As the Congress is all geared up for the poll battle in the five states of Mizoram, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the grand old party’s plank of “social justice” for the 2024 election will face its first test here. On October 9, the four-hour meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, held at the party headquarters announced that it was unanimous in making “social justice” the main plank for the 2024 election. The CWC made three announcements to this effect, which included that a government led by the Congress would conduct a caste census to find the number of other backward classes (OBCs), remove the cap of 50 per cent reservation for OBCs, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) through an Act of Parliament, and finally, offer 33 per cent quota to women lawmakers, including a separate quota for OBC women, at the earliest.
Even former party chief Rahul Gandhi argued that the “rights of a community should be proportional to its population in society”. In Telangana there are over 52 per cent voters from the OBC community. Although Congress is attached with the people through former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and former party chief Sonia Gandhi, who gave Telangana statehood in 2014, however, with no government at the Centre and in the state, the party needs to connect with the OBCs and the SC and ST communities to defeat the ruling BRS and the BJP. The Congress did not have big faces in Telangana as in the last ten years several senior leaders could not ensure the party’s victory in the state in the last two elections. Thus the promises of the caste census, OBC, SC and ST reservation and the six guarantees by the party are the main big poll planks.
In Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress government was toppled in 2020 just 14 months after it came to power, the party has fielded 62 out of 230 candidates from the OBC community. The Congress guarantees and the OBC representation are a major hit among the public, thus it is hoping to make a comeback in the state polls. However, the situation is a bit different in Rajasthan, where the Congress is banking on its seven “guarantees”. In Chhattisgarh, which is a tribal dominated state, the grand old party is hoping to return to power on the work of the Bhupesh Baghel government in the last five years. The Congress is hoping to ride its welfare “guarantees” and caste census promise to ensure that it enters the “finals” in 2024 as a formidable challenger to the BJP by winning in all the five states. The party had won the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assembly elections in 2018. However, it was unable to bank on the narrative in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
