To Stitch'em A Forked Tongue

Battling a many-voices-no-impact jinx, the Congress regroups its top communicators. Will it work?

- Bula Devi

AN indefensible Congress tries to defend itself by blaming the media for being biased against it, but wears blinkers when it comes to its own repeated public relations blunders. In a party plagued with divergent views, the absence of consistency is the only constant. How, then, would party vice-president Rahul Gandhi—the to be president, going by long-time speculation in party circles, with D-Day now expected to arrive by December—take on the ruling BJP, which is rapidly spreading its wings from west to east and north to south?

To take on the BJP’s growing might with collective responsibility, putting things in the correct perspective and avoiding self-goals, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has set up a structured communication strategy group comprising party leaders of the two Houses—Mallikarjun Kharge and Ghulam Nabi Azad—and former cabinet ministers Anand Sharma, P. Chidambaram, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Jairam Ramesh, besides Lok Sabha MPs Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sushmita Dev. Party research head and MP Rajeev Gowda and communications unit head Randeep Surjewala are ex-officio members in the group.

Since cohesiveness and concerted efforts have been missing in the party for quite some time now, individual leaders have been taking initiatives in outreach programmes. For instance, the party’s SC wing is busy organising the three-day international conference ‘Reclaiming Social Justice, Revisiting Ambedkar’ in Bangalore, beginning July 21 and with Martin Luther King III and Rahul Gandhi as chief guests. Similarly, Pushparaj Deshpande, an analyst with the All-India Congress Committee (AICC), is also trying to do his bit.