When the Congress gets into a huddle in Udaipur from May 13 to 15 to brainstorm on what should be its action plan to get into revival mode and gear up for electoral battles over the next two years, including the Lok Sabha polls in 2024, it will be the fourth occasion when the party will be holding a 'Chintan Shivir'.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi's first address as party chief at the AICC Session on April 6, 1998, which was months before the first Chintan Shivir was held in Panchmarhi, a small hill station in Madhya Pradesh, was not very different from her remarks at the Congress Working Committee meeting held last evening to finalise the preparatory work for the Udaipur meet.
She had then said, “Our numbers in Parliament have dwindled. Our support base among the electorate has been seriously eroded. Some segments of the voters, including our tribals, Dalits and minorities, have drifted from us. We are in danger of losing our central place in the polity of our country as the natural party of governance.”
This was shortly after the Congress had been reduced to 141 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. It was in this backdrop that from September 4-6 1998, the party held a Chintan Shivir in Panchmarhi. The outcome of the meeting was a 14-point plan of action for revival, the highlight being the party's assessment that coalitions were a passing phase in politics at the national level and that the party will come back again with full force and on its own steam.
The declaration read that “coalitions will be considered only when absolutely necessary and that too on the basis of agreed programmes which will not weaken the party or compromise its basic ideology.”
However, in the Lok Sabha elections in 1999, the party failed to improve its performance at the hustings. Its numbers in the lower house fell even further to 114.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2004, the Congress held a Chintan Shivir in Shimla. The brainstorming session held in July 2003 marked a change in the party's stance concerning coalition politics. The party set the tone for its preparation for the general elections by declaring a readiness to join forces with secular parties and proposing governance that is based on legal guarantees.
The next time the Congress held a Chintan Shivir was when it was in power, towards the fag end of the ten-year-long rule of the party-led United Progressive Alliance. The meeting, held in Jaipur in January 2013, marked the anointment of Rahul Gandhi as the party's heir apparent and its leader for the Lok Sabha polls of 2014. However, the general elections marked the beginning of the Narendra Modi era in national politics as also the start of a rapid decline of Congress.
At its lowest ebb now and in a condition that is even worse than the scenario in 1998 when Sonia first felt the need for a brainstorming session, the Congress now hopes to emerge from the Udaipur confabulation with a winner of an action plan for revival that will also help it win back the faith of voters.
