Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (SP) confronts a quieter version of the same crisis. Pawar is one of India’s most experienced politicians and continues to command great respect. But his personal stature cannot indefinitely compensate for organisational erosion. Like the Sena (UBT), his party too lost its recognised name and symbol after the split.
Questions about succession persist. The organisation survives substantially because of the veteran’s own authority rather than an institutional structure capable of renewing itself independent of him.
The combined effect is unprecedented. Maharashtra’s two major regional opposition parties are simultaneously engaged in battles for organisational survival. Instead of challenging the government inside and outside the legislature, they are preoccupied with retaining their legislators, local leaders and workers.
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Their predicament has created space for the Congress, which has something its regional allies lack at this moment — organisational continuity. It has not suffered a major split. Its district committees remain intact.
The party has, in fact, got fresh blood with newly appointed presidents of local units under its nationwide organisational revamp campaign — the Sangathan Srijan Abhiyan. Whether the campaign succeeds in rebuilding the Congress bottom-up is a different question, but its ideological identity is relatively stable. Most importantly, it is not burdened by questions like which faction represents ‘the real party’.
This does not automatically translate into electoral revival. The Congress has organisational weaknesses of its own and has struggled to convert public discontent into political gain. Yet, if Maharashtra seeks a durable and recognisable Opposition, the Congress may increasingly find itself occupying that space, less so at this point because of any great resurgence and more because the other claimants to that role have steadily fragmented.
Jaideep Hardikar is a senior Nagpur-based journalist and author of Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis. More by him here
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