After receiving the worst electoral drubbing ever in the recent Lok Sabha elections, the Congress has been busy firefighting to keep its flock together, and to silence the voices of criticism against the leadership of the Gandhis. While it has been easy for the party to muffle criticism and discipline the few dissenters within its ranks for now, it won’t be easy for the grand old party of India to revive its fortunes unless it reinvents itself.

For long, it was the glue of power that held the organization together. That and the supposed charisma of the Gandhis seemed to unite a disparate bunch of politicians under one umbrella. With power slipping from its hands, and with the impact of the Nehru-Gandhi family considerably diminished in today’s India, the party faces a full blown crisis.

The party will find it increasingly difficult to win the confidence of voters and to keep its flock together unless it is able to chart a roadmap for root and branch reforms. After all, the rot in the party is deep, and has been long in the making.

The root of the current crisis lies in the rent-seeking Congress model of governance perfected by Indira Gandhi, when she took charge of the party and the state. In her quest for unbridled power, Indira Gandhi destroyed not just the autonomy of independent India’s newly formed institutions but also many of the democratic practices within the Congress.

The revolt she faced from powerful regional satraps within the party early in her career made her instinctively distrustful of any politician with a mass appeal. As a consequence, the democratic conventions established and nurtured by the likes of Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru died a quick death. All power became extremely concentrated in one person, and by extension, in one family. The rules of debate and discussion that should apply to any normal party in a democracy ceased to apply to the Congress.

Loyalty rather than performance has since then become the yardstick for promotions and rewards within the party. Enterprising leaders across different regions therefore found it easy to attack the heavily centralized Congress model, and struck out on their own, creating powerful regional parties. Politicians who still gravitated towards the Congress were only of two kinds: rent-seekers and dynasts. The rent-seekers knew they could award contracts and favours to their cronies with impunity as long as they stayed faithful to the first family of the Congress. The dynasts knew their family connections would speed up their rise in the party.

To camouflage the decaying system within the party, the party leadership had to resort to populism to signal their commitment to the poor. Left-wing rhetoric therefore went hand in hand with undercover sweetheart deals for cronies. As the country liberalized, crony socialism gave way to crony capitalism, with a new kind of resource raj replacing the earlier license-permit raj.

To be sure, many of the new parties including several regional parties and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) too adopted some of the elements of the Congress model over time. But if there is one party that is identified completely with this perverted model of governance in India, it is the Congress. This is also the reason why Rahul Gandhi appears so utterly insincere whenever he talks of changing the “system". Given that more than anyone else, it is Rahul Gandhi who represents this very system perfected by his grandmother, and his sole claim to power rests on that legacy, it is difficult for any voter to take his words at face value.

There is indeed a space for a strong Left-of-Centre opposition in India with the decline of the Left parties and the emergence of a marginally Right-of-Centre government. But to be relevant to today’s times, such a party has to combine market economics cleverly with social welfare to establish itself as a genuinely social democratic party. Even to fashion such a shift, the Congress must give up on the brand of voodoo economics it has practised in the past, and be prepared to promote grassroots leaders rather than rent-seekers and dynasts.

Is the Congress prepared for such a transition?

Can the Congress change itself with changing times? Tell us at views@livemint.com

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