Rahul’s Congress-decentralisation plan promising, but fraught with hurdles

After sycophantically fostering a “high command culture” through decades, the Congress now wants to decentralise its power structure, hoping to rebuild its crippled organisation from the grassroots.

The ambitious plan, a brainwave of former party president Rahul Gandhi, involves granting greater functional and financial autonomy to the party’s over 750 district unit chiefs across the country.

On March 27 and 28, Rahul, along with party president Mallikarjun Kharge, met two batches of District Congress Committee (DCC) chiefs in Delhi to emphasise their role in ensuring that the party’s pledge of sangathan srijan (organisation building) in 2025 doesn’t ring hollow. A meeting with another batch of DCC chiefs is scheduled for April 3.

More power to DCCs

The Congress’s media wing chief Pawan Khera has hinted that “some important announcements” on the role and powers of the DCCs could be made during the AICC session scheduled in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad on April 8 and 9.

Khera confirmed that the party high command wants the Congress to shift to a “more decentralised organisational model” which makes the DCCs “more autonomous”.

Among the key proposals being pushed by Rahul, sources said, are a mechanism to “directly involve DCC chiefs” in selecting candidates for elections to local bodies, Assemblies and Parliament and granting financial assistance to district units.

Also read: Congress story: Another poll drubbing, fresh reform vows, no real intent

Target to break stranglehold of factional leaders

Rahul also wants the party to consider evolving a “reporting and feedback system” that allows more frequent “direct communication” between district chiefs and the high command.

The basic idea behind Rahul’s push for strengthening the DCCs, a close aide of the former Congress chief told The Federal, is to “break the stranglehold” sundry factional leaders have traditionally held in the functioning of the party at the state level so that “more leaders from the grassroots can come up the ranks”.

Rahul’s push for enhancing the powers of DCC chiefs, the aide said, is also meant to “shake up the satraps” in the different state units who “work less for the party and more for themselves”.

Following in uncle’s footsteps?

A party veteran, multiple-term former MLA, and presently a Rajya Sabha MP, told The Federal that Rahul’s suggestion of empowering DCCs was “reminiscent of measures his grandmother (former Prime Minister, the late Indira Gandhi), took in the late 1970s in consultation with the late Sanjay Gandhi (Rahul’s uncle) to strengthen the party”.

The Rajya Sabha MP recalled, “Back then too, many people were chosen, mostly handpicked by Sanjay, from districts, or even from university politics, and given important responsibilities, disappointing strong state-level leaders but that strategy helped us regain ground we had lost during the Emergency years; many of these leaders went on to become MLAs, MPs, and even chief ministers, but as these leaders grew in stature, they formed their own factions while the party began to lose support at the grassroots.”

Calling Rahul’s plan to empower DCC chiefs “a step in the right direction”, the Rajya Sabha MP, however, also cautioned about “resistance from leaders who may think that their position in the party is being undermined”.

Also read: Gujarat: Congress ramps up revival efforts, BJP reacts by rolling out 'bulldozer justice'

All-round scepticism

Rahul’s enthusiasm for empowering the DCCs at the cost of state-level leaders has already triggered scepticism not just in the higher and middle rungs of the party’s leadership pyramid but also among those he hopes to strengthen.

A senior party functionary told The Federal that Rahul had mooted his plan of enhancing the powers of DCC chiefs during a meeting of AICC general secretaries and state in-charges held earlier this month. The functionary said “signs of resistance” were immediately visible.

“During the course of the meeting, Rahul Gandhi said we need to give DCC chiefs a bigger say in the candidate-selection process and also evolve some mechanism to make frequent direct communication between the high command and DCC chiefs possible. As soon as he proposed this, some leaders cautioned that this could annoy state Congress chiefs and other senior leaders and may also make things difficult for state in-charges. Rahul simply responded saying ‘it doesn’t matter’,” the functionary said.

Practical problems

Of Rahul’s several proposals for strengthening DCC chiefs, the trickiest appears to be his suggestion to grant these district-level leaders a seat at the high tables of the party’s Central Election Committee (CEC) and Pradesh Election Committees (PECs).

Under the party’s existing system, candidates for Assembly and Parliament elections are first shortlisted by the Pradesh Election Committees (PECs), comprising the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chief, legislative party leader, current and former MPs and MLAs and a handful of DCC chiefs who either enjoy the patronage of some factional leader or can boast of some clout of their own.

The shortlist is then sent to the 15-member CEC, where senior AICC leaders, including Kharge, Rahul, and former party chief Sonia Gandhi, finalise candidates in consultation with the relevant state in-charge and PCC chief. Party leaders, thus, think of DCC chiefs as being too low in the pecking order to be granted not just an audience but also a say during discussions of the CEC and PECs.

Also read: Why Rahul met 4 forgotten Gujarat Congress veterans and what they told him

‘Practical problems’

A party leader who is part of the current CEC alluded to “practical problems” in bringing in DCC chiefs for discussions of the high-level body.

“CEC meetings are for the final round of discussions before candidate lists are finalised, and except the PCC chief and CLP leader, or in rare cases working presidents, even senior state leaders are not included in these. The list we receive is prepared by the PECs after sorting probable candidates based on winnability and other criteria. This system avoids unnecessarily long discussions, allowing us to focus on seats where there may be more than one strong candidate. Opening up CEC discussions to DCC chiefs would mean redoing the whole PEC process, which will prolong the announcement of candidates. It may also undermine the PEC,” the CEC member said.

The CEC member added that a “better alternative” would be to “involve DCC chiefs in the PEC discussions” or to “nominate one or two CEC members to attend PEC meetings” but said “roping in all DCCs chiefs may still not be possible in PEC meetings”.

Food for thought

In a long post on X, party spokesperson Rangarajan Mohan Kumaramangalam gave Rahul and the Congress much food for thought. Asserting that Rahul needs to “to take a far closer look and spend far more time with organisational issues than he has”, Kumaramangalam wrote, among other things, that the party must “stop appointing district presidents by quota of senior leaders /MPs/MLAs. This is particularly true in states where we depend on alliances because there is no possible way to align incentives of the seniors struggling to hold onto their seat in an overall shrinking share of seats”.

He added that the Congress needs “a self-reporting system and someone to monitor it so the intermediaries, who are almost always corruptible, do not do irreversible damage.”

DCC chiefs’ concerns

DCC chiefs who attended the meetings convened by Kharge and Rahul at the party’s new Indira Bhawan headquarters last week have their own share of concerns. During the meeting on March 27, Kharge had repeatedly emphasised the centrality of empowering DCCs in the party’s wider revival scheme, which includes marshalling these grassroots leaders to identify “discrepancies in voter lists” and have them rectified ahead of elections.

What seems to have, however, stuck with many district chiefs who heard the pep-talk was Kharge’s assertion that as the party’s “first line of defence (against political rivals) on the ground” it was the responsibility of DCC presidents to “ensure victory of every (Congress) candidate in your district”.

Also read: Need to remove Congress leaders who work for BJP: Rahul Gandhi

A flawed idea?

A DCC chief who attended the March 27 meet told The Federal that while it was “encouraging to see the high command finally think of us, holding DCC chiefs responsible for poll outcomes would mean making scapegoats out of us because our views on candidate selection hardly matter... even if we are given a greater say in candidate selection, will the party go by our recommendation or by what our PCC chief or other senior leaders say”.

Another DCC chief offered a more candid view. “DCC chiefs are also allied to different factional leaders because it is these leaders and not the high command that get them appointed in the first place. Whether it is in candidate selection or in general working of the party, any DCC chief will only say what he is told by the leader who got him appointed. So, this idea that a DCC chief will give better inputs is flawed,” this DCC chief said.

A question for Rahul

Congress sources say what needs to precede any reform of DCCs is for the high command to acknowledge and resolve issues with the middle and senior rung of leadership.

“DCCs are powerless; in some states they don’t even exist, while in others they exist only in name... When the party announced the schedule of these meetings, many states did not even have DCC chiefs. DCC chiefs for UP were appointed only last week, and in states like Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, we either have no DCC chiefs or have DCC chiefs with no office bearers under them. Has the high command held any PCC chief, state in-charge or the GSO (KC Venugopal, the AICC’s general secretary-organisation) accountable for this mess? Who has a greater responsibility for the party’s electoral performance — these senior leaders or the DCCs,” a party veteran from Uttar Pradesh told The Federal.

The Ahmedabad AICC Session is expected to give final shape to Rahul’s blueprint for decentralising power within his party. A question Rahul may want to ask himself, in the meantime, is whether satraps who stand to lose grip over the party following this decentralisation bid will happily draft an elegy to their own stranglehold.