After Congress's loss in the Assam Assembly elections recently, the national party—as a part of its usual exercise—will review its performance and scrutinise the causes of defeat elaborately.
Initial assessments have found that the party's weak cadre network was one of the major causes for the decimating defeat of the party.
An alliance partner of the Congress, Assam Jatiya Parishad led by Lurinjyoti Gogoi, tells THE WEEK that weak cadre is one of the big factors, but what hurt more during the elections was that the Opposition parties couldn't come together months before.
"It is not only the Congress and Gaurav Gogoi that are to blame, though they were the principle Opposition party, but also other partners in the Opposition who tried to create confusion," Lurinjyoti said.
"The alliance should have been prioritised two to three months earlier and things should have been sorted out and that could have helped the parties lay down a strategy on the ground without confusion."
“One major reason during the elections,” a candidate told THE WEEK, “was that on one booth I wasn't able to find a booth president as nobody was willing to be part of the Congress side and that is the case with many booths.”
On the other hand, the BJP had a strong booth presence in more than 23,000 booths out of the state's nearly 29,000, and the grassroots cadre was well aware of their targets and activities.
The saffron camp had more than 15 members active on each booth on those 23,000. They would often be gathered by local leaders to assess the progress and keep the flock united or keep the communication lines greased, which was widely missing in Congress.
The Congress looked nowhere close to the BJP's cadre strength. The only areas where the BJP had a thin presence were Muslim-majority areas.
Secondly, there was poor enthusiasm among the cadre, which had fewer objectives to follow.
Third, there was a lack of understanding of political groundwork and lack of coordination, as Congress leaders say that many of the workers who were aware of groundwork politics were taken away into the BJP by Himanta Biswa Sarma after he became the chief minister. This left the Congress unable to replenish it or devise a counter strategy.
This has impacted the party and put it into decline thoroughly, as just during the last phases of the election campaign too, two important leaders—former state unit president Bhupen Kumar Bora and Lok Sabha MP Pradyut Bordoloi—also left the party, showing it as a scattered unit.
A section of today's Congress still believes that the party is a mass-based party and that when people want to make it win, it will do so without the need for cadre building, just like C. Joseph Vijay won with a thin cadre.
“However, they fail to make relevant comparisons, as a mass-based party also needs mass popularity on the ground, which is missing for the Congress due to weak state-level, as well as local-level, leadership,” a political analyst said.
“The BJP's cadre machinery for elections cannot be defeated just at one level. The Congress will have to work at multiple levels to secure a challenging organisational structure and establish coordination through a strong mechanism which can help efforts translate into energy throughout the organisation.”
