Gujarat: Why Congress' efforts to overhaul party at grassroots faces serious 'glitches'
An AICC leader claimed Rahul's assertion of the need to expel leaders working within Congress as “BJP agents” has wrecked the process to select district chiefs
Over the past month, there have broadly been three mantras that Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly hammered into his Congress colleagues in Gujarat, where he is trying out another ‘pilot project’ for revitalising the party.
The former Congress president wants to strengthen grassroots leadership by selecting and empowering new district Congress chiefs, aggressively court backward classes and purge the party of saboteurs working in cahoots with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Seemingly sound advice. The Congress’ inability to win Gujarat for the past three decades has seen the party wither at the grassroots, lose support of communities that voted for it en bloc till the 1980s, and made the organisation susceptible to both overt and covert attempts of sabotage by the BJP.
Congress plan goes awry
To execute the pilot project, the Congress appointed 43 AICC observers, seven supporting AICC observers and 183 PCC observers earlier this month.
Each district in Gujarat has been assigned one AICC observer and four PCC observers to enable the widest possible consultations at the grassroots level for short-listing a panel of six nominees per district by May 10. These dockets are then to be sent to the party high command for picking the new District Congress Committee (DCC) chiefs.
Within two weeks of its launch, however, the organisational reform project has begun to run afoul of the mantras Rahul had propounded.
Also read: We seem demoralised in Gujarat but only Congress can defeat BJP: Rahul Gandhi
Sources involved with the project’s rollout say it has become common practice among leaders to discredit their intra-party rivals and prospective candidates for the DCC chief’s post by accusing them of being in cahoots with the BJP.
Infighting intensifies
Rahul’s emphasis for a backward caste outreach has only intensified infighting among district-level leaders who represent different caste groups.
Further, the push for a more empowered DCC is apparently being filibustered by a section of the state leadership, which is ostensibly wary of its own importance being diminished if Rahul’s project of empowering DCC chiefs succeeds.
In some districts that fall in the OBC-dominated North Gujarat and Saurashtra regions, once was the Congress’s strongholds, sources told The Federal that observers are facing a stiff pushback from local leaders.
A common refrain is that the AICC-appointed team was either being misled or strongarmed by a section of senior state leaders to shortlist candidates whose names hadn’t even figured during discussions the observers had with grassroots party workers.
A case in point is the Porbandar district in Saurashtra, a Congress bastion not long ago, where a leader from the upper caste Darbar community is being billed as a frontrunner for the DCC chief’s post.
Darbars versus Mehrs
The district has a sizeable population of the backward caste Mehr community, which had aided the rise of Arjun Modhwadia to the frontlines of the Gujarat Congress leadership over two decades ago.
Also read: Gujarat: Congress ramps up revival efforts, BJP reacts by rolling out 'bulldozer justice'
A former Gujarat Congress chief and former Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly, Modhwadia had, however, stunned the Congress last March when he switched to the BJP; robbing the Grand Old Party of its most prominent Mehr leader in Saurashtra.
The DCC revamp plan, part of the Congress’s pan-India sangathan srijan abhiyan (organisation building campaign), had raised hopes among party workers in Porbandar of a renewed focus on courting the Mehr community. However, the consultations that the team of observers assigned to Porbandar have had over the past two weeks, have left ordinary Congress workers disappointed.
“Darbars and Mehrs have a history of conflict in Porbandar. The Congress district unit in Porbandar is full of people from the Mehr community and they are not happy about possibly having to follow a district president from the Darbar community,” a Congress leader from Porbandar told The Federal.
Erroneous leadership input
In North Gujarat’s Banaskantha district, the name of Mavji Chaudhary, a leader from the backward caste Anjana Patel community who recently returned to the Congress after a brief stint with the BJP, is doing the rounds for the next DCC chief.
Curiously, Chaudhary doesn’t even hail from the Banaskantha district and candidly conceded to The Federal that if the party does wish to appoint him as DCC chief he would do a better job in the neighbouring district of Patan, which has a formidable population of Anjana Patels.
“I was a part of the campaign team when Geniben Thakor contested the Lok Sabha polls from Banaskantha (the Congress’s only victor from Gujarat in last year’s general election) but while I may have worked in the district for about a year, my ground network is strong in Patan, which is dominated by Anjana Patels,” pointed out Chaudhary.
Also read: Why Rahul met 4 forgotten Gujarat Congress veterans and what they told him
An AICC observer The Federal spoke to said a major cause for the sangathan srijan abhiyan facing “teething problems” in Gujarat was the input being received from the state leadership.
“In any exercise like this, it is natural for state Congress leaders to try and get their loyalists appointed… Unfortunately, in Gujarat this seems to be happening at the cost of the (organisation building) campaign; to have their loyalists appointed, senior state leaders are providing some district observers wrong inputs on local caste dynamics and potential candidates,” the AICC observer said.
Another AICC leader also claimed that Rahul’s recent assertion of the need to identify and expel leaders who have been working within the Congress as “BJP agents” has also “wrecked the process for selecting DCC chiefs”.
BJP ‘agents’ galore
“Every day we are dealing with local leaders making allegations about one or the other colleague working as a BJP agent, how are we supposed to find out who is telling the truth and who is lying? If we start removing anyone against whom such allegation is made, then forget appointing DCC chiefs, Congress kha jhanda uthane ke liye bhi log nahi milenge (we won’t even have workers left to carry the Congress flag),” this AICC leader, who has been appointed observer for a district in Central Gujarat, told The Federal.
The inability of the observers to get genuine feedback from the grassroots, party insiders say, is also because of a failure to win back the trust of dedicated workers who have been systematically sidelined by the state leadership over the years or those who quit the party for better prospects but continue to be misfits in the BJP or even the AAP.
Also read: Congress banking on Jignesh Mevani to shore up sagging fortunes in Saurashtra
Overhaul state leadership
“In just the last two years, 75 district Congress leaders, many of them veterans, have either left the party or are sitting at home solely because the senior leadership never heard them. They are crucial for the party and are needed for any rebuilding exercise to succeed,” senior Gujarat Congress leader Manhar Patel told The Federal.
Patel cited the example of how the Gujarat Congress leadership treated Natu Thakor, an influential leader of milk cooperatives. Thakor had quit the Congress to join the BJP in 2020 after his repeated pleas for aggressive intervention by the Gujarat Congress against the saffron party’s stalling of elections for cooperatives between 2017 and 2019 fell on deaf ears, said Patel.
“Thakor reached out to state Congress leadership multiple times to discuss measures to tackle the situation but nobody met him and even in 2020 when he joined the BJP, nobody from the state leadership spoke to him or inform the central leadership (about Thakor quitting the Congress). When the cooperative polls were finally held in 2021, we lost all the milk cooperatives to the BJP, including Amul, our fort of 30 years,” Patel added, while asserting that the party high command needs to overhaul the state leadership before it can think of its district revamp turning a corner.
Mass discontent
Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi conceded that the district overhaul plan had met with “temporary glitches” but tried to gloss over the gravity of the situation.
“Local leaders are yet to be convinced that this time the party is undergoing a massive overhaul and changing the way of its functioning. There are some initial issues. We will have to convince local leaders that this is a serious exercise,” Doshi told The Federal.
He expressed hope that the current hurdles will be overcome once AICC observers assigned to each district begin interacting with booth agents, booth presidents and block level office bearers to narrow the search for new DCC chiefs.
With problems galore, will the jumbo team constituted by the AICC to revamp the DCCs meet the May 10 deadline, to finalise names of prospective names for district Congress chiefs?
