Standing up to be counted again

It was a bold statement to hold the Congress Working Committee meeting and the AICC session (8–9 April) in Ahmedabad. It was time the Congress reasserted its deep roots in Gujarat, seeking strength and inspiration from the party’s historical connections in the state.

Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the Congress founders, and two of the three tallest Congress leaders during the freedom struggle — Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — were from Gujarat. In the din of the relentless RSS–BJP propaganda, younger generations of Indians could do with a history refresher.

The Sangh’s campaign to defame Nehru and present him as an adversary of Sardar Patel — a dedicated comrade and Nehru’s deputy in independent India’s first government — would be funny if it weren’t so vile. The Sangh has even put Gandhi’s assassin on a pedestal.

The BJP’s entire basis for staking claim to Patel are lies about his relationship with Nehru, and has no more substance than hollow memorialising in the form of the ‘world’s highest statue’ — ironically made partly in China — at an estimated cost of Rs 3,000 crore.

As the former Gujarat chief of the IYC (Indian Youth Congress) Indravijay Singh Govil rather poignantly said: “The BJP’s Patel is made of bronze, our Patel lived and fought on the ground.”

The AICC resolution takes the BJP–RSS propaganda head on. Invoking the Bardoli Satyagraha (a non-violent protest led by Sardar Patel in 1928 against a 22 per cent tax hike imposed by the British colonial government on farmers in Gujarat's Bardoli taluka), the resolution holds the BJP guilty of replicating the British playbook — especially in its treatment of farmers. The party slammed the Centre for diluting the Right to Fair Compensation law and reaffirmed its support for a guaranteed minimum support price (MSP).

Congressmen from Gujarat also recalled the 2015 demolition of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Cricket Stadium in Ahmedabad. The new stadium that came up in Motera was named — what else — the Narendra Modi Cricket Stadium. The state BJP, they said, had done nothing to preserve Patel’s ancestral home in Karamsad (in Anand district), and had in fact stopped the annual state government grant of Rs 3 crore for its upkeep.

A remarkably candid session

For those who go on about the lack of ‘inner democracy’ in the Congress, the AICC session was possibly an eye-opener. Not just veterans like Shashi Tharoor but also relative unknowns like Alok Mishra from Uttar Pradesh spoke freely and frankly.

Tharoor underlined the need to set a “positive narrative” and project hope instead of appearing to be critical, resentful and “negative” all the time. Mishra was scathing, and even drew applause for his plainspeak. It made no sense, he said, to have people with children working for other parties to head Congress party organisations. How does it help if such a head has one son in the Samajwadi Party and another in the BJP, he asked.

He was repeating what party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi had also pointed out — that there were BJP sleeper cells in the party and these needed to be identified and eradicated.

One of the delegates voiced his disappointment over the Congress leaders’ silence on the genocide in Palestine. Only Priyanka Gandhi, he said, had bothered to speak out on X while others had maintained a most conspicuous silence. This delegate from Bihar went on to say that the Congress should take a stronger stand against the Modi government’s cowardice on Gaza.

Yet another speaker wondered why the party was apologetic about secularism and so-called ‘Muslim appeasement’. Why describe victims of targeted violence as belonging to marginalised or minority communities? Why not call them what they are — Muslims and Dalits?

Several others insisted that the party’s stand should be clear and consistent. Euphemisms like the ‘oppressed’ should be abandoned in favour of directly identifying the victims of mob lynching, caste atrocities and communal violence.

The sentiment received strong endorsement from leaders like Rahul Gandhi. The change in tone was striking as Kharge gave a rousing call for leaders to perform or retire. He was also candid in acknowledging that the party was weak in communicating its principles, its core values.

It was also possibly the first time a Congress president had openly acknowledged that the party’s coffers were empty: “Party ke paas paise nahin hain.”

A report in Ahmedabad Mirror confirmed this. It stated that the BJP had received Rs 401.9 crore of the Rs 404.5 crore donated to political parties in Gujarat ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, i.e., 99.3 per cent of the total donations made to political parties.

In contrast, the Congress had received Rs 2.5 crore, donated mostly by leaders like Shaktisinh Gohil, Geniben Thakor, Amit Chavda and others. Of the 2,153 donations, 2,113 were for the BJP.

A new Gujarat, a new Congress

The Congress has been out of power in Gujarat for the past 30 years. In 2024, it won only a single Lok Sabha seat. The 2017 assembly election was narrowly won by the BJP. Five years later, the BJP swept the election in 2022. (That year, Rahul Gandhi did not campaign as he was on the road with the Bharat Jodo Yatra.) No wonder the BJP seems as unperturbed by the success of the AICC in Gujarat as by Rahul Gandhi’s confident assertion that the Congress will win the next assembly election in 2027.