AFTER the Congress party’s defeat in last May’s general election questions are being asked whether it can ever revive itself. The omens are not bright. The Tamil Nadu state unit split; activists are restive.

Beneath suggestions for reform is unmistakable dissatisfaction with the leadership; especially with Rahul Gandhi, the vice president whom his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been assiduously projecting as her successor.

She herself is not in the best of health. He has refused to accept the responsibilities of leading the party in parliament. Not once has he delivered a serious policy pronouncement. That there is no future at all for the Congress with Rahul Gandhi as its leader is tacitly accepted by all outside the coterie of flatterers.

Smita Gupta, a well-informed correspondent of The Hindu reported recently on the trends in the internal debate on the Congress’s future. She wrote that in closed-door sessions that started late October, the party’s top leaders have been talking of the Congress’s future. The discussions focused on the need to rearticulate the party’s ideology and transform it into a fighting machine.

But what she added gives little hope for ideological clarity.

The Congress has its task cut out for it.

“Discussions on ideology have boiled down to the ‘need to be pluralistic without looking like a Muslim party, to retain the minority vote without annoying the liberal Hindu mainstream, and choosing a path so that we are not stigmatised as anti-upper caste in north India,’ as a former minister who attended one of the meetings said. Indeed, the Congress is very conscious of the fact that it is no longer seen as ‘an umbrella party’ attracting the votes of Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims alike.”

How it meets the leadership as well as the ideological challenges remains to be seen.

The Congress would do well to recall some precedents of stunning revival of decaying political parties.

Three factors contribute to a political party’s revival. Inspiring leadership, an attractive ideal and policy and an efficient organisation. Muslims trusted Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, approved of his policy and they could see for themselves a party machine that was growing stronger by the day.

These three factors also explain how Indira Gandhi arrested the Congress’s decline, reflected in the 1967 elections, and revived its fortunes. She provided the leadership; gave an attractive slogan “gharibi hatao” (banish poverty) and split the Congress in 1969 to weld her own faction into a powerful organisation. She won a landslide victory in 1971.

Winston Churchill’s shocking defeat in the 1945 general election drove not only the war hero himself but much of his party into depression. One man remained undaunted in adversity. He was R.A. Butler. He realised that while the people loved the leader they did not approve of his domestic policies and considered him outdated.

A leader there was and the Conservative Party machine was strong enough to survive such a defeat. The failure was at the policy level. Butler repaired himself to the party office with just a secretary and skillfully filled the void. He formulated policies which the electorate could accept.

As chairman of the Conservative Party’s advisory committee on policy, he encouraged its extra-parliamentary organisations to feel that they also had a role in the formulation of policy.

He told the party’s annual conference in 1948: “Gone are the days when policy is brought down to us from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone, so that we are blinded by the light when it is brought to us. The Conservative Party is now helping … to give its own contribution to the making of policy.”

It worked. The Conser­vatives returned to power in 1951.

The Janata Party (1977-79) went to pieces because leaders publicly squabbled; its constituent units did not weld into one and its policies lacked coherence. Precisely these factors accounted for the collapse of the Janata Dal government headed by V.P. Singh (1989-90). The party was reduced to a mere shadow.

The Congress has a leader in Sonia Gandhi. Its organisation is intact. Two factors impede its recovery — the obstinate refusal of its leader-in-waiting Rahul Gandhi to relinquish a baton which his feeble hands cannot grasp and the party’s failure to evolve sensible and coherent policies.

The exercises about evolving an ideology have not taken the party far because there has been complete indifference to the ideological aspect. The Congress has its task cut out for it by launching a campaign against the Modi government’s sustained attempts in various fields to induct the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh men in the administration and in other state-run bodies. But the Congress dreads the prospect of losing the Hindu vote. Sonia Gandhi has seen to it that a second rung of leadership independent of her cannot flourish.

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, November 29th , 2014