At 140 (on December 28, 2025) Indian National Congress is grappling with the cumulative effects of long-standing institutional erosion. Senior party leader Digvijay Singh’s recent comments praising the organizational strength of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) compared to the Congress have brought the issue back into the public debate. Yet any serious discussion must begin with an important distinction: the Congress and the BJP are not comparable political parties, and treating them as such obscures the structural roots of the Congress’s decline.
The BJP operates within a dense ideological and institutional ecosystem maintained by a set of organizations run and affiliated with the RSS. The RSS supports the BJP with key capabilities in campaigning, election management and booth-level coordination. No other party in India – and arguably nowhere else – enjoys such an external cadre base that continuously replenishes the leadership, shapes ideology and conducts political mobilization independent of electoral cycles. In contrast, Congress is not a cadre-based party, putting it at a serious disadvantage due to the absence of trained workers at the district and booth level.
organizational erosion
The organization that the Congress built in the first decades after independence has undoubtedly declined over time due to centralization and concentration of power at the top. The result has been a decline in local leadership capable of sustained mass mobilization, a sharp departure from earlier periods marked by dense political networks. Since the 1969 partition, electoral leadership has increasingly given way to organizational depth, a trend that continued into the 1990s. During that decade, leaders from outside the Gandhi family led the party, but little effort was made to renew or strengthen its internal structures.
Also, it would be misleading to describe the Congress today as a strictly centralized party. Indeed, it is arguably less centralized than the BJP, where authority is far more decisively concentrated around a single leader, especially in terms of state-level electoral strategy. As political expert James Manor has observed in the context of the Karnataka Assembly elections 2023, the Congress has often allowed clearly decentralized management of campaigns at the state level. The party thus remains loosely structured – plural, internally diverse and heterogeneous. While this was once a source of flexibility, in India, as elsewhere, it has become a liability in a political landscape dominated by right-wing parties that thrive on ideological uniformity, disciplined mobilization and strong leadership. Therefore, the challenge before the Congress is not just one of centralization versus decentralization, but of rebuilding the party’s capacity without sacrificing the internal pluralism that differentiates it from the BJP. Comparisons with the BJP are wrong because there is a risk that the Congress will have to repeat the BJP’s model for electoral success.
myth of decentralization
Much of the debate on decentralization proceeds as if this dilemma was unique to the Congress. The truth is that no major party in India works with real decentralization. In fact, the BJP exercises tight control over its state organisations, ensuring that the Chief Minister, the State President and the de facto party president remain accountable to the central leadership. The current BJP president, JP Nadda, and recently appointed working president, Nitin Nabin, hold office through nomination rather than vote of party members, while the Congress held an election for the party president post in 2022, an exercise that, whatever its limitations, was a sign of internal democracy.
Nonetheless, the absence of electoral processes within the BJP has received limited public or media scrutiny. Instead the focus is on the concentration of power within the Congress, which suggests that concerns about internal democracy arise only when a particular party is under test.
This focus on centralization also ignores the extent to which the Congress continues to tolerate internal dissent. Unlike most Indian parties, it has allowed senior leaders and internal groups such as the Group of 23 senior Congress leaders, commonly known as the G-23, to publicly criticize the party’s functioning and call for elected leadership, collective decision-making and revival of institutional structures without facing immediate marginalization or expulsion. In fact, many members of G-23 are working in the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the highest decision-making body of the party. However, this tolerance of public dissent should not be mistaken for political power. This is a double-edged phenomenon: while it signals internal independence, it also exposes the weaknesses of the party and increases the perception of factionalism and indecision. These weaknesses have repeatedly troubled the Congress in states like Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan, where leadership tussles have slowed political growth. The same openness that distinguishes the Congress also exposes its weakness, underscoring the challenge of resolving internal debates with decisive authority.
Repeated electoral defeats have exposed the structural weakness of the Congress, particularly its lack of sustainable grassroots presence. This deficit has become increasingly apparent as the BJP, backed by vast financial resources and an extensive party apparatus, has expanded into states where it had little presence a decade ago, while the Congress has been ill-equipped to mount an effective counter. Due to its loose internal structure and weak local networks, the party has been unable to match what is arguably India’s most formidable political machine to date. The Congress’s strong performance in the November 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, where it achieved a very poor strike rate, has brought these shortcomings into sharper relief.
Congress’s Rahul Gandhi has on several occasions sharply criticized his party’s institutional inertia, but his efforts to translate that criticism into meaningful reform have repeatedly stalled. Efforts to rework internal hierarchies, challenge entrenched patronage networks, and transfer authority have met with stiff resistance from within the party, preventing it from developing into an effective state-level organization. The irony is that many of the senior leaders who loudly condemn the organizational dysfunction of the Congress have themselves been the biggest obstacles to genuine reform. His criticisms, often couched in the language of internal democracy or decentralization, at times serve more to maintain his own influence than to strengthen the party. This dynamic has created a contradictory environment: the Congress is simultaneously marked by vocal criticism of its decline and constrained by strong figures who benefit from maintaining the status quo, while claiming to champion reform.
where is the party’s problem
The real problem facing the Congress is not centralization but weak internal democratization. While decision-making authority has long centered around the Gandhi family, the deep weakness of the party lies in its failure to nurture state and district-level leadership or create institutional pathways through which new voices can take responsibility. It lacks internal mechanisms that would allow central authority to be exercised through competent, accountable and socially embedded leaders. This helps explain the continued dominance of dynastic leadership and a narrow group of senior figures, even as the party struggles to muster support in the states or maintain a credible opposition.
Institutional restructuring and renewal is essential for this reason. Congress needs leaders who are rooted in public support and not functionaries with limited land holdings in Delhi. This is especially important in an increasingly uneven political field, where the BJP enjoys a massive advantage in financial resources, media access and narrative control. With electoral bonds disappearing, electoral trusts now replacing them and the bulk of corporate funding going to the ruling party, and much of the mainstream media closely aligned with power, opposition politics cannot rely solely on episodic mobilization. Only a revitalized party, driven by a radical progressive vision and capable of sustained mass engagement, can overcome these structural disadvantages and enable the Congress to emerge as a credible and durable alternative to the Right.
Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita at the Center for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
published – January 17, 2026 12:16 am IST
