Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 26: Waking up to the reality after months of lethargic response to the drubbing the Congress kept facing in election after election, the party national president Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday indulged in some plain speaking highlighting the lack of clarity and cohesion on policy issues even at the party’s top levels.
“There is a lack of clarity and cohesion among several State-level leaders on policy issues,” Ms Gandhi said in an address to State unit chiefs, general secretaries and state in-charges adding that communication from the party’s headquarters often did not percolate down to grassroots cadre.
“The issues raised by the Congress at the national level,” she said, “were not reaching the party’s grassroots cadre at the district and block levels.” She said. She said the party must ideologically fight the “diabolical campaign of the BJP/RSS and expose the BJP government’s lies. We must do so with conviction and expose their lies before the people if we are to win this battle,” she said but regretted that this did not seem to be happening.
“The AICC releases important and detailed statements almost every day on issues facing the nation. But it is my experience that they do not percolate down to our grassroots cadre at the block and district level. There are policy issues on which I find a lack of clarity and cohesion even amongst our State-level leaders,” she pointed out.
Training programmes for the workers were an absolute necessity, Ms Gandhi noted, calling it a priority. “You must train our workers to take on the unceasing onslaught of malicious disinformation campaigns at the behest of the BJP/RSS. And you must train our people to fight it while upholding and projecting the core Congress ideology,” she said.
She added, “The fight to defend our democracy, our Constitution and the Congress party’s ideology begins with being fully prepared to identify and counter false propaganda.” She also exhorted State leaders to ensure that the campaign for the five State elections, which are due in next few months, were based on discussions with a cross-section of society.
With voices of dissent growing stronger within the party, especially after a group of leaders — widely known as the G-23 — questioned the Gandhi family’s leadership demanding reforms, Ms Gandhi emphasised the need to override personal ambitions which may weaken the party.
Giving a stern message to the group demanding “reforms” in the party orgainsation, Ms Gandhi said “I would like to re-emphasise the paramount need for discipline and unity. What should matter to each and every one of us is the strengthening of the organisation. This must override personal ambitions. In this lies both collective and individual success,” she observed.
In the run-up to internal elections, there will be a nation-wide Congress membership enrolment programme from November 1 to March 31, 2022. Ms Gandhi said the enrolment process must be transparent. The party recently had announced 40% tickets to women in the upcoming U.P. election. Taking the thread forward, she said the Congress would be more meaningful only if it was truly representative of a cross-section of society and told the leaders that new members were the lifeblood of any political movement.
Meanwhile, the Congress also cautioned the Trinamool Congress (TMC) of West Bengal against providing an indirect support to the BJP by trying to seize some anti-BJP grounds in Goa which along with Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab would also go to the polls early next year. As the Trinamool Congress gears up to launch an aggressive poll campaign for the Goa Assembly elections with the visit of the chief minister Mamata Banerjee later this week, Congress on Tuesday hit out at the TMC asking it to introspect whether it was strengthening the BJP by giving it covering fire in trying to carve out a space for itself in Goa. It reminded the TMC that elections were not “tourism.”
Senior Congress leaders like Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury had been criticising the Trinamool Congress for focusing on Goa, but on Tuesday the party officially questioned the TMC’s move.
“Every party has a right to fight elections. In Goa, TMC fought the last Assembly elections as well. But what did they do for five years after that? Elections are not tourism where you fight one election and then you go away and reappear after five years. Elections are not tourism where you go to Goa for two months or five months… and then go back. So, while I respect and recognise their right to fight elections independently – because that is the beauty of democratic polity – they need to understand what are they fighting, who are they fighting and what are they fighting for,” Congress communication department head Randeep Surjewala said.
“The Congress is fighting for Goa, transparency, accountability, people of Goa and the rights of the people of Goa. What are the other political parties fighting for? The BJP is fighting for the kind of corruption that we have seen, but the other political parties need to also introspect… are they strengthening the cause of BJP or are they really in contest for their own place in the polity of Goa,” he said. “That question I will leave it to them to decide,” he added.
Surjewala said while some of the other Opposition parties crumbled under pressure, the Congress was the “only political party” which had been fighting the BJP and the Narendra Modi government’s policies for the last seven years. The Congress, he said, had fought the BJP “single-handedly, without bowing down, without getting cowed down and without retracting even a step, at the cost of many personal sacrifices, despite being persecuted recklessly and unjustifiably by the ruling dispensation.”
“Our records speak for itself. Opposition parties, whenever they get ED notices, whenever their leaders are summoned to ED offices or CBI offices, unjustifiably I agree… that is also part of a persecution plan… but many times they retract and many times latently or patently some of them have compromised. I don’t blame them. Everybody does not necessarily have the courage to stand for truth, come what may,” Surjewala said.
He said the Congress empathise with the smaller Opposition parties. “We will support those smaller Opposition parties even when they oppose us. Because it is our duty to stand with everybody who is being wrongly persecuted,” he said.