How Congress is rebuilding its ideological, organisational base in Madhya Pradesh

INDORE

Though the crowd at Rahul Gandhi’s Chhatron Ki Goonj event on September 19 became a talking point, perhaps more interesting was the venue he chose for it—Indore.

The city is one of the strongest political and organisational centres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Madhya Pradesh. The BJP has held the Indore Lok Sabha seat for 37 years and swept all nine assembly seats in the district in 2023. Hence, before the event, there were murmurs within the Congress whether it would be dead on arrival.

Indore sits at the centre of the wider Malwa-Nimar region, which accounts for 66 of Madhya Pradesh’s 230 assembly seats. Historically, the region has played an important role in determining who forms the government in Bhopal. In 2023, the BJP won 47 of 66 seats.

“Indore is considered the financial, political and organisational engine of the RSS-BJP,” said Deepak Tiwari, political commentator and former vice-chancellor of Makhanlal Chaturvedi University. “It is also the financial capital of Madhya Pradesh, so he who controls Indore controls the state. The current chief minister, Mohan Yadav, is himself the in-charge minister of Indore.”

The Congress strategy, therefore, has been to strike the BJP’s fortress and make Madhya Pradesh a lab for Gandhi’s fight against what Congress leaders describe as the saffron ecosystem. If successful, the party hopes to replicate the strategy elsewhere.

Taking a cue from cadre-based parties, the Congress has gone back to basics. It has designed a “syllabus” aimed at rebuilding its ideological and organisational base. The training covers constitutional rights, the idea of India, anti-communalism, grassroots mobilisation and organisational work.

The ideological training would not only help leaders generate well-designed views in public forums, but would also count if there is external pressure to defect. The Congress cannot forget 2020, when Jyotiraditya Scindia walked out with 22 MLAs and undermined the Congress government in the state.

“The training programme has already been completed in 45 of 71 district committees,” said Sanjay Kamle, the Congress organisation in-charge of Madhya Pradesh.

In addition, the party has ironed out its organisational structure, creating a hierarchy to smoothen out its decision-making and implementation process, which a supervisory system called Connect Centre will monitor.

These checks and balances, party leaders believe, would stimulate even the chronic weak spots—there are 66 assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh that the Congress has struggled in for the past two decades. The new system has already flagged non-performers, including seven district presidents who will soon be replaced.

Madhya Pradesh is the second state after Gujarat where the party has rolled out district president appointments under the Sangathan Srijan Abhiyan. It has rapidly filled vacant organisational posts, moved veterans such as Digvijaya Singh and Kamal Nath away from the frontline, and has given state party president Jitu Patwari greater operational freedom.

“Part of the reason is that the Madhya Pradesh electorate is politically more sensitive than in those other dry electoral states for the Congress, [for instance] Gujarat, where the Congress has been out of power for more than two decades,” said political analyst Aditya Rathi. “As the party saw a response from the people, it chose Madhya Pradesh as a model state to gauge its potential.”

Next year, the Congress will put its young organisational machinery to the test in the local body polls. In the past 20 years, the party has won less than 20 per cent of the seats in these elections, but state leaders believe they can put up a stronger fight this time. They point to Gandhi’s Indore crowd and recent byelection results as signs of change.

“As we have a lot more hands now, we were able to spread the message of the Chhatron Ki Goonj event to the youth more widely, and thus the crowd was the product of organisational work, apart from the immense and growing popularity of Rahul Gandhi among the youth,” said Patwari. “Earlier, the feedback would come from surveys. Now, we have an organisational machinery in place, and feedback comes from the bottom frequently, making the bottom-most layer of the organisation robust.”

Two years ago, the Congress had lost the Amarwara byelection in its bastion of Chhindwara. It was a low point for the party. But under Patwari’s leadership, it began doing better in subsequent contests. Four months after the Chhindwara loss, the Congress was able to bring down the BJP’s margin of victory in Budhni—which Shivraj Singh Chouhan vacated to become a Union minister—from over a lakh to 13,901 votes. Alongside, it pulled off a surprise win in the Vijaypur bypoll, where Mukesh Malhotra defeated the BJP’s Ramniwas Rawat, who had defected from the Congress.

Importantly, this August, the party won the Datia byelection, with Ghanshyam Singh defeating the BJP’s Ashutosh Tiwari. The Congress attributed the win to its growing organisational might—dozens of BJP ministers had camped and campaigned in the constituency.

“In the Datia byelection, he (Patwari) personally visited more than 80 per cent of the booths to monitor the elections,” said Congress spokesperson Feroz Siddiqui. “There is a lot of hard work behind the electoral progress of the party. When the liquor scam happened in Sagar (this September), Patwari immediately went there and sat with each of the 33 affected families, sharing their pain.”

The party has also changed the social composition of its organisation. It has raised the representation of backward castes in district committees to over 60 per cent from less than 40 per cent. By balancing castes, ideology, organisation and, importantly, performance, the state, say sources, is now seen as a ‘bright spot’ for the Congress.

“The Congress has established leadership and robust cadres in Karnataka and Rajasthan,” said a senior Congress insider. “It is in power in Karnataka and Rajasthan has seen alternating governments (BJP and Congress). Despite it being out of power in Madhya Pradesh for the past 21 years, apart from a brief 15-month period, it is catching up fast to the new political realities and is ranked among the top three performers by the AICC.”

Its importance to the Congress is highlighted by the fact that Gandhi has visited the state seven times in the past 18 months, despite no major election being listed there.

Almost ten years since it last won Madhya Pradesh, the Congress is hopeful that it can repeat the feat. The recent Gen Z movement only adds to the anti-BJP sentiment, say observers. Whether this organisational and ideological restructuring works will be evident in the 2028 assembly elections. If the Congress does pull it off, it could even be the party’s blueprint for the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.