Rahul Gandhi needs a new imagination

Rahul Gandhi’s journey to power and the presidency of the Congress party has been a tentative one. Often the journey and the narrative is conducted in third person as if Rahul is the one least interested in his own future. But now the future beckons and the first thing he has to carry out is a spring cleaning of the Congress, as a party and as an idea.

The Congress has become more and more a party of the past, or a party with the past. The past in fact has become less of a legacy and more of a burden. The past and the present of the Congress needs to be rethought and presented in a new way. One needs a new language, a new narrative and a new rhetoric for the Congress. It has to recreate its constituencies and its sources of legitimacy.

Gandhi needs a new set of narratives. If the BJP seeks legitimacy in the past, the Congress for all its legacy must create constituencies which have a future and guarantee a future. The Congress needs a language where the vernacular speaks the language of inclusion and justice. It can’t speak the language of socialism because socialism, fairly or unfairly, was constructed as an inept language of governance.

The Congress has to combine justice and diversity on two separate grids. First in terms of the imagination of democracy and second in terms of the language of competence, of delivery systems, of transparent language of governance. The language of empty promises must give way to the language of delivery and yet this whole performance cannot be merely pragmatic or instrumentalist. There must be vision of justice which attracts a new generation.

The Congress must make a close reading of the BJP’s mistakes to understand how it can recreate itself. Its genius lay in uniting the varieties of dissent, marginality and ‘minoritarianism’ into a wider tapestry of unity. This cannot be in terms of an electoral mathematic but a new reading of India. It needs a sense of its own mistakes, especially the violence of its development projects from Narmada to its forest policy. It needs a new social contract where tribes, craft, the displaced and the obsolescent become its vision of the last man that Gandhi wanted as the ethical basis of society.

Here Gandhi’s vision has to come back to revitalise the idea of Congress. For example, a few years ago the Congress had a brilliant idea of revitalising Badshah Khan’s idea of the Khuda-i- Khitmitgars as creating a new effervescence on the ground, where one creates not only an inclusive idea of caring and conversation but a new sense of participation and involvement.

The party has to recover as its core members those who had a sense of values and ideals, people with dreams not those who saw in Congress a pragmatic way to achieve instrumentalist ends. A vision of the Ashram must form part of its core ideals. The rise of AAP showed that younger people with ideals are ready to join politics. Rahul, who has been emphasising the importance of youth must rework them as a sociological category for innovation, for ethical startups. There is nothing naïve in such idealism today. It must not be seen as a boy scout phenomenon but one grounded in a more innovative reading of the future.

Secondly, Congress has to speak once again the language of the dispossessed, rearticulate the dreams of the vulnerable who are convinced that democracy is the way of life for them. This means it has to exorcise its vindications and illusions of the Emergency, understand it as the beginning of the de-institutionalisation of Indian democracy. It has to exorcise the idea of the AFSPA, to question the way in which violence became a consequence of its dreams of progress.

The Congress has to ensure that poverty is not objectivised. This demands an attempt to rebuild the informal economy and the realm of agriculture which the BJP is seeking to destroy. In reviving agriculture, the tribal economy and democratising the informal sector, the Congress creates a political economy for its democratic imagination.

This also needs a new imagination of diversity, which in many ways was the silent term of the long years of planning. The Congress must carry into the BJP ranks a battle for a new idea of culture where diversity is retained, where plurality goes beyond the minoritarian imagination. It must introduce legislation to bring nature into the constitution so that every ecological question becomes a livelihood question and therefore central to the new democratic imagination.

It must revive vernacular languages, oral traditions to challenge the hollowness of the BJP’s ideas of culture. It has to feel the power of pluralism, sense the creativity of syncretism so that in its moment of weakness it does not deteriorate into a weak idea of secularism or a sense of weak Hindutva as a piece of bio-mimicry.

Thirdly it has to create a democracy of ideas which is civilisational, multi-religious and has a place for every dissenting and marginal imagination. For this it has to rework the idea of the school and the university into a more inventive set of imaginations. If the BJP saw the university as an extension of the, the university for the Congress must become a new panchayat of ideas where democracy creates innovation without obsolescence. An idea must become a notion of the commons that holds the community.

I think the Congress must go back to history by re-reading the history of nationalism as a history of plural imaginations, of the availability of eccentricity, a commons of ideas of alternatives. This plurality of possible and impossible ideas must challenge the current officialdom of development, security and nation-state to create a fluidity of citizenship which takes democracy beyond the electoral frame. This involves not only creating plural frames within but in the region as SAARC as an imagination must become a new idea of the region as a new commons.

Years ago, the political scientist Rajni Kothari in his classic Politics in India argued that the very confusion of disparate ideas was a microcosm of India. The Congress as an organisation mimicked the idea of India. Today as the idea of India is changing, the Congress must create an India of ideas which can help create a different imagination. The Congress has to begin as an imagination to rework itself as a party. Only then can reform in any institutional sense follow.

If we reduce reform to a banal idea of plumbing and repair, the Congress will be doomed. It is with the politics of the new imagination that Gandhi can offer hope to democracy as it gets warped in a self-congratulatory majoritarianism which does not read the difference between a vote and a lynch mob.

In this context, one must add a small but critical caveat. Whenever the Congress has been in power, it has been arrogant or illiterate about critique. Whether it was Human Rights groups, or civil society dissent, the Congress oozed a sense of pomposity. Today it has to work hard to be open to them, learn from them. The question of the Emergency as a future possibility must be ruled out by eliminating the emergencies of the mind. The Congress in search of a new openness must not forget this. In search of a new democratic imagination it must keep a checklist of its past sins. Only such an inner accounting will let it renew itself.