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Gandhi Party’s Demise Is Warning to the Left
By Philip Collins
The Indian Lok Sabha will be elected, in the largest democratic experiment on Earth , from April 19 until June 1. Approximately 960 million people are eligible to vote and, if turnout is the same as usual, at least two-thirds of them will do so. No tutored eyes can see anything other than a third emphatic victory for the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
In a recent poll, 64 per cent preferred Modi to the 17 per cent who selected Rahul Gandhi of Congress. In polls conducted this year the alliance on the right, headed by Modi’s BJP, has taken close to 50 per cent of the vote and usually a double-digit lead over the alliance on the left, headed by Congress. According to the latest projection, Congress could hit an all-time low with 38 seats, close to a wipeout.
This is the party, remember, that ruled India almost unimpeded from independence until 1989. It is the only political party in the country that has run the government of every Indian state. In a vast and heterogeneous nation of 15 major languages and over 800 dialects, the Congress party used to be a national institution and, as Sunil Khilnani observed in The Idea of India, one of the solvents into which differences of identity tended to dissolve.
No longer. India is now ruled by a government that makes a fervent issue of identity, and Congress is on the edge . All short-term fixes have been tried. Indian party politics is highly local and diverse, with 39 parties in parliament and over 1,800 nationally, and so binding agents like Congress are crucial. Its leaders established the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India) to maximize the force of the anti-BJP parties, but to little avail. Party strategists have tried to entangle Modi in crony capitalism, and Gandhi declared the election to be a choice between democracy and dictatorship. Though it is true that the Modi government has an alarming record with respect to the judiciary and press freedom, the charge does not stick, at least not when it is levelled by Gandhi. This is how they got to the meaningless alternative of the “shop of love”.
Nothing is working and this draws inevitable attention to the leadership question. Gandhi, the latest scion of the Nehru family to sit at the top of Congress, is always cited as the de facto leader. In point of fact, since his mother, Sonia, stood down as the president in 2019, that post has been held by Mallikarjun Kharge, an 81-year-old lawyer from Karnataka. Yet this hardly feels like the herald of post-dynastic politics and Gandhi has been vague about which of the two, himself or Kharge, will be prime minister in the unlikely event of a Congress victory.
The organizational and leadership problems, though, are symptoms of a larger failing. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Congress deserves the obscurity to which it is headed because of its acute intellectual shortcomings. The residual Congress ideology is a sort of English Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun. Congress built an Indian economy that discouraged foreign trade and inward investment and caught up commercial transactions in a web of regulations. To some extent the Nehruvian state was dismantled by PV Narasimha Rao’s government from 1991 but the change was short and liberalization is not a current cause within a party that lacks a clear economic doctrine.
By contrast, Modi has a record on which he can run. India’s growth rate of 7.2 per cent is the second highest in the G20. More people have heat and light, more people have inside lavatories. India has been adding 10,000km of highway every year. Capital expenditure as a percentage of total government expenditure has doubled since 2010 and India now makes more digital payments than the next four leading countries combined.
Modi’s Hindu nationalism is an important part of his political movement, to be sure. The construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a destroyed mosque in Ayodhya, on what its advocates claim is the holy site of the birth of Ram, is a popular move from which the prime minister extracts all the political credit going. His party does not like dissent and is impatient with institutions which, in a democracy, are designed to question and curtail power. A revived Congress party should not yield on these points.
But this is not a path to victory. Congress needs to avoid being orphaned as the party solely of the dispossessed. The Congress manifesto, published on April 5, was a standard left-of-center list of desirable state handouts. It said little about more inclusive growth. The top 10 per cent of Indians hold 77 per cent of the national wealth. Unemployment is as high as it has ever been and less than half of urban workers have full-time jobs. The India Skills Report 2023 found only half of young Indians are employable — one in five Indians cannot yet read. And, most alarming, India’s female labor participation rate has dropped from 32 per cent in 2005 to 19 per cent in 2021. In the second most unequal democracy in the world, after South Africa, there is a story that a revitalized Congress could tell.
To some extent the problems of the Congress party — lacking a convincing story about growth, sounding culturally distant from the nation and too keen to dispense state funds — are exemplars to the political left everywhere. Yet politics is also local, and it is time — it has been time for a long while now — for Congress to go beyond the limitations of the dynastic Nehru family. The future of India will need good inclusive growth to fund good public services. It will also need a government that can be trusted with democratic freedoms. Congress is the only option to offer both, but at the moment it is no option at all.
For the time being, a new Labor government will not be able to deal with its sister party. Instead, it will have to seek to finish a trade deal with the Modi government — which is by far the best way to detach India from its historic neutrality and proximity to Russia which are, strange to say, the other great legacies of the Congress party. – The Times
