IN THE DISTANT Meda Adraj village in Gujarat’s Kadi assembly constituency, hundreds of dalits were upset with the Congress. Predictably, the Congress’s dalit face, MLA Jignesh Mevani, was assigned to assuage them. A week before the byelections on June 19, he stirred the villagers with the slogan ‘Jai Bhim’ and made promises of “social justice” and “development”. The small crowd appreciated his effort, but it was too early for them to reward the Congress. The party lost Kadi and Visavadar seats to the BJP and the AAP.
The bypolls had mobilised the Congress for a short while, but party leaders say it is the non-electioneering phase that is the major concern. And at the centre of this concern is the falling apart of the party’s “operational backbone” at the grassroots level, its district offices.
When THE WEEK visited the Congress’s district hub in Mehsana, of which Kadi assembly is a part, the people did not know about the office. “It’s mostly shut,” a local in the same building remarked. “At most it opens thrice a month.”
The disintegration of the district offices started just after the party’s defeat in the 2017 assembly elections. As per senior office bearers, more than 60 per cent of the Congress’s 41 district offices in Gujarat are dysfunctional. This has made around 70 assembly seats (of 182) politically infertile for the party.
Out of power for about 30 years, the Congress is facing fatigue in the state. While some of the leaders appear dispassionate, hopeless and above all, limited in number, there is lack of energy among the foot-soldiers.
“With the new formula of appointing district presidents based on merit by the central leadership, the organisational performance will have an upward trajectory. It is about to level up, that is for sure,” said Mevani.
The Congress’s communication strategy, according to several top leaders, has faltered in many states during elections because the party workers were not used to any protocol-bound communication before the elections. “The intra-party mass communication would surface abruptly during the heat of elections and burst on to the scene,” said a senior leader.
According to party insiders, a high-level dialogue had happened between top Congress leaders ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. There, the idea of a “connect centre” model had come up. This centre was conceived as a source of power for all the foot-soldiers rather than any individual. It was Rahul, said party insiders, who wanted more powerful district presidents who could function as the nerve centres of the new model.
With the district chiefs tracking all the local unit activity, their real-time experience and assessment would be used for the selection of candidates in constituencies under them. They could also be integrated with the election committee and political affairs committee of the party.
As per senior leaders, the high command-driven process will weed out leaders conniving with the ruling BJP. “The leaders have got the message that they have to work for the party rather than any powerful leader,” said Gujarat Congress chief spokesperson Manish Doshi. “The idea is to promote those who promote the party and not their individual interests.”
Former state unit president Arjun Modhwadia’s exit from the Congress last year is an example of how senior leaders exercised control over cadres. As Modhwadia resigned, almost all of the Congress workers in Porbandar region switched with him to the BJP.
As a result, when the byelections were announced in 2024, the Congress could only muster around 16,000 votes; Modhwadia won by a margin of one lakh in Porbandar. A senior office bearer said, “Modhwadia had seized the local unit; he had made a sub-party where people functioning smoothly in Congress were those who would pledge allegiance only to him.”
Notably, Rahul visited Gujarat three times in the past few months and interacted with all the party’s stakeholders from top to bottom. With about two years left for the assembly elections, the pilot project of the party has set the ball rolling. A senior leader who was part of several meetings with Rahul said the Gandhi scion was personally overseeing the appointment process.
Prashant Dayal, editor of Gujarat’s Navajivan News, said, “The proper functioning for Congress leaders will be a challenging task even after new appointments as many of the Congress senior leaders have businesses which stand on the favours of the BJP.” He added that most of the senior leaders had never worked for the Congress, and had deliberately bred groupism.
Presumably, most of the threads of the district president will be connected with the central war room. “The party has established one war room in the state that will have a direct connect with district Congress presidents while their work will be centrally monitored,” said former Gujarat Congress president and MP Shaktisinh Gohil. “We will also monitor as there will be no one person responsible for giving out instructions.”
According to leaders in the national war room, the party will constantly give tasks to district presidents and create a model wherein the ground workers remember their voters. “The flagship programme will assign serial numbers to scheduled tribes and castes and first-time voters clearly listing, for instance, beneficiaries of some scheme,” said a senior leader. “The idea is to see the voter list many times.”
There is also talk that if the district presidents do not perform, they could get replaced.
“We have started to understand the importance of a review system,” said the party’s central war room chairman Sasikanth Senthil. “We will engage party workers, hand-holding them, and then evaluate them accordingly. It will be a human model with constant engagement.”
What makes the revival plan different this time is the demographic change in the party—young guns have started aligning themselves with Rahul’s political signals.
On the downside, the party continues to shelter a group of non-performing loyalists in top-tier positions. Their misaligned activity has often choked the party’s response to crises.
As this Gujarat model is being replicated in other states such as Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, the disorientation that had set in in the Gujarat Congress is likely to be addressed with laser-focused tasks, energetic leadership and availability of resources. And to sustain it, the party leaders agree, the approach needs to embrace sincerity and merit in the leadership.