NEW DELHI: Adopting a back-to-basics approach in the face of prolonged political slump, Congress is mulling leaving major decision-making functions to its district units, the building blocks of the party organisation which have been marginalised in the recent decades.
Sources said the idea of reorganising the party around District Congress Committees (DCCs) was discussed in the Wednesday meeting of the party brass, with office-bearers managing state units. While president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi are learnt to have spoken about focusing on district units, ranging from strengthening its structure to promoting loyal workers, sources said the future decision on the issue may revolve around giving greater importance to DCCs.
Sources said the party may make district units crucial in selection of candidates for elections. While the present process involves recommendations starting from DCCs and then moving to state units and then to the All India Congress Committee (AICC), the leadership believes there is greater centralisation, with marginalisation of the first recommending authority. Some said the party was organised around the districts in the 1960s, before the shift towards the AICC happened. Also, the leadership of district units may get greater say in strategy and campaign, with the party building on their inputs. While Congress mulls returning the political primacy to districts, the lesson has been learnt at a big cost. As an insider said, the party did not have its DCCs constituted in Haryana for over seven years, a key reason behind the failure to manage better in the recent assembly elections. The same has been true for many other states.
“The idea is to give greater responsibility, along with accountability, to DCCs in decision making,” a party manager said.
With the recent assembly defeats providing a reality check to Congress after the euphoria of Lok Sabha results in which the opposition did better than expected, Rahul has urged the states’ managers to strategise better to take on the resource-rich BJP. Sources said he warned that the party had become predictable, which was providing an advantage to the rivals. Rahul is said to have stressed the importance of being unpredictable, citing the example of Bharat Jodo Yatra, and urged them to come up with out-of-the-box ideas in states. The importance of unpredictability was likened by a neta to that of Shivaji’s guerrilla warfare.