Congress leadership should learn from past mistakes

Congress leadership should learn from past mistakes

The Congress, reportedly, will get civil society groups to draw up a charter of demands for incorporation into its manifesto in poll-bound states. Some rootless wonders put in charge of party units in these states might consider this a smart ploy to rally a group disgruntled with the BJP because of the restrictions the central government has placed on the flow of foreign funds to non-government organisations (NGOs). But, on the whole, there could be no better advertisement of the party’s alienation from the people than having to depend on civil society intermediaries to identify what troubles the people whom the party seeks to represent.
A political party is, by definition, a voluntary organisation that seeks to gain control of state power. What distinguishes one party from another is its vision of how it seeks to gain power and what it seeks to achieve with state power. If a party has popular support, it would be because it engages with the people on a regular basis, in the course of mediating between the people and the state, whether the party is in power or not.
It is only when a party fails to engage with the people on a daily basis and emerges out of the woodwork only to seek people’s votes, come elections, does it need other voluntary organizations to tell it what troubles the citizenry. Sonia Gandhi made a cardinal mistake in setting up the National Advisory Council, when the UPA was in power. Her job as party president was to make the party come alive as a conduit of popular aspirations and demands, to respond to which would be the job of the government.
The party leadership should learn from past failure to energise the party organisation, not persist with the mistake of focusing on power politics and outsourcing engagement with the people to NGOs.