Can Prashant Kishor's formula revive Congress?

A serious debate is raging within the Congress on hiring election strategist Prashant Kishor to help in the revamp of the party.

Sonia Gandhi thinks that Kishor has superb ideas that can catapult the party to a dominant position to challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi and upset the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

But senior leaders like Digvijay Singh, Kamal Nath and Ashok Gehlot believe that, while Kishor may have had the guts to tell Sonia Gandhi and her children, Rahul and Priyanka, to allow a non-family member to become party chief, he could not be fully entrusted with the task of reviving of the Congress.

Apparently, Kishor has convinced the Gandhis that their main worry about the flow of funds can be resolved because he knows the nuts and bolts of enhancing financial support to fight the elections.

Also, he has also pledged to negotiate with leaders such as other opposition leaders including Jaganmohan Reddy, M.K. Stalin, Akhilesh Yadav, Naveen Patnaik, Tejashwi Yadav and Mamata Banerjee so that the Congress is able to contest a decent number of Lok Sabha seats.

In turn, Kishor expects the Congress to accommodate him at a senior level, allowing him ample freedom to implement his proposals that include fixing the leadership issue at all levels, reclaiming the party’s founding tenets, raising an "army" of grassroots leaders and "foot soldiers", and creating a supportive media and digital propagation network.

Naturally, Sonia Gandhi has found Kishor's offer very tempting and could be close to inducting him. A year ago, a similar exercise had failed to materialise and ended up with Kishor criticising the party leaders for not seizing on an opportunity to utilise his services.

Therefore, the latest round of consultations between Sonia Gandhi and other leaders seemed to indicate that Kishor's Congress entry may be certain. But he has to dissociate from all other parties including the DMK, Trinamool Congress and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) for whom he has been working for some time.

But the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) (with which Kishor has had association) has just finalised its contract for the 2023 Assembly elections with K Chandrashekar Rao’s TRS. This party is the Congress’s opponent in Telangana.

Kishor was in Hyderabad on April 23 and 34 holding marathon meetings with Rao and the TRS leadership though he has held that he has officially ended his relations with IPAC.

So, now the big question is whether Kishor has devoted himself entirely to the Congress. Will Kishor be fully committed to the Congress' future alone?

Secondly, Kishor's relationship with client-political parties has seen many ups and downs. His relationship with Mamata Banerjee is not in great form. The buzz is that Mamata is angry with him for misleading the Trinamool Congress to fight the Goa polls, and lose miserably.

After Yogi Adityanath's impressive win in UP, there is no doubt that a sense of desperation has gripped the Gandhis as well as the Congress party. That is why we see that, despite his increasingly vocal idea that a non-Congress leader must take over as Congress chief, Sonia Gandhi has engaged him in at least two rounds of discussions.  This is notwithstanding his earlier stint of guiding with the Congress party in 2017 UP polls, which resulted in a flop show.

Kishor began his career as a water and sanitation expert of the UN in Gujarat, and got close to Modi. He began campaigning for Modi in 2014. He, however, parted ways with the BJP because his demand for accommodating his team in the Union government was rejected when Modi became PM. Then he shifted loyalty to Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal(United) and helped its win in Bihar in 2015.

He again helped the Congress win in 2017 in Punjab, then aided the YSR Congress Party to sweep in Andhra Pradesh in 2019 and the AAP in 2020 in Delhi. In 2021, Kishor was seriously involved in the election work of both the Trinamool Congress and the DMK in Bengal and Tamil Nadu respectively.

Kishor and his team are seen as experts in crunching electoral numbers for a winning formula. But his task before for the revival of the Congress does seem to be a very tall order.

Kishor says he can succeed in uniting the Congress party and the opposition in a pre-poll-alliance against the BJP all over the country. According to him, the fact that there may be many opposition faces who want to be projected as a PM face does not matter. If the BJP faces a united opposition in all 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, its fortunes will turn downwards.

But the big question is whether the troubles of the Congress party can just be cured by Kishor alone?

There is no doubt that Sonia Gandhi has taken Kishor's offer seriously and got a seven-member panel to report on his proposals.

But more than Kishor's expertise, the Congress desperately needs new energy more than anything else.

What impresses Sonia Gandhi is that Kishor, as an election management expert, has produced spectacular results for other parties and his expertise should be utilised for the Congress.

In any case, the party is holding a three-day brainstorming session (Chintan Shivir) beginning on May 13 in Udaipur.

In 2013, Rahul Gandhi became the party’s vice president during the Jaipur Chintan Shivir. So, major decisions for a revamp could be coming at the end of the Udaipur brainstorming session. 

An immediate fallout could be Kishor may goad Rahul Gandhi to go on a yatra across the states. Kishor has pointed out that the last mass public outreach campaign by the Congress was Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Yatra in 1990.