Congress can never be a cadre party. Why?
Many political thinkers and commentators argue that Indian National Congress can come back to power only if it creates a cadre to spread its message to the masses. In my view, Congress can never become a cadre party. If it attempts to do it, it will fail miserably and lose time and resources in the process. Why do I say so?
What are the roles of cadre?
Cadre is a socialist/communist concept. Cadres are a group of people who are extremely loyal to the party they belong to. They are the people who are trained to carry out the programs of the party-state or disseminate the party propaganda to the masses.
In a single party-state like China, cadres have always work to do. They collect information from the people and government, inform the people about the government’s work and function as the people’s nearest access point to power.
In a democracy like India, when the party is out of power, cadre does the job of the opposition at the grassroots level.
What motivates cadre?
The grassroots level cadre is not paid for their work in India. Most of them voluntarily devote their time and energy to do party work apart from doing a day job. They also contribute money from their earnings to the fund the party. They are loyal to the party and its ideology, making them stand like rock behind the party against all odds.
We see people who are ready to die for Hindu Rashtra or a Proletarian State. To make someone die for an ideology, it must be extreme. Thinking about it should make your heart swell with emotions that you become ready to do anything or sacrifice your life. The party becomes a religion that some people would die to protect.
Then there are the paid-to-be-cadre who will do not have an ideological affinity towards the party. They are not passionate about the party’s cause and will never sacrifice anything for the party. They are this dispassionate group of people who are paid to attend political rallies. They are as loyal as an employee of a company, which pays them a salary. Their loyalty ends when someone offers better.
Congress and Cadre will never go together
An extreme and puritanical ideology is the most important requirement of converting a party to a cadre party. Congress doesn’t have one. On the contrary, its ideology is loitering around the centre. It never went to extremes on any issue since Independence.
How many people are ready to sacrifice their lives for a subtle “Live and Let Live” kind of ideology? It doesn’t pump your heart or make your blood boil because of a lack of animosity towards any one group. There are no sworn enemies created out of stretched imaginations to hate.
Congress leaders and sympathisers often use the phrase ‘party workers’. Have they ever put a count to the number of party workers? Does Congress have one lakh workers across the country, or twenty thousand? We don’t know.
There are a handful of party workers around each state leader or local leader. Most of them are loyal to their leaders, not the party. That’s why you see scores of people switching sides when their leader moves to another party due to the lure of power. If Congress count these people as their workers, then they are living in fools’ paradise.
Then, who should Congress count on?
If you listen to common men who still vote for Congress, most of them complain that BJP workers come to their homes asking for votes many times during an election. In Kerala, I have experienced that most other party candidates and workers visited several times during the recent Panchayath Elections. Congress candidates or workers went barely once for house visits.
But then think about it this way. Despite other party workers visiting and talking to them many times, in the 2019 general elections, Congress got 19.5% of votes and the UPA coalition got 24.6% of total votes polled. What motivated these 12 crore voters to vote for Congress against all odds?
How can Congress increase their tribe? If the party can find an answer to that, they will have the only practical way to storm back to power.
The votes that Congress gets are mostly from its sympathisers who are sober people, who don’t push themselves to the extreme. They are people who support Congress passively. They are busy with their daily work and are not willing to come out and support the party in the open, attend a rally or forward unverified or baseless posts on social media.
What BJP did to these unsuspecting people in 2014 was to make them very ambitious by selling pipe dreams. Once they were drawn into their propaganda network, the party started slowly injecting them their heady religion-politics concoction.
Cadre, a double-edged sword
Cadre helps in building as well as destroying a political party. When you are out of power, cadre helps you in your propaganda to come back to power. However, when you are in power, having a loyal cadre is a burden for the party. The money-motivated cadre and their leaders will take money from people to get things done and so on. These high-handed men who are drunk on power will spoil the image of the party at the grass-roots level. It’s very difficult to creatively engage cadre when you are in power. They need to be fed their daily dose of poison and hatred.
So, how can Congress comeback?
Congress needs to bring half of the 44% people who voted for NDA in 2019. The communal-religious venom that has been injected into the common man needs to be treated first. Then, Congress needs to showcase a set of tangible and practical offerings to them.
All of these need to be communicated in such a manner that people get truly excited about the prospects. Most Congressmen talk about the need to create a network like cadre parties. My take is that the network is an outcome of a party program and not vice-versa. If there is a compelling message that is worth spreading, it will eventually be spread among the masses. Even if you do not create a network, it will happen.
Congress is not a narrow one-leader, one-religion party. It is a mass-based, pan-Indian party that represents the aspirations of all sections of the society. The party must focus on people from whom it draws its strength. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach in politics. So spend the energy that you spend on building a cadre to design your narrative and engage the people with it. Perhaps that’s the only to power.
