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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Reform School
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| Can the Youth Congress expunge the sins of its fathers before it inherits their wicked ways? |
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BIJU BORO / AFP PHOTO |
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| Youth Congress workers stage a motorcycle rally in 2009. The party has added 10 million members in the past three years.
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N A WARM AFTERNOON in early March, five young men arrived at the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) office in Lucknow to meet Uma Shankar Pandey, the Youth Congress vice president for central Uttar Pradesh. A lean, clean-shaven 31-year-old with intense dark circles under his eyes, Pandey was sitting behind a desk littered with loose sheets of
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paper; layers of dust coated the windows and shelves of his office.
Ajay Srivastav, an exceptionally genial man in his early 30s who serves as an IYC general secretary for central UP, led the men into Pandey’s office and introduced them one by one, describing the work each had done for the party. Pandey stood up from a plastic chair, still holding a polythene bag overflowing with files in his left hand, and shook hands with each of the men before turning quickly to more pressing matters.
“Have you prepared the report?” Pandey asked Srivastav.
“Not yet,” he answered, “I will send it tomorrow.”
Pandey stared back at him blankly, betraying some frustration. Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh are scheduled for 2012, and the Congress is desperate to unseat the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and reverse decades of declining vote share in the state. In addition to Rahul Gandhi’s highly-publicised visits—nine so far this year—the entire state party apparatus has been mobilised for what’s been dubbed “Mission UP”.
For the Congress, reeling from a year of unprecedented corruption scandals and political missteps, the upcoming elections in India’s most populous state are a crucial test for the next general election, and a chance to reverse the surging tide of negative headlines. But they will be an even bigger test for the Youth Congress and its leader, Rahul Gandhi: after a dismal result in Bihar last year, the UP elections may be the last chance to show that the much-touted “youth strategy” can pay dividends for India’s oldest party.
With the countdown to elections underway, Youth Congress workers like Pandey are on the frontlines of the Congress campaign, holding public meetings and panchayat conventions in villages across the state—canvassing voters about local concerns and attempting to stoke discontent with the BSP and its chief minister, Mayawati. “We talk about the local issues,” Pandey told me, “like corruption, lack of proper schools, illegal construction in villages.” In February, IYC headquarters in New Delhi announced that public meetings would be held in every panchayat; Pandey had been given orders to supervise meetings across five Lok Sabha constituencies, containing about 6,000 villages. By March, he had already sent his report back to New Delhi, highlighting the issues and concerns of voters in his own constituency of Sultanpur—which catalogued everything from crumbling school buildings to needed tube wells, with no issue too small to include.
Wearing tightly-laced white sneakers with jeans and a brown shirt that had faded with time, Pandey paced around the room while Srivastav and his men weighed the strengths and weaknesses of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and BSP in Sultanpur. (The local BJP was weak, they claimed, but Mayawati’s cadres were active and well-funded.) After some time, Pandey took a few bills from his tattered wallet to pay for the tea they had been drinking, signalling the end of the meeting, and Srivastav and his men got up to leave. “You should send the report by tomorrow evening,” Pandey told him again, just to be sure.
The reports submitted by Pandey and the other IYC leaders in UP are intended to provide ammunition for an upcoming series of state-wide agitations against Mayawati and her government, which will be led by visiting senior Congress leaders like Rahul, Digvijay Singh and Salman Khurshid—for which events like Rahul’s recent padyatra are a prelude. “We will organise a padyatra,” Pandey told me in March. “All the senior leaders will come here, it will be a huge event.” For the moment, his goal is to galvanise youth anger in the most neglected areas of the state, where he feels the party can best capitalise on the intensity of local frustrations. “If we can’t win a majority in the elections,” Pandey said, beaming with pride, “I promise that we will at least form a coalition government.”
Though IYC workers like Pandey are now the tip of the Congress spear in UP, the organisation was moribund as recently as the early 2000s, before Rahul Gandhi joined politics and devoted his energy to its revival. Rahul, who had vowed before his first campaign in 2004 that he would “create a new brand of politics”, made the Youth Congress his laboratory—the platform for his efforts to strengthen the Congress while opening and democratising its ranks. The fourth-generation heir to the modern world’s most successful political dynasty was an unlikely spokesman for meritocratic politics, but his message seems to have resonated with more than a few young people like Uma Shankar Pandey, who say they’ve been drawn into politics by Rahul’s call for new recruits.
Pandey, whose father sells ayurvedic medicine in a village in Sultanpur district, graduated from university in Lucknow and was doing part-time work as a social activist. In 2008, while visiting Andhra Pradesh, he decided to go listen to Rahul Gandhi, who had come to the state to launch the Congress party’s Aam Aadmi Ka Sipahi programme (literally, “Common Man’s Soldier”). Pandey was impressed by the outpouring of applause from the audience, who screamed “Rahulji!” and tossed flowers to the stage, but what truly moved him was the speech that followed. He was particularly impressed by Rahul’s call for an end to nepotistic politics, his insistence on merit as the measure of political success. “I had seen how aam aadmi suffered,” Pandey said. “I had seen how bad politicians were in my village. His words were powerful and precise.”
Pandey’s cynicism was deeply rooted: his brother had died of kidney failure in a government hospital, and Pandey felt sure that his family’s lack of money or connections had consigned his brother to inadequate treatment. “I hated politics, frankly speaking,” Pandey said. “But Rahul spoke against the system, he said we have to change the system.”
In 2008, the Youth Congress introduced “open membership”, which allowed any Indian citizen between the ages of 18 and 35 without a criminal record to become a member. Pandey joined a few months after hearing Rahul speak; a year later, he was elected the vice president for central UP during the first-ever round of Youth Congress internal elections.
Pandey’s story testifies to the evident appeal of Rahul’s rhetoric of change and democratisation; even those who derisively mock the no-longer-so-young dynast can’t deny that IYC membership has ballooned under his command. But far tougher challenges lie ahead: it remains to be seen whether the revamped Youth Congress can really help power its parent party to electoral victory at the next general election—or whether family connections and patronage can ever be eliminated from a party that currently runs on both.
The warm glow of the Congress victory in 2009—which led to a pile of fawning profiles announcing the “age of Rahul” and praising his modesty and vision—has given way to an icy glare of criticism and second-guessing, targeting both Rahul and the party he’ll presumably soon lead. His supporters unanimously insist that Rahul’s strategy looks far beyond short-term returns—he’s running a marathon, not a sprint, they invariably say—and they usually present the four-year-long effort to revitalise the Youth Congress as their prime piece of evidence.
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HE SEEDS FOR THE YOUTH CONGRESS revival were first sown in 2003, a year before Rahul Gandhi made his political debut as a candidate in Amethi, the Lok Sabha seat that had been held by his mother, father and uncle. In July 2003, a few hundred top party leaders met in Shimla to formulate strategy and discuss political challenges and organisational |
reform. The result was a 14-point statement trumpeting the party’s secular and pro-poor policies; it didn’t mention the Youth Congress, but among the delegates, several attendees told me, there was a firm consensus on the need to strengthen the Congress youth wing.
After the 2004 elections, which brought Congress back into power and Rahul into the Lok Sabha, the young heir apparent took a particular interest in the party’s youth outreach. Over the next three years, he met with student activists, social workers, management experts, lawyers and Youth Congress workers across the country, seeking advice on how to rebrand the party and bring in new recruits who might otherwise steer clear of the murky world of Indian politics. The Congress had no real counterpart to the BJP’s powerful Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (Youth Front) or the cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which had achieved considerable success spreading their message among young people in the north Indian ‘Hindi Belt’.
| SAMI SIVA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Uma Shankar Pandey, the IYC vice president for central UP.
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In 2007, Rahul took formal charge of the Youth Congress and the party’s student wing, the National Students Union of India (NSUI), and took the first steps toward the “new brand of politics” he had promised four years earlier. Rahul, who had done his own stint in the world of business consulting at the Monitor Group from 1996 to 1999, reached out to GK Jayaram—a management consultant who served as the first chairman of Infosys and now heads a leadership and institutional development institute in Bengaluru—for assistance with “vision, strategy and structure” in the IYC. In a phone interview, Jayaram told me he had been working with Rahul for the past three years as a “consultant and facilitator for the transformation effort”, for which he coined the name “Vistaar”, meaning “vastness” and “enhancement”. The goal, Jayaram said, was to create “holistic leaders and strengthen moral leadership”.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Vinay
1 March 2012
04:03 AM
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I am yet to understand after reading the entire article if this is the objective dissection of youth congress or is it mere listing of how many MBAs and PhDs their members have? How come 100% of MPs from congress below 35 despite all efforts still belong to dynasty....does having a degree ensures that I am capable to understand and resolve issues that are not technical but emotional, social and religious....confusing urban thinking as new wave of changes is gross exageration of ground realities....here Mr. Gandhi is experimenting a new era(as per the article) and there we find the same youth brigade silent and unable to get away from populist policies of Indira Gandhi era.....in 1930s germany there was also a youth organization and in 1970s there was also a man named Sanjay Gandhi...who was young.....we know where all those transformations went towards....
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rekha
3 November 2011
11:51 AM
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In the present political scenairo , there is a deadly need of a drastic change in the so called existing "system" which is deeply rooted in corruption and consist of more than seventy five percent persons indulged in crime. power of politics must pave the way forward and for this a well organised future vision must be there in the system. we can expect some positive surge in the system under the Mr. rahul gandhi's supervision.
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A.C.Patel
9 September 2011
09:05 AM
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Good Work Hon.Rahul Gandhi ,National President Rajeev Satav & U.P.Central President Tarun Patel , Youth Congress O.Bs. Nice Work Mishan 2012 In U.P.
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HAKEEM
31 August 2011
01:20 PM
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i came to read this article lately.anyway i am very much obliged to shri rahulgee for internal election in iyc.i was an active k s u worker and university union councilor in 1999.after that people like me did not get opportunity only because of consensus and nomination system.but in this election i could bring a lot of freshbloods from my villege and on that basis i could became assembly gen sec in kottakkal assembly in kerala.
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amit
24 August 2011
01:41 AM
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what democratization ? does Rahul Gandhi owe his position in congress to democratization ? !!! n he is the guy to push internal democracy ...really !
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Iris
13 August 2011
02:33 PM
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I feel like Kanishka Singh deserves Prime Ministerial berth! He is pushing harder than Rahul does.
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Inderjeet
12 August 2011
03:19 PM
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A very nice deailed outlook of youth congress. I must say after reading this article, I feel it's very difficult for Rahul Gandhi to become the Country's prime minister. I feel very disturbing about the fact that young workers are in such a bad condition and then because they protest they are dismissed from the party affairs.
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Anil
10 August 2011
01:59 PM
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IMO, RG just doesn't have it in him to become a leader. When will he speak on current issues to neutral media? When will he speak in parliament?
Also, there are lot of corruption related issues on the Congress and he can't escape from those.
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Vivek Rana
3 August 2011
01:47 PM
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How is youth congress important for congress in UP elections? In the end it's all money that decides the fate of elections. Mayawati spends public money to get votes. Rahul cannot manage that amount of money becaue he still is Amul baby. he gets his pocket money from his mother Sonia Gandhi.
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sandeep
2 August 2011
02:52 AM
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The intention and right efforts towards transformation is for everyone to see and it is just a matter of time tangible results will follw. The need for the hour is sutained belief in what is being done without even a blink of tha eye. There would several obstacles come as they are currently but only a determined effort and see thru. The road is not easy but then the results that we are asking for- democratization and transformation- is too big to give up on this process anywhere in between..
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Abhay Dhingra
31 July 2011
01:53 PM
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Youth congress is a failed experiment. All the activists including youth congress activists are goons. They join parties to obtain power, blackmail busines people. They never help poor people. It's a myth.
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Akanksha Kumar
30 July 2011
01:07 PM
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an interesting piece that elucidated the efforts Rahul is putting in rebranding Congress via the IYC,panache of the Gandhi scion has undoubtedly attracted hordes like Pandey to join the bandwagon, though the success of this troupe would follow only when they rise above the ranting act of raking up issues and if given a 'chance' try to mitigate the woes of the Aam Aadmi they've vowed to give 'saath' to.
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Pankaj A
30 July 2011
08:39 AM
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Well written. Would love to see an article next on efforts underway to break the illicit funding-crime nexus in various quarters of our politics
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