Can a party be built in five months when it hasn’t been built for five years?

l Why did the Goa Congress need P Chidambaram if all was well?
l Organisations need to build relationships with the people
l The irony is that in spite of its state, many old families still, nurture good memories of the party
l Can sudden new entrants and old rejected ones revive the party or will they just focus on winning seats
Governance and leadership are a process. It cannot happen overnight. Nor can organisations be built overnight. The Congress in Goa has actually admitted to a basic weakness in its organisation by having to bring in a seasoned and the senior-most Congress leader P Chidambaram, to supervise the rebuilding of the Goa Congress that was allowed to literally break.
Even now there are families in Goa looking for strong honest leadership
Ask any genuine Congressperson in Goa from whom the survival and strengthening of the Congress are more important than winning the next elections through arrangements and deals. They will tell you the real story of the party today. At the same time in many homes in Goa, there is a generation that still nurtures the Congress and is looking for leadership that will make them hope again.
Appointing a leader as senior as P Chidambaram is an admission that the party is in disarray. It seems that the central leadership is unaware of its party’s real state
For P Chidambaram to spend a couple of days in Goa, as AICC election observer, meeting organisation members and three of its five MLAs with no surety the other two (Pratapsingh Rane and Ravi Naik) contesting on a Congress ticket is perhaps an indication that the Congress at the Centre was unaware of what the state of the party is. Perhaps it has now realised that need to take some very urgent measures.
There is no time for a yoga or slow ayurvedic wellness programme to revive the Congress. That time has passed. But will even a surgery and organ transplant work?
The problem is Himalayan in nature. But can Mr Chidambaram witness the Himalayan problem, through a stroke of lightning, in just two days? But let us hope he understands the grassroots situation by speaking directly to workers and not be fed only by certain Congress leaders with their own agenda, including those who are functioning as B teams for other parties. One thing is certain, slow healing will not work. This patient needs more urgent treatment.
In 2017, Congress had an organisation, people, grassroots support. Everything was lost since then
Luizinho Faleiro came to Goa 2014 to be the president. Elections happened in 2017. He got three years. He took over the mantle from John Fernandes and rebuilt and strengthened the Congress, travelling personally to each district, meeting grassroots workers and rebuilding the organisations within the PCC like the Mahila Congress, Youth Congress, minority cell etc. That was one of the main reasons why the party got revived and managed to knock on the doors of victory, till a member from the central leadership, actually came in the way of government formation.
After the great match-fixing which prevented the Congress from forming a government in spite of having 17 MLAs, the organisation that was built-up at different levels withered away. After Luzinho Faleiro gave up his party presidentship to a group that boasted that they would form a government in 24 hours, during a huddle at Babush Monserrate’s residence, the party went down rapidly.
This was the state of the party: No working committee for almost a year, non-functioning frontal organisations with no plans and leadership
After Girish Chodankar took over as PCC president there was no working committee for a year. Has this happened in another State where Congress did not have a working committee responsible for party affairs for a year?
In the 2017 Assembly elections, the Congress gave a ticket to Xavier Fialho, its then Youth Congress president to contest from Cumbarjua. He lost and then literally disappeared leaving the Youth Congress without a leader for a few months.
Thereafter, both its Mahila (Women) Congress head and Minority cell president Urfan Mullah have left the party. The Mahila Congress president was replaced by a retired teacher and widow of late Shantaram Naik, Bina Naik while the minority cell is still headless.
Do remember that these organisations are supposed to work among the youth, women and the minorities. Can any of these organisations come up and say that they have trained and nurtured leaders who can now become fresh new clean faces of the party in the next elections? How can they when these organisations themselves are headless and functionless?
If you get new cattle and leave them in your cowshed and they leave, they will not find a way back.
There is this saying which effectively means this. New entrants will take time getting used to the place. Less than six months before elections, the Congress forgetting its organisation weaknesses and the fact that it neglected organisation building totally, is getting, as the saying goes, new cattle to plough its field. It is also getting old retired and rejected ones and those from other parties too. People are joining the party almost on a weekly basis and with each entry, there is opposition, which means that grassroots workers have not at all been consulted before a decision is made on a new joining. Do the workers want it? Do the local people who support the party agree with such decisions? Or have they even been asked?
Look at Velim and Cuncolim and possibly in Calangute and it won’t end there.
Of course, the BJP is facing the same issue too but in a better position to control it. On Tuesday, Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant was forced to attend meetings of two factions in Mandrem of Dayanand Sopte and Laxmikant Parsekar with both demanding tickets
Instead of consolidation, Congress is going in for the acquisition of imported people. Those who have lost elections are being portrayed as new faces
Is the Congress planning to win the next elections with old repacked leaders who are entering or re-entering the party? If a party is reduced to trying to fulfill just one role of trying to win elections and not its larger role of organisation building, it will be like a limping horse with no cart to pull.
The party has barely five months, or even less to be in some shape to even stand for elections. And it must know that you cannot build or rebuild a party organisation in five months when it takes a minimum of five years.
All it can do is some miracle that will kindle some hope in those who still have a place for the Congress in their hearts. To do that it must look within and not outside.