Congress party struggles to change with the times

"Mrs. Gandhi has brought new hope, a new sense of unity. In what way is Mrs. Gandhi not an Indian? She is rational, pragmatic, committed to the ideas which Congress and our country stand for."

Essay titled `The United Colours of Congress'

The Indian National Congress, the party that dominated independent India's first half-century, is now being routinely described as having one foot in the trash can.

Congress resounding defeats this month in three state assembly elections in India's Hindi-speaking heartland to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political arm of the Hindu nationalist movement, which leads a national coalition government. The elections -- pitting India's two major national parties head to head -- were widely seen as a semifinal for general elections to be held by next fall.

"It is a setback," said Manmohan Singh, the Congress party's leader in the upper house of parliament.

Obituaries the party are undoubtedly overblown. Congress could easily turn the anti-incumbent sentiment that is perennial to Indian voters against the BJP in general elections next year. It still controls 12 states, and it returned to power last week in Delhi.

But the reasons for the Congress losses suggest deeper problems. They tell of a country changing, and a party that has failed to change with it.

"It is clearly a sort of behemoth without a sense of direction," said Mahesh Ranjarangan, a political analyst, of Congress. "I think there's a serious intellectual crisis: being unable to make sense of the new India."

Congress seen increasingly as a party without a clear ideology, with a leader who could be a liability as much as an asset, and as an organization beset by factionalism and feudalism, united only around a family dynasty that last held the prime ministership in 1989.

"The nation has changed a great deal," said one influential political figure who asked not to be identified. "They don't want to know your father's name; they want to know your name."

Beyond current leader, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, Congress no longer has many high-profile leaders at the state or national level. The BJP, in contrast, not only has the popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, but a whole new generation of leaders.

Congress has fallen victim to the changing nature of Indian politics, with parties based on narrow demographic, social, economic or regional support slowly sapping its once-broad support base. Weak at the grass roots, it also has done less well than the BJP in forming alliances in a new era of coalition-based politics.

Congress, once a "catch-all" party, is now more of a "catch-none" party, Anthony Heath and Yogendra Yadav noted in a 1999 essay, The United Colours of Congress.

"To put it less kindly," the authors wrote, "its shape is like that of a pillow: It reflects that shape of the person who last sat on it."

Then is the question of Congress' prospects under Gandhi, who became party president in 1998. Even some of her political allies have repeatedly raised the question of whether an Italian by birth has the right to rule India, as Gandhi probably would were Congress to win next year.

"She has no experience in Indian politics," said Tariq Anwar of the Nationalist Congress Party, which broke away from Congress. "Her only qualification is that she is the wife of the late Rajiv Gandhi."

Singh insisted that was not so.

"Mrs. Gandhi has brought new hope, a new sense of unity," to the party, he said, asking: "In what way is Mrs. Gandhi not an Indian?

"She is rational, pragmatic, committed to the ideas which Congress and our country stand for," he added.

But some say the very problem is determining what Congress stands for today.

Sitaram Yechury, a leader in the Communist Party of India, noted that Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, had had a clear vision of democracy and socialism. Indira Gandhi vowed to fight poverty and remove the privileges of the feudal nobility. Rajiv Gandhi envisioned a 21st-century India capitalizing on technology.

"What is the Congress vision now?" Yitary asked.

Ranjarangan there was the same lack of clarity on economic reforms, which began under Singh, then the Congress finance minister, in 1991, but have since been championed by Vajpayee's party. Should Congress "be critical of reforms and globalization -- or should it say we'll do it faster, better?" he asked.

Each of the three states where Congress was defeated seemed to speak to a different one of its weaknesses, or to the strength of its rival, according to analyses by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. In Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP won a three-fourths majority, the state government had been unable to meet an electorate's rising expectations for roads, power and other infrastructure.

In Chattisgarh, where Congress lost narrowly, the issue was partly the image of its chief minister as corrupt. But Chattisgarh and the other two states also showed how the quiet work of Hindu nationalist organizations, unchallenged by Congress, among indigenous tribes had paid off. The BJP won a large majority of the seats reserved for the tribes.

In Rajasthan, the BJP won more than twice as many seats as Congress. The results suggest that although it is often derided as a retrograde Hindu nationalist group focused on India's glorious past, Bharatiya Janata has also become a modern party.

The BJP picked candidates carefully to deal with complex local caste equations, said Jairam Ramesh, the Congress Party's senior economic adviser.

"It's the first time we had an American-style campaign in an Indian election," Ramesh said, and Congress had not been able to compete. "We're not a modern party, we're still an old-style political party," he said. "We haven't come to terms with the changing political idiom."