You have been one of the most accomplished political strategists the country has seen, especially after the tornado-like sweep of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, which redefined India’s political trajectory.

I was among the few who actually publicly endorsed your entry into the Congress party as a bold breakthrough proposition, even when I was suspended by the party myself. But I must point out, regretfully, that of late, your utterances have been rather cosmetic, and often, bordering on mendacity. I woke up this morning to your BBC News interview, and to be honest, was stunned into disbelief. Either you have got your basic facts completely wrong, or you are blatantly misleading the people of India.

1. India’s Muslim population is 14% but according to you it is 18%. Wow! Considering your entire political career started off as a psephologist, that gargantuan 4% difference that you glossed over is professional sacrilege. Psephologists are rated on their exactitude. You fail the test. There is no margin of error when you are indulging in a serious conversation post a historic election that has reduced an authoritarian government to its knees.
2. Your attempt to diminish Congress party’s impressive 23% aggregate vote-share in the 2024 elections has again got a luminous distortion. Again, it is elementary, Mr Watson. The rise in Congress vote-share by nearly 3-4% is staggering, because it fought in only 328 seats compared to 464 in 2014 where it got 19.4% vote-share. Why did you not tell that to BBC News? Why would you make such a brazen omission?
3. Your statement that Congress has a “free vote-bank of 20% minorities votes” is so preposterous that it could qualify for the Oscars in Exaggerated Falsehoods. Muslims vote for regional parties too in bulk; the perfect case being UP and Bihar, among others. The Sikhs vote for different political parties including the BJP. Several Christians have voted for the BJP in Goa, Kerala and the North East. And the bulk of Jains probably vote for the BJP alone. Bottom-line: You lied. But why? Why did you not elaborate on the reasons why minorities are apprehensive and frightened of the hate-mongering and divisive politics of the BJP?
4. FYI, Congress won 57 of its 99 seats from six states with low Muslim populations – Karnataka, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. PK, you forgot to do your homework.

Now, the truth that the people of India must know, the real reason why you are so unambiguously hostile to the Congress is because you saw yourself as a saviour of the Grand Old Party once it would have been annihilated in the 2024 general elections – something Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others too thought was a fait accompli. You tried that in your famous “TMC-Goa model” in the assembly elections of 2022 which flopped miserably. Your attempt to rebrand TMC as a national alternative to the INC was instantly abandoned. Mamata Banerjee was an unsuspecting victim of your Machiavellian game to destroy Congress for the pursuit of your personal ambitions. It was expected that a demoralised Congress would crumble, and you would arrive as a knight in shining armour.

There are two things you need to reflect on, Prashant:

1. Why did BJP lose the parliamentary seat of Ayodhya?
2. Why did Congress win both the seats in Manipur?

I hereby give you an open challenge to debate with me on national television on the above and more. And by the way, this will hurt, but I predicted 240 seats maximum for the BJP on several occasions, while you were sarcastically asking Indians to keep a glass of water ready for the June 4 results with the saffron party at 303+.

I messaged Karan Thapar after your public meltdown on his show (similar to another media-created political superhero) that you had indeed told me yourself over a phone call that Congress would be decimated in Himachal Pradesh. But then, you can always deny that. But what you cannot deny is that a celebrated emissary of your team (an intellectual titan and former parliamentarian) wanted me to join TMC with a host of attractive inducements thrown in. I listened to the proposition as any gentleman should, and politely refused. And yet, I was in London when a press release was unethically circulated that I had attended a meeting with the West Bengal CM in attendance.

Cheers!

Sanjay Jha is a former national spokesperson of the Indian National Congress party. He also worked as a banker and an internet entrepreneur.

The post An Open Letter to Prashant Kishor, Who Has Misled Indians appeared first on SabrangIndia.

My own personal experience of being part of a crucial committee in 2014 was distressing. Initially I was thrilled to be included in this august gathering of political heavyweights as in those days I was still a relative outsider in the Congress party and did not yet know inner party functioning.

I live in Mumbai and therefore had to travel up and down several times for these celebrated ‘meetings’, which often lacked direction, purpose and, worse, a clear outcome.

Many people tell me that I am being extremely naïve if not altogether asinine in expecting a political organisation to function like a dynamic corporate. I disagree.

Time is in short supply and time is money, whether an NGO, multinational corporation, public sector undertaking, a professional, a small shopkeeper or the Grand Old Party. On the contrary, since politics is a never-ending collage of possibilities, decisions need to be quick and one should make sure that every group interaction leads to a forward movement.

After over half a dozen meetings, our prestigious committee just fell apart, no meetings were ever held again and nobody was aware of what had truncated the brief life of the ill-fated team. It seemed de rigueur, no big deal.

It was as if this was standard operating procedure in the AICC manual. I was stunned. And this atrocious happenstance was before the big election of 2014 when the Congress had been virtually written off even before the election dates were announced.

This prologue is necessary to contextualize the next recommendation, especially given the fact that since Rahul Gandhi’s resignation, the Congress seems to be in limbo and, worse, pretty much reconciled to suspended animation.

The party of Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru deserves better. Things need to change. And fast.

2) Reconstitute Congress Working Committee (CWC); make it smaller
The CWC is the distinguished group that is responsible for providing leadership to the party in good times and bad. It has an array of revered Congress stalwarts each possessing a formidable political nous.

I have always maintained that the party is blessed with amazing talent which helped the Congress earn the moniker of being the ‘natural party of governance’. However, at 25, the CWC size is too big and needs a serious trimming.

The CWC should be able to convene at short notice and take critical decisions with alacrity. It has to have the speed of a jaguar. Everywhere I go, anxious Congress supporters ask me: “What are you all doing? Why are you not appointing a new Congress president?” Frankly, I am hard-pressed to dodge that curve ball.

The culture of appointing people to high-profile committees or to any committee to assuage their fragile egos or temporary disgruntlement or to ensure a balanced representation to state, region, caste, gender or religion must be obliterated.

That is old-fogey stuff; the party should imbibe a high-performance culture. The only criteria should be pure merit and long-term potential contribution to strengthen the party and have a direct electoral impact.

Politics is about winning elections because that is the only way its ideology, policies and programmes can be executed and implemented. Or else one is just a paper tiger living in la la land.

While everyone cannot necessarily be an elected member of Parliament as a mandatory requirement (even good people lose elections when the headwinds are rough) to be a CWC member, the CWC must give weightage to those who have triumphed in Lok Sabha elections.

A new approach is required for all party committees (publicity, manifesto, alliances , screening, etc.) right down to state and district levels.

Most have become a huge drag, creating lethargy and lassitude. It has become just a token signature card that is supposed to motivate people. But if that does not translate into electoral and voter impact it is a bad practise and over a period of time leads to further corrosiveness.

The only criterion for being a member of a committee must be pure deliverables. And all committees must be small or of a manageable size.

First published on https://in.news.yahoo.com/

The post A 5-point blueprint for the Congress – Part 2 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The despondency is understandable, the electoral rout is indeed an unmitigated disaster for the Grand Old Party in the 134th year of its storied political journey. Rahul Gandhi’s decision to resign as Congress president has only further rocked the boat that is navigating turbulent waters infested with sharks.

The brazen anaconda-like swallowing of the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) Karnataka government by the unconscionable, opportunistic Bharatiya Janata Party is a perfect example of how the latter intends to fulfill its cherished aspiration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highfalutin call of Congress-mukt Bharat (India without Congress).

In the BJP playbook, the ends justify the means, whether it is cash offers, political intimidation, institutional threats of criminal proceedings or a promise of ministerial positions that would augment self-aggrandizement. In its crude bottomline approach of power-at-any-cost, the BJP is creating new touchstones of political malfeasance.

However, given the massive mandate of 303 seats they received (despite their terrible performance), their hubris is human.

I think the BJP actually believes that the ‘MLA stock exchange’ that they created in Bengaluru where elected legislators were traded as purchasable commodities has public backing. They cared a damn. For them ‘Operation Kamal’, as the sleazy buyout of MLAs was christened, was a way of saying QED; we can do as we please.

But this piece is not about the BJP. It is about the Congress party and what it can and must do to reboot itself and reclaim the fast dissipating, disintegrating ideals that our Constitution’s founders once envisaged.

India is close to a dangerous precipice and this is not just vacuous fear-mongering.

If you don’t believe me go and ask the family of Tabrez Ansari, callously slaughtered by a bloodthirsty mob. And he is not the only one. India’s hate-mongers are being mainstreamed; not long ago they were also being garlanded by Harvard-educated, McKinsey-experienced lawmakers of the BJP.

The Congress party must stem the rot: after all, at stake is the future of a complex, democratic society that houses 16% of the world’s inhabitants. But to do that first it will have to reinvent itself.

The cliché goes that extraordinary times demand extraordinary solutions: frankly, it appears customized for a Congress renewal in its worst days. However, instead of cosmetic tinkering, one needs to do a major surgery, almost akin to a complete personality makeover.

The elephant in the room is the moribund AICC (All India Congress Committee) which appears largely comatose on account of its disorganisation. A new architecture is needed.

Here are five suggestions that will help bring about a structural change; strategy, tactics, game-plans, Plan B, alliances, et cetera will be a natural by-product or collateral of this exercise:
 

1. Appoint 5 regional vice-presidents

The All India Congress Committee (AICC) structure right now suffers from bureaucratic cholesterol; it needs to be junked. We live in the age of Artificial Intelligence, drones, 1,000 million mobile phones, Big Data and facial recognition technology — adhering to an old, non-performing, labyrinth-like organisational body is counterproductive.

Currently, the Congress president is over-stretched with practically every key decision being concentrated in that position. It is practically impossible to have the daily bandwidth to absorb the diverse, complex and people issues that regularly crop up in a loose, fragmented volunteer-driven political party with several competing factions.

Sanjay Jha is National Spokesperson, Indian National Congress party

First published on https://in.news.yahoo.com/, republished with authors persmisssion
 

The post A 5-point blueprint for the revival of the Congress – Part 1 appeared first on SabrangIndia.