The Congress cannot allow....

The Congress cannot allow the country’s “growing educated and middle-classes to be disillusioned and alienated from the political process”. With those words, party president Sonia Gandhi, in a crisp 20-minute long opening speech in Jaipur on Friday, set the tone for the two-day Chintan Shivir, officially acknowledging that growing middle class angst visible over the last year and a half on the streets of the country’s major cities was causing concern to the Grand Old Party.

For a party that has seen itself as a champion of the poor and the marginalized, Ms Gandhi’s indirect admission that the middle class was a constituency the Congress ignored at its peril marked a departure from the past. It was also a reminder that the party will face its fiercest challenge in next year’s general elections in urban and semi-urban India – where it performed remarkably well in 2009.

Urging the 345 party delegates gathered at the BM Birla Science and Technology Auditorium in Jaipur “to recognize the new India...increasingly peopled by a younger, more aspirational, more impatient, more demanding and better educated generation,” she said India’s youth wanted its voice “to be heard”. With people better informed and better equipped to communicate, thanks to television, the social media, mobile phones and the internet, Ms Gandhi pointed out, “Our people are expecting much more from their political parties.” If the MGNREGA had brought employment to rural India, Ms Gandhi said there was need to provide employment in urban and semi urban areas as well. The RTI Act, that the Congress-led government had enacted, had made people demand greater accountability and demonstrable integrity from their their elected representatives.

In keeping with the objective of the Chintan Shivir -- introspection -- Ms Gandhi turned the spotlight inwards, taking in a host of issues, from taking gender issues from the margins of political activity to its “heart” to the critical need to continue the battle against corruption, to observing austerity in personal celebrations, to placing the good of the party above personal ambitions to taking up the causes espoused by the various protest movements relating to land, forest, water, livelihood, tribal and gender issues.

Obliquely referring to last month’s gang-rape and heinous assault of a young paramedical student in Delhi, Ms Gandhi said atrocities on women, both in urban and rural India,” are a blot on our collective conscience”, and stressed that “the way we still treat widows, the prevalence of female foeticide even in economically prosperous regions, the trafficking of children and women, brazen sexual harassment...are all very disturbing trends that should shake and awaken us.” But even as she focused on the issue, she told her party colleagues that gender issues would no longer be left to the Mahila Congress or to women’s organizations – she wanted them to change their mindsets and place it at the heart of their political activity.

Taking party leaders to task for “squandering” the many opportunities the electorate had given the Congress because they had failed to function as a disciplined and united team, she said, “Unity is the cry of each and every party worker of our great organization, and it is our sacred duty to respond to it.” In states where the party was out of power, it was particularly important to set aside personal ambitions and egos: “Why do we forget, “she asked,” the simple truth that in the party’s victory lies the victory of each and every one of us?” However, in a nod to the Congress ‘ anti-alliance mindset, she said that in states where the Congress is in alliance, it needs to “ strike a balance between respecting these alliances and ensuring that the party’s rejuvenation is not compromised.”

With over the delegates under 45, Ms. Gandhi made a pitch for austerity and ending the practice of “ostentatious displays of wealth, pomp and status” at weddings, festivals and happy occasions. “Does this not beg the question,” she asked, “where is this wealth coming from?