Congress is still a sarkari party after 10 years of BJP rule. It’s got no ground game

Mass mobilisation is the path to power in a democracy. India’s two largest national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress, have mass mobilisation in their DNA. One party nurtured the mobilisation impulse, whereas the other became reliant on the state and forgot the art of organising citizens. Political parties are supposed to connect the citizen to the state. In India, the state bends easily to a strong executive’s will and does its bidding. This use of the state can inadvertently make the party less reliant on its activists. Repeated tenures in government, then, have serious implications for a political party and, specifically, its mass mobilisation capacity. In the short run, overreliance on the state to meet electoral objectives benefits the ruling party, but in the long run, this dependence can turn a party into a sarkari party that neglects its activists.

Becoming a sarkari party

In the first half of the 20th century, the Congress, the face of the country’s freedom movement, mobilised Indians against colonial rule. It deliberately built a grassroots infrastructure for this purpose. After Independence, as the dominant party, Congress demobilised itself. Instead of penetrating society through its organisation, it increasingly turned to the state to reach out to citizens with rights and services. Sometimes, it acted out of a sense of noblesse oblige, while at other times, the party was motivated by a spirit of empowerment. It expanded legal protections for Dalits and Adivasis. It decentralised power to municipalities and panchayats. It created minimum guarantees related to food and employment. These programmes were largely disconnected from mobilisation. They were neither products of mass campaigns nor accompanied by mass mobilisation to take them to the people. The party often failed to produce a sense of collective ownership of its programmes. The arrangement had distinct roles for the state and society. The state was the dispenser of rights, and the citizens were the beneficiaries.

When it occurred, mobilisation was close to elections, as a party organisation was woken up from slumber and deployed. Gradually, overreliance on the state destroyed the foundation of the Congress. It lost touch with mass mobilisers and forgot the art of producing collective action. It stopped nurturing party activists and instead, attracted opportunists who joined the party for proximity to the state. When the party lost elections, the opportunists left.

Congress constantly needed the state to produce loyalty among voters and attachment to the party. To maintain its electoral success, Congress, then, needed to be in power.

The party’s dependence on the state was so acute and its ground game so weak that in the past two decades, instead of its party workers, the Congress had to turn to civil society organisations—that have no mass base—to draw up its policy agenda. Congress even forgot that the party had once defined Indian Nationalism. Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra represents the first serious effort by the party to rediscover the importance of mass mobilisation. Whether the yatra marks a durable change in the party’s approach to mass mobilisation remains to be seen.

Society is the organisation

For the BJP, mass mobilisation was the core survival strategy during the decades of Congress dominance. The party has adopted the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) principle of Samaj Sangathan Hai. The understanding of samaj is restrictive. It may be inclusive of all castes, but still, it remains limited to only Hindus. The BJP built a cadre of ideologically committed activists. They gradually expanded the party in the absence of state support. For these activists, self-reliance was a necessity. They viewed political activism as a fulfilment of duty and mobilisation as a quest for social and political transformation.

When in government, the BJP relies on the state to advance its mobilisation agenda; however, the real power comes from mobilised citizens. Mobilisation is not confined to elections—it is continuous. Unlike the Congress, the BJP has remained in mobilisation mode between elections. The party may be more centralised than before, but it has regularly reached out to society through its organisation and the state to communicate its narrative and vision.

The BJP mobilised citizens for the Swachh Bharat Mission. In response to its call, citizens suffered hardship during the demonetisation drive, participated in the movements to respect the Indian flag and honour frontline workers during the Covid pandemic, joined the campaign to save and educate daughters, and celebrated the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

By partnering with citizens in its campaigns, the party has tried to shift the discourse of adhikar (rights) to the discourse of kartavya (duties). The citizen is reminded: Ask not what the state can do for you, but what you can do for the state and the progress of Bharat. The BJP uses nationalism as the glue to bind the state-society mobilisation. It helps that the opposition parties have allowed the BJP to emerge as the uncontested owner of nationalism today. These back-to-back mobilisation campaigns connect the party to voters. They also help it to paper over its failures.

Successful mobilisation projects require an extraordinary mobiliser and a deeply committed mobilisation infrastructure. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP has had such a mobiliser. Consider the following comparison: During its 10-year-long tenure in government between 2004 and 2014, the Congress party did not have the confidence to field PM Manmohan Singh as a candidate for the Lok Sabha in a single constituency across India. By contrast, in most parliamentary constituencies in India today, even in opposition-controlled states, Modi is likely to be highly competitive, if not victorious, as a candidate in the electoral contest.

In addition, the RSS and affiliated organisations remain a nursery of activists and leaders for the BJP. It currently benefits from the party’s electoral dominance. However, its ability to survive the first four hostile decades of independent India and lay the groundwork for BJP’s ideological and electoral ascendence are the true markers of its mobilisation strength.

Mass mobilisation made the BJP a formidable opposition party and enabled its rise as the dominant electoral force in the country. As a ruling party, its increasing reliance on the state in the past 10 years to meet its electoral objectives is beginning to turn it into a sarkari party. The use of central agencies against opposition parties, running bureaucrats as candidates in parliamentary and state assembly elections, opening its doors to state-seeking opportunists, and dependence on state machinery for projecting the party and its achievements are early symptoms of this affliction. On the other end of the political spectrum, a credible challenge to the BJP’s dominance can only materialise through mass mobilisation.

Amit Ahuja is the author of Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements published by Oxford University Press. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)