It is suicidal for a political party to assume that only a few top leaders know what is best for it. Such an assumption creates more problems for the party than it solves. It leads to the concentration of all powers in a few. It also discourages the growth of responsible leadership at lower levels. The so-called high command in the Congress may have done incalculable damage to the party itself by not letting its state leaders function independently. The party won the just-concluded assembly polls in Uttarakhand in an otherwise bleak electoral season. But it is the high command’s representative who sits in judgment over the choice of the new chief minister. The matter should have been left to the party candidates who won the polls and to the leaders of the state unit of the party. Instead, the central leadership’s emissary flies down to Dehra Dun from New Delhi in order to do the job. Worse still, the high command’s decision in such a case is passed off as the legislators’ unanimous choice. A fake stamp of legitimacy is thus given to an illegitimate act. But it is the state unit of the party which subsequently suffers from this unwarranted and unhealthy intervention by the central leadership.

The latest events in Uttarakhand suggest that the Congress high command is still clueless about why it lost in the elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Goa. There are obviously many reasons, not all of which have to do with the Congress itself. But one of the principal reasons for the party’s poor performance in the latest round of elections has much to do with its over-dependence on the high command. An obvious result of this process is the ever-growing unimportance of the state leaderships. If all important decisions are to be taken by the high command, then all that the state leaders can do is sail with the prevailing winds from the top. The Congress has been saddled with the problem for a long time. It also explains why the party organizations have all but disintegrated in states such as Bihar, UP, West Bengal and several other states. The drubbing in the recent polls should shake the party into reinventing the importance of party leaderships in the states. The rise of the regional parties shows how important it is to revive the federalist polity. For the Congress, a reinvention of the federalist principles must begin at home. The party’s centre alone cannot hold any more.