With Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra featuring in the Congress’s 138th foundation day event in Delhi, the organisational health of the party is back in focus even as the party tries to revive its stature in the national political landscape.
In some ways, the evolution of the party in the last 138 years has mirrored phases of how its network of workers crafted it. The 72 delegates who met for the party’s inaugural session in Bombay in December 1885 included 39 lawyers, a few other professionals, as well as some of India’s wealthiest men such as the Maharaja of Darbhanga. However, in the 20th century, as the Congress grew from an “annual tea party”, as its critics would dub it in the initial years, to a mass anti-colonial movement, it defined the contours of institutional politics in India. In the competitive politics of post-Independence India, this continued to serve the party in the initial decades before it weakened by the end of the last century.
