Forget grand speeches at AICC meet: Congress needs to lose to win

What does a party do when it faces a certain rout in an imminent election? It puts on a brave face. The face of the usually passive Manmohan Singh actively stating that Rahul Gandhi will lead the Congress to victory in 2014. The stern face of Sonia Gandhi calling the main opposition communal and violent. The face of Rahul Gandhi, the great young hope of the Grand Old Party, not as Prime Ministerial candidate but in his avatar as leader of a most loyal opposition.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh. PTI

Rahul Gandhi would like us to believe that he wants to reinvent the Congress. He spent a considerable part of his address to the All India Congress Committee talking about corruption and how he is determined to combat it. But where were his conscience and determination when the 2G scam was revealed in 2010, when the CWG and Adarsh scams were exposed the same year and when Coalgate blackened the UPA in 2011? His claims circa December 2013/January 2014 have to be read for what they are: a desperate attempt to salvage some pride in the April general election. Rahul has risen only when Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal have torn through the Congress, exposing it as corrupt to the core, leaderless and in drift.

Grand speeches at an AICC session at the fag end of a disastrous rein in government will do nothing to change the Congress. The only thing which can aid a reinvention of Congress is a humiliating election defeat. Actually make that two election defeats that keeps them out of power for 10 years. Congress's great success has been that the longest it has stayed out of power at the Centre is an eight year period between 1996 and 2004 (the next longest is just three years between 1977 and 1980), and even in that eight year long hiatus, for two years (between 1996 and 1998) it was effectively wielding power from the backseat. It has never, therefore, felt the need to do anything radically different. It simply accepts a brief stint out of power as an electoral reality, but assumes that an unchanged party will eventually be voted back to power in quick time. That is the way it has happened for almost seventy years.

The party's frequent victories in the Lok Sabha polls have had a devastating effect on its long term health. In certain important states, beginning in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s and 1970s, but continuing to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the 1990s, West Bengal in the 2000s and Andhra Pradesh in the 2010s (Delhi may be next), the Congress has more or less been wiped out of electoral contention. The party never thought of a serious reinvention in these states and eventually its tired politics simply faded away and ceded space to other newer and more nimble parties.

The reality is that the Congress has for long been living off the legacy of its past. It remains the only party which has all India footprint even if it is getting lighter every year. This year, 2014, may be the year that the Congress realizes that that legacy has exhausted its electoral purpose.

Perhaps then when faced with political oblivion the Congress will get its act together. It will genuinely think about corruption. It may start to view governance as something more than populism - incredibly, Rahul Gandhi hailed every populist Congress policy including bank nationalization in his AICC speech. And it may start to effect the kind of structural change that will halt the rise of mini-dynasties and allow merit to take precedence in key part positions.

Elsewhere in the world, parties have reinvented after long years in opposition. In the UK, the Labour Party spent 18 years in opposition between 1979 and 1997 before it eschewed it's out of date socialist and populist policies. The Conservative Party spent 13 years out of power between 1997 and 2010 before it shed some of its extremist policies which had forced it into the political sidelines.

The Congress may yet have a future. Or it may not. It can reinvent when out of power but if it doesn't it will stay out of power for a generation (or longer) like it already does in several parts of India.