Power centers in the corridors of power, Extra Con

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Posted online: Thursday, March 08, 2007 at 0000 hrs

<b>Sonia’s call for Congress internal reform</b>, seen logically, puts most focus on her Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has shared with Congress Parliamentary Party leaders her assessment that there may be more than just price rise to the party’s recent setbacks in Punjab and Uttarakhand. She has urged them to look wider and deeper. They would do well to follow her lead and fix their gaze on the state of the Congress organisation. But the problem will remain, nevertheless. Given the internal structure of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi’s challenge is not so much to spread the message of organisational primacy. <b>It is, rather, to take full ownership of that message herself, and to make sure that a revival, like all things in the Congress, begins from the top</b>. In a sense, should Sonia Gandhi take her own words seriously, it would cast her in the unique role of presiding over a dispersion of power away from her and her family. For the Congress, the question is no longer — if it ever was — Dynasty versus Democracy. It is, rather, how much the

There are at least two reasons why this is a task most urgent for the party. One, electoral straws in the wind indicate that in many states the voter is looking expectantly at the two biggest national parties and the space that has been sporadically occupied by the Third Force in the last few decades is receding. The contest in many states has already assumed a bipolarity — it is BJP versus Congress, or between two coalitions led by the BJP and the Congress. But the Congress is still far too top-heavy and still not fleet-footed enough to keep pace with the shift in political dynamics, much less profit from it. It needs a more consultative decision-making process, and new ideas. It needs a participatory internal debate on how to deal with a polity that has transformed radically from the time when it was the centrepiece of a one-party dominance system.

The other reason why Sonia Gandhi should initiate organisational restructuring is because she said she would. After the verdict in the 2004 polls, when she refused to be prime minister, the general impression was that she would now concentrate on an overhaul of the party. With a crucial election looming in Uttar Pradesh, what could be a better time to redeem that promise?
editor@expressindia.com