85th Congress Plenary Session starts today in Raipur: What to expect?

Starting today (February 24), 15,000 delegates drawn from its cross-country rank and file will meet in Chhattisgarh’s Nava Raipur to flesh out an actionable blueprint on issues moot to the crisis-ridden Congress party’s organisational and electoral revival.

The three-day-long 85th Plenary Session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) is expected to indicate how the party plans to implement reforms within its organisation, including elections for a spot in the Congress Working Committee (CWC), which were approved at the party’s Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir in Udaipur last May but have since been gathering dust. More importantly, the session will indicate how the Congress plans to arrest its continuing electoral decline to take on the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the terms of engagement that it wants to set for other like-minded parties on the tricky issue of Opposition unity.

Building on success of Bharat Jodo Yatra

The Plenary Session comes at a time when the Congress is finally shedding its characteristic inertia. Massive public participation throughout Rahul Gandhi’s 4,080 km Kanyakumari to Srinagar Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) and shocking allegations made in the Hindenburg Report against industrialist Gautam Adani’s business practices, along with a desperately needed electoral win in Himachal Pradesh, have boosted the party’s flagging morale. A renewed fighting spirit was also visible in the combative stance that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul and others took during the first half of Parliament’s budget session against the Narendra Modi government.

Also read: Gujarat: Congress continues to be in disarray after rout in assembly polls

The backlash from the ruling BJP has been prompt and unsparing. The budget session saw the BJP giving no quarter to Congress MPs in both Houses, including Kharge and Rahul, for raking up Modi’s allegedly preferential treatment towards Adani group companies. Large parts of the speeches that Kharge and Rahul made in Parliament on the Adani issue were expunged and a privilege motion was moved against Rahul for linking the industrialist’s meteoric rise to Modi’s political ascension.

The political hara-kiri witnessed in the immediate run up to the Plenary Session has been no different. The Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) raids against a number of Congress leaders in the session’s host state have added heft to the Congress’s claims about the Modi government’s misuse of central probe agencies to target and intimidate political rivals. As did the uproarious scenes witnessed at the Delhi airport on Thursday (February 23) morning when Congress media wing chairman Pawan Khera was deplaned on account of three separate FIRs being lodged against him for making an “objectionable remark” against the Prime Minister. Khera’s brief arrest was immediately challenged by the Congress before the Supreme Court, which after an urgent hearing, ordered that the leader be granted interim bail by the appropriate magistrate court.

Targeting Modi government

The party’s political challenges panel, one of six such committees constituted by Kharge to outline resolutions on different issues, is expected to emphasise during the session the need to combat the Centre’s misuse of probe agencies and constitutional institutions against political rivals. Congress communications department chief Jairam Ramesh has indicated that the session will underscore the imposition of an aghoshit apaatkaal (undeclared Emergency) in the country by the Modi government.

Also read: Congress, Oppn parties must adopt give-and-take spirit to fight BJP in 2024: Chidambaram

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul are also expected to highlight this while outlining other challenges before the party and the country when they address the plenary on the second and third day of the session, respectively.

A large chunk of time will also be spent in discussing ways to target the Modi government on issues of growing unemployment, communal disharmony, price rise and Chinese transgression on Indian Territory – all issues that Rahul’s BJY repeatedly raised – and on harnessing them for the Congress’s electoral strategies in Assembly polls due in the big states of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan later this year as well as in the run up to the Lok Sabha polls.

Rahul, predictably, will come in for fulsome praise at the session for his Bharat Jodo Yatra. Scarcely-veiled attempts at projecting the Wayanad MP as the only credible alternative to Modi in the 2024 General Elections will be made aplenty. The imprint of the BJY on the Plenary Session has been made clear by Ramesh who declared recently that the session will be called the Haath Se Haath Jodo Session, in line with the party’s ongoing mass-mobilisation programme named Haath Se Haath Jodo Abhiyan, which the party has said is a political extension of the BJY.

Also read: BJP will have a tough time in 2024, predicts Tharoor

Much of all this may cheer Congress members, who over the past nine years of the party’s debilitating poll routs and internal turmoil, have become accustomed to a snoozing organisation. However, Congress insiders assert that the real test for gauging how effective the Plenary Session actually turns out to be would depend on the willingness of the party high command – Kharge, Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra – to accept “constructive or even unpalatable suggestions and criticism”.

Blueprint for party’s electoral revival

“Discussions in Raipur won’t be vastly different from those we had during the Udaipur Chintan Shivir though the Plenary Session will have a far greater number of participants. After the Chintan Shivir, a number of suggestions had been made for strengthening the party and many of these were incorporated in the Udaipur Declaration… the BJY was also mooted in Udaipur. Nearly nine months have passed since but most aspects of the Udaipur Declaration regarding internal reforms have yet to be implemented. If the Plenary Session merely reiterates the same resolutions but offers no time frame for implementing the correctives, it’ll be a wasted exercise,” a senior Congress functionary who is part of the Raipur session’s Drafting Committee told The Federal.

Congress sources say if the plenary is reduced to a “forum for Modi-bashing and reaffirming the centrality of the Gandhi family to the Congress” instead of thrashing out an actionable blueprint for the party’s organisational and electoral revival, it would serve no purpose other than that of “just another talking shop”.

Also read: Karnataka polls: Congress starts ‘flower-on-ear’ campaign against BJP

A major point of debate within the party in recent months has been whether the Plenary Session will see Kharge and the Congress Steering Committee accepting the long-standing demand by a section of party leaders to revive internal elections for the CWC. A sub-group constituted by Kharge to finalise amendments to the Congress constitution for enabling organisational reforms has also come up with proposals to ensure life-time CWC membership for anyone who has served as Congress president for a period exceeding 365 days and also any party leader who has served as Prime Minister. These proposals, essentially, are meant to ensure that both Sonia and Rahul, as well as Dr. Manmohan Singh, get an assured spot on the CWC irrespective of whether elections to it are held or not.

CWC elections

Clarity on the issue of CWC elections is likely to emerge on the first day of the Plenary Session. Ramesh told reporters in Raipur that the steering committee will meet at the session’s venue at 10 AM on Friday to approve resolutions finalised by the six working groups set up by Kharge.

Sources said that though a nod for CWC elections is expected at Friday’s steering committee meet, these may not be conducted immediately. “There are broadly three views on the CWC elections at the moment – several leaders are in favour of conducting the election during the Plenary Session, some senior leaders are opposed to the election completely and others favour elections but believe these must be held at a later stage because conducting them during the Plenary Session will take the focus away from more important issues we want to address as senior leaders who may contest the election will get busy with canvassing for themselves instead of contributing to the actual deliberations,” a steering committee member told The Federal.

Also read: War within Congress in Telangana even as party eyes power

Sources said though the Gandhis aren’t averse to CWC elections they do not want the session to be derailed by what is “essentially an internal matter of the party with no bearing on how the Congress will take on the BJP in 2024 or what political and social message it wishes to send to the country when the session concludes on February 26”. It is learnt that the session will approve key resolutions adopted in Udaipur with regard to reserving 50 per cent posts within the organisation for leaders aged below 50 years. Similarly, the proposal for enhanced representation for SC, ST, OBC and women leaders in various organisational posts is also likely to be accepted. The two proposals are also a bid by the party to reach out to communities and a demographic group that the Congress has failed to woo electorally in recent years.

The session may also see a formal announcement on the second leg of Rahul’s BJY. Many party leaders as well as Congress supporters have repeatedly urged Rahul to carry out a padyatra across the breadth of the country from Arunachal Pradesh to Gujarat so that states that the BJY had skipped in its first innings are also covered.

Any announcement on BJY 2.0 is expected to be met with emphatic approval by Congress leaders and supporters. However, some believe that though another yatra would be a “good move”, the party needs to ensure that its mass mobilisation initiative isn’t limited to boosting Rahul’s image. “It’s now been nearly a month since the BJY concluded in Srinagar and roughly the same amount of time since we launched our Haath Se Haath Jodo Abhiyan. Any honest stock-taking exercise would tell you that in most states the BJY covered, our local leaders have failed to build on the success of the yatra while the response to the Haath Se Haath Jodo Abhiyan, which is purely driven by state and local leaders at the grassroots, has been lukewarm at best… this is not to undermine Rahul’s hard work but we need to recognise that organisationally the BJY hasn’t really given us the dividends that we are claiming to the world,” said a senior Congress MP.

Also read: Why can’t govt set up JPC on Adani issue, asks Congress

A section of party leaders also believes that though the Himachal Pradesh Assembly results proved that the BJP is not invincible in state elections if the Congress runs an effective campaign based on local issues, the same cannot be said at the central level. “Nationally, we still haven’t been able to project ourselves as a credible alternative to Modi’s BJP; we need to start identifying constituencies we can win and have strategies for individual Lok Sabha seats… an omnibus cross-country strategy may not be the right way; the Adani issue may work as a poll plank in some urban areas but it has no traction in rural constituencies… we made this same mistake in the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign when Rahul made the whole election about the Rafale scam… we must stick to livelihood issues – price rise, joblessness – and Adani can be a supplementary attack,” another Congress MP said, adding that “unfortunately, Rahul doesn’t see things this way”.

Opposition unity and alliances

With the Lok Sabha polls barely a year away, the issue of Opposition unity and alliances is also expected to dominate discussions in Raipur. Congress sources told The Federal that though the session will witness Kharge and the Gandhis appealing to like-minded parties to join forces in the fight against the BJP, any mention of Opposition unity will have telling riders alluding to the Congress’s indispensability and centrality to such a platform.

Sources say that the Congress leadership is in favour of stitching state-wise alliances that “do not undermine our electoral position” but is in no hurry to initiate talks for a United Opposition Front for 2024 despite Kharge recently declaring that a Congress-led alliance will come to power at the Centre next year.

“The first rule of negotiations is that you enter into them only from a position of strength. At the moment, the only thing we have going for us is the success of the BJY because electorally, we have still not had a major victory against the BJP… it is natural that other Opposition parties doubt our capacity to lead any anti-BJP front while outfits such as the Trinamool Congress, Bharat Rashtra Samithi and Aam Aadmi Party have made it clear that they want an Opposition front without us… this isn’t the right time for us to talk to other parties for an alliance for 2024,” said another Congress steering committee leader.

Sources say that though the Congress high command is in constant touch with the party’s existing and potential allies, it hasn’t offered any concrete alliance blueprint. “There are major states going to polls this year and we are fairly confident of victories in Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, perhaps even Rajasthan if we find a solution to our infighting (between chief minister Ashok Gehlot and his former deputy CM, Sachin Pilot)… If we win these, we will have a much stronger case for leading an Opposition alliance, so it makes sense to wait for these polls to get over and talk of alliances for 2024 to begin subsequently,” said a leader close to Kharge.

Ramesh too indicated a similar approach when he told reporters on Thursday that “2023 will witness a number of Assembly polls and in many of these states the Congress is a strong force and is either in power or is the principle Opposition party… the question of Opposition unity will be answered after the elections due in 2023”. He added, “Opposition unity can only be effective if the Congress is a part of it… for alliances, a constructive and common programme between the constituents is essential and we need to discuss these in detail; if there is any alliance, we are clear that all constituents will have to take on the Prime Minister’s policies and practices without mincing any words and without any compromises.”