, and Somen Mitra) were focused primarily on court intrigues. The YSRCP split reflected the challenge of preserving party loyalty from being subsumed into the political capital of dynastic chieftains, who can now skilfully bypass traditional party structures and directly connect to beneficiaries of lavishly funded welfare schemes with the help of a technocratic bureaucracy.
A federal Congress would probably help induce much needed inner-party competition, but it might also supercharge its intrinsic tendency to split. The Congress holds on so tightly to the Gandhi family brand because it appears to be the last available glue. The interesting thing about the myth of the Gandhi family embodying the eternal DNA of the party is not the veracity or falsifiability of its proposition. Like all myths, that is beside the point. The myth works to keep the party together because everyone claims to believe in it. In the absence of a high command whose authority is respected and based on some values higher than partisan jockeying, the risk is that the Congress might implode into disjointed State parties before it even gets the chance to build back the organisational framework required for a stable federal party. That is the precarious centrist paradox the Congress finds itself in, presenting no easy recipes for revival.
