Kharge is Cong prez, will fortunes change?

The dust has settled and a new Congress president is finally set to take over. The winner, Mallikarjun Kharge is no ordinary politician-he has toiled and battled many odds on his way to the top in a star-studded 50-year-long career during which he won as MLA nine times and became a Lok Sabha MP twice.

For the first time in more than two decades, the Grand Old Party has a non-Gandhi as president, which is expected to bring about a sea change in the manner the party functions and maybe reverse its political fortunes which have been on the ebb in recent years.

But will that happen is the moot question. Eighty-yearold Kharge is well past his prime and as he himself had declared earlier, will consult the Gandhis at every step as the Congress struggles to regain momentum after a series of electoral reverses. So one need not expect revolutionary changes in the Congress strategy or poll tactics ahead of the forthcoming Assembly polls or the parliament elections, now barely 18 months away.

Not that Tharoor, if he had won, would have been much more aggressive and path-breaking but then, one could have expected him to at least try to usher in winds of change in the manner in which the Congress has been functioning, pushing it from one disastrous poll performance to another.

And maybe, the much younger Tharoor would have served as a beacon of hope and dynamism to the younger crowd in the Congress and to youth across the country with his effervescence, scholarliness and oratory. But all that can now be forgotten for the Congress organisation has given him the thumbs down with the Kerala leader coming nowhere near Kharge in garnering support within the party.

Where does the Congress go from here? Will it be the same old party which has not been able to make an impact on the electorate in most states including Karnataka? Or will Kharge, with the backing of senior and junior leaders including Tharoor, be able to reinvent the Congress and pose a formidable challenge to the ModiShah combine which looks set to run away with the honours in every coming poll battle?

Maybe what Kharge can do is something he is best at - democratise decision making and make sure it is a participative process in which Congressmen contribute their best rather than wait for decisions to ‘come from above’ which has been the norm till now. There are party stalwarts in every state-whether it be AK Antony in Kerala, Prithviraj Chavan in Maharashtra, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan, Kamalnath in MP, Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Haryana or Salman Khurshid in UP-who have emerged unscathed from many a political battle and who would be more than willing to lend a shoulder to give the Congress a fresh spurt of energy to remain politically relevant on the national scene.

Through the tumultuous eight years since 2014 when the Congress lost out in most states getting reduced to a shadow of its original self, most of its adherents will swear by one fact-unless the party grows strong at the state and regional level and throws up committed and determined leaders who are given a pivotal say in the decision making process, it is going to get nowhere. Knowingly or unknowingly, the Gandhis’ presence at the top has deterred many of these brilliant leaders from determining the course of Congress strategy for many years.

Maybe now, is the best time to bring about a change by moulding a new national Congress leadership under Kharge, guided by the Gandhis of course, who can break the stranglehold the saffronists have on national politics.