“What is your Clause Four?” I asked a group of Congress Party leaders who recently visited London. They had come to try to learn from new Labour how to rejuvenate India’s once all-powerful, but now demoralised, political party. “What symbolic change can you make to show that you really mean business about starting ‘new’ Congress?” The answer was instant: “Stop sitting on the floor to hold our central working committee meetings,” said Natwar Singh, a veteran diplomat and an adviser to Sonia Gandhi, the party’s Italian-born president. Even the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the current coalition government, sits at chairs and tables. “But we maintain our image of austerity – in a room that has air-conditioning, [and using] our mobile phones,” laughed Salman Khurshid, one of the party’s younger leaders.
The tradition of sitting on the floor – softened with white-covered mattresses and large white bolsters – for top-level policy meetings has its origins in the days of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s leading campaigner for independence. It reflects Gandhi’s austere style, and was adopted as a symbol of sacrifice and virtue. Now, however, it has become the Congress Party’s dogmatic badge of political self-importance. To abandon it would be as dramatic as abandoning the Congress politicians’ “uniform” of white (originally homespun) khadi cloth that the Mahatma wore as a demonstration against British rule. Together, these images sum up the tensions, contradictions and failures of the Congress Party, which has ruled India for most of the country’s 53 years of independence, but which has not won a general election on its merits since 1981 (the landslide victories in 1984 and 1991 were swung by sympathy votes after the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv).
In policy terms, Congress’s main problem is its outdated and insincere “socialist” creed. It is being used against the current government’s economic reforms – without any real debate on the social and economic issues – because certain influential Congress leaders believe that such a stance will win votes, even though it was Congress itself that launched India on its globalisation path ten years ago next month. This opposition is helping vested interests to block reforms on measures such as privatisation and cutting wasteful subsidies.
Congress’s current problems resemble those of Britain’s Conservative Party. Both parties dominated their country’s government for much of the second half of the 20th century, and have now lost policy direction and their vote-catching ability. But it is not to the Tories that Congress is looking for an answer to its woes. Those who agree that Congress must reinvent itself as a modern party also agree that the example on which it must model itself is new Labour.
An opportunity to see Blair’s transformations of the Labour Party close up came in 1999, when the British government invited Sonia Gandhi and some senior representatives of the Congress Party to London. The primary focus of the visit was on Labour and the trade unions. Robin Cook left it to the head of the Foreign Office’s South Asia department to meet the group, and Peter Mandelson was “not taking calls” (it was the end of February). Thus the meetings were mostly at the level of departmental heads.
On an organisational level, the visitors were impressed by the efficiency and accessibility of the Labour Party’s modern headquarters and its call-centre. These contrasted starkly with the untidy inefficiency of India’s mostly decrepit party offices, which are swamped by supplicants seeking favours.
They were also impressed by the way parliamentary candidates are selected, which usually leaves them ample time to work in their constituencies before elections. In India, most candidates are chosen at the last minute, literally, just before the polls. But it was Jim Mowatt, the national secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who left the most lasting impression, because of his conversion from a left-wing past to privatisation and non-militancy. Producing slides with slogans such as “Change or perish”, he said: “We opted for change.” On privatisation, he sounded more enthusiastic than Treasury civil servants, and said it was relatively painless in terms of jobs. This surprised the visitors from India – as did his next remark: “You are an expanding economy, so you should not have a problem switching from an old to a new economy.”
The Congress delegation will now try to get this sort of pragmatism accepted in India. In particular, they want to emulate Labour’s move away from Clause Four symbolism while maintaining a socialist base. This means replacing the arguments of party elders and vested interests (who find it easier and more comfortable to stay with the party’s traditional populist stance) with new approaches produced democratically by policy groups.
But the Congress Party’s main challenge goes deeper. Unlike Labour, it no longer has the credibility of long-established moral authority (to borrow a phrase from John Pilger’s NS column three weeks ago). It began to lose that credibility 30 or more years ago, when Indira Gandhi led the party away from its roots and caused it to lose its identity as the “mother party” that cared for India’s poor and minorities.
So, if Indira’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, and her advisers want to build “new” Congress, they must do more than merely emulate new Labour’s organisational and communications skills. They must also recreate the sort of moral credibility that Labour has not yet lost. Otherwise, they will find that the BJP, whose Hindu nationalism is as extreme as Labour’s old left-wing militancy, will be recognised as the party of government, despite its dangerous, chauvinistic roots.
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