The missing roll call

Congress should not undermine presidential polls

Transparency, or the lack of it, has been at the centre of the Congress party’s crisis since 2014. That opaque, non-consultative, and sometimes wholly inexplicable process has caused the party serious damage, not just electorally but also organisationally. Senior stalwarts have either quit the party, such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, Amarinder Singh, and, most recently, Ghulam Nabi Azad, or formed a coterie of dissidents — the G23 — that expresses its discontent through social-media posts and press interviews. But no lessons seem to have been learnt by the party high command. The first election for the president’s post in more than two decades, due on October 17, is being marred by the same opacity that has been the source of the party’s steady decline as a national force.

These elections could have offered the party one critical chance to unite with its fractious senior leaders, many of them talented, forward-thinking politicians. Instead, the leadership appears to have doubled down on the opacity. In the contest between Jitendra Prasada and Sonia Gandhi, serious questions were raised about the veracity of the electoral rolls. The principal point of controversy — a strange one in a party that commits itself to democracy — is the absence of a publicly available electoral roll. Lok Sabha member Manish Tewari has been among a clutch of leaders to rightly point to the impossibility of holding a free and fair election without a transparent electoral roll. This is no small matter. In the 2000 elections, Prasada had alleged manipulation of the electoral rolls both before and after he filed his nomination. Without the names of those eligible to vote, it is impossible for any candidate to campaign effectively.

That transparent electoral rolls are basic to any democratic exercise is obvious. No election in India is held without them. Yet, the response from the chair of the party’s central election authority (CEA), which is overseeing the election, has been to direct leaders to request the individual Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) office and Territorial Congress Committees (TCCs) for their lists. This is patently absurd, given that there are 28 PCCs and eight TCCs and no contender can be expected to canvass each of them for their electoral rolls. The party’s CEA has also said leaders who filed their nomination would be furnished with the lists. This, too, is an obtuse observation, since that will leave little time for the prospective candidates to canvass for votes.

All told, it is hard to escape the notion that the process, which should have been one of the most consequential, given the deep crisis in the party, is being geared to ensure the continuing stranglehold of the Gandhi family on the organisational levers of the party. Indeed, Ms Gandhi is president only by virtue of her son’s resignation from the post after the party’s debacle in the 2019 election. If the party persists with this secretive policy, the chances of its much-needed revival look bleak.