EVERY electoral defeat for the Indian National Congress invites a mass resignation drama in the party. The Congress functionaries have lived up the tradition and submitted their resignations so that it would facilitate the party chief to revamp the party structure. But no one is able to point out the structure of the party because same fifty persons are being shifted in a reshuffle from one office to the other in the party. There is no new crop of leaders because new people have not found a place or space in the party for several reasons. The chief among them is that the party has been running on the basis of a nominated structure for the past 25 years since January 1978 when Indira Gandhi had split the party second time to get rid of leaders who were perceived as a threat to her leadership.

The ills and evils of the Indian National Congress stemmed from the sense of insecurity that Indira Gandhi had felt after her installation on the basis of selection by the old-guard and supported by nine chief ministers in the electoral battle against Morarji Desai in January 1966. She always believed that if 15 persons could make her the Prime Minister, then they could also unmake her. Hence she needed to get rid of them. She took her time and gave such a turn to the Congress ideology that the old-guard did not know what had hit them. But the net result was that the people who had their roots deep in the public mind and had a battery of workers whom they had collected during the freedom struggle and maintained them through a patronage structure were out on the road with new faces taking over the reins in the party.

It was an era when Indira Gandhi had begun to draft the chief ministers by superimposing on the state legislature parties those persons who did not enjoy majority in the state Congress legislature parties. They became entirely dependent on mercy and pleasure of Indira Gandhi for their stay in the offices of the chief minister. To humour her, they also had to humour persons who were acting as her advisors or who were on her personal staff. This style resulted in ouster of all those men who retained their self-respect and stood on their grounds. Indira Gandhi did not prefer them.

Same continued during the Rajiv regime and thereafter. Narasimha Rao was not willing to tolerate either Sharad Pawar or Arjun Singh as the independently elected members to the Congress Working Committee. Hence what had followed after the first organisation election after a gap of many years was the resignation drama. All members of the Working Committee were made to submit their resignation and two potential rivals to the throne Sharad Pawar and Arjun Singh were made to resume the office as the nominated members to the Working Committee.

The electoral defeat saw elimination of Narasimha Rao and subsequently of Sitaram Kesri though their electoral performance for the Lok Sabha election was better than that of Sonia Gandhi in 1999. No one could explain why her magic did not work but she has to take the credit for the failure of the Congress in three states, especially mauling it received both in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The Delhi victory was largely due to Sheila Dikshit than anyone else. Every one except in the Congress high command recognised the fact.

So the high command remains confused. It does not really know what caused the defeat when the initial reports about Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh had clearly favoured the Congress prospects; at least the senior leaders had believed so before the final countdown. The results were surprise to them. Even the BJP leadership was surprised at the final outcome in Rajasthan.

Even in the re-structuring party, the new incumbents do come from the same set of people who roam around the leader. Are the political structures made up of only persons? Or something more is needed? Is there any need for the clarity on ideological and economic stances? Have the strategists understood what constitutes the political mind of an Indian voter? What affects the most for him to decide on what party to vote and what individual to vote for? Has party analysed thoroughly why it did not succeed in Bengal assembly elections despite association with the firebrand Mamta Bannerji?

Basically, the Congress has to understand why it has failed to attract the younger generation to its ranks for the last two decades? What impact the pedigree syndrome had for stagnation of the party? If you succumb to pressures from established members to nominate their close relations for the constituencies they held, what avenues of promotion are there for rank and file within the party? If there was no such stimulant of promotion and possibility of space and place within the organisation why should any self-respecting person even look at such a political apparatus, leave aside joining it?

THE Bharatiya Janata Party has reinvented itself in the last round of the assembly polls in five states that were finished in December 2003. The leaders admitted that it had routed the Indian National Congress in three states of the Hindi heartland on the basis of the issues of performance and development and not on the emotive issues of Hindutva and religion or caste appeals. In fact, Law Minister Arun Jaitley had virtually said in one of his comments to a TV network that religion was no political issue.

The BJP has also discovered that its second-generation leadership is invested with ability to strategise the electoral battle to suit the local needs without depending on any extraneous issues. They were capable of innovative ideas based on more scientific methods to meet the challenges of traditional methods and outsmart them. Pramod Mahajan, general secretary, who managed the party campaign in Rajasthan, says that his party had used modern methods of flooding the State with campaign literature to point out the mistakes of the State.

It was apparent that the party had not used the Hindutva as a campaign material to attract the new generation of voters.

Uma Bharti of BJP was also told not to talk of Hindutva during the election campaign in Madhya Pradesh. Even Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was made to talk of only development issue and not to go back to his Gujarat campaign style.

The BJP had not used the front organizations, like Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, during the election campaign in any one of four states in the Hindi belt. It had the advantage the younger generation as the front face of the party. Comparatively, even the Congress had young faces as the chief ministerial candidates but they suffered from the disadvantage as they had to answer for their performance in the previous five years.