InDepth | Inside the Congress’ Plan to Revamp the Party

Rajeshbhai Bhuriya was among the applicants for the post of District Congress Committee (DCC) president in Gujarat’s Dahod. The 54-year-old tribal leader decided to enter the race after several party workers left because they felt deserving candidates were not being given responsibilities. He believed he could help strengthen the Congress at the grassroots. “Everyone was complaining that the Congress was not growing at the block level in Dahod. When they announced the Sangathan Srijan Abhiyan (SSA) exercise, I thought I should try too. Without this exercise, I don’t think I could have applied. I had been working for the party since 1996,” says Bhuriya. His story is part of a much larger organisational exercise that the Congress is undertaking as the state approaches the 2027 Assembly election.

The Rebuilding Exercise

The overhaul was rooted in a problem that had become difficult to ignore after the 2024 Lok Sabha election: the party won 99 seats, up from 52 in 2019, but its organisational weakness remained. Party sources say the Congress still has a large cadre base, but many workers had little meaningful connection with the organisation. The link between workers below the block level and the central leadership had weakened, while the party had become increasingly Delhi-centric. “There were too many gatekeepers. The problem was not necessarily a shortage of party workers, but the absence of a system that gave them a clear role,” says a party source.

There was a parallel debate within the Congress over what kind of organisation it needed to be. One view was that the party was a mass organisation, rather than a cadre-based one, and that its job was to take up larger political issues such as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) reservations, ‘Samvidhan khatre mein hai’ (the Constitution is in danger) and ‘vote chori’ and shape the political narrative around them. But political messaging needed a methodology to carry it beyond rallies and press conferences.

Congress general secretary (organisation), K. C. Venugopal, says the party had declared 2025–26 as the “year of the organisation”, with the aim to strengthen the Congress from the grassroots to the top. The decision was taken at the Congress Working Committee meeting in Belagavi in December 2024, after discussions on revamping the organisation based on feedback from workers. The party formally adopted the SSA in April 2025 at the Ahmedabad session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC). By September 2026, the exercise has been completed in more than 900 of the 1,054 organisational districts.

Venugopal says a similar process was being followed for appointments at the block level, while the party was also strengthening booth-level agent-2 (BLA-2) and booth committees to verify electoral rolls and maintain contact with voters. “We want to have a BLA-2 at every booth,” he says. A party source says this will ensure that workers are trained to understand voter lists and map the caste and family details of voters so that they don’t have to scramble for untrained agents during elections. The system also recognises workers when they complete their weekly tasks, so the party believes “they will remain loyal and work to improve the party messaging at the booth level”.

This was the thinking behind what eventually became SSA. “We felt we needed to strengthen the DCC, which is one of the most important structures of the party. A worker in a rural area now feels that the high command is sending senior leaders to seek their views on who should become their DCC president,” says Venugopal. “Even if a senior leader recommends someone, that person has to go through the same process. This creates a sense of loyalty to the organisation and the high command, rather than to an individual leader,” he says.

“Modern political action operates at three levels: narrative-building, ground mobilisation and cohort mobilisation,” says a Congress leader. “We needed to operate at all three levels.” The Congress had managed the first, but struggled with the second. “We could somehow manage the narrative, but we could not mobilise anything else,” says the source.

In contrast, the BJP that is backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its extensive organisational network made the weakness more apparent. The 2024 election reinforced the lesson that a political narrative needed an organisation capable of taking it to the last mile, says the source. West Bengal was among the latest states to complete the exercise earlier this month. Prakash Joshi, AICC in-charge of West Bengal, says the process was designed to give grassroot workers and leaders at all levels a say before the final decision was taken. Gujarat was the first state where the exercise was completed in June 2025.

Before going to a state, observers meet Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Venugopal, state in-charge, AICC secretary C. Vamshi Chand Reddy and war room chairperson Sasikanth Senthil. The process is explained to them, with emphasis on neutrality and the profile of leaders being sought. Once these observers reach the district, a press meeting is held and applications for DCC president are invited. At the end of their stay, they prepare a panel of six names, which includes diversity and minority candidates, along with reports on the political atmosphere, caste equations and the strengths of prominent grassroots leaders, and submit them to the party high command. They are subsequently called for a meeting chaired by Venugopal along with the state in-charge. “Earlier, the process to appoint DCC presidents would take at least seven to eight months, but here we have done it in almost a month. It was announced in early August and by the second week of September, all 32 DCC presidents had been appointed,” says Joshi, who adds that West Bengal was among the latest states to complete the exercise earlier this month.

Bhuriya did not make it to the final panel of six, but he is glad that Harshadbhai Ninama, also a tribal leader, was eventually chosen as district president. He insists that Ninama has worked to strengthen the party structure in the district. Ninama has held the post since 2022. Before him, the DCC president had remained in place for more than a decade.

In Dahod’s neighbouring Mahisagar district, 42-year-old Harshadkumar Patel believes he became DCC president because of the new process. Patel, the son of a farmer, was a sarpanch in 2017 and joined the Congress in 2019. His work on farmers’ issues led to his appointment as Kisan Congress chairperson in Mahisagar in 2021. When the leadership programme was announced, party workers encouraged him to apply. “I am an outcome of the process. I have no godfather in politics,” says Patel. He also points out the scale of the exercise. “For the first time, on June 21, 2025, all the district presidents were announced at one go. It had never happened in Gujarat before.” Gujarat was the first state where the organisational exercise took place in June 2025.

For the Congress leadership, the process mattered as much as the outcome. For years, party workers had complained that decisions about the organisation were being made too far from the ground. The leadership now wanted to change not just who held the organisational posts, but how they were chosen and what they were expected to do. For 46-year-old Ninama too, the process mattered. “The AICC in-charge and an observer went to every taluk in the district, met every worker and took the opinion of more than 3,500 workers,” says Ninama.

The party is simultaneously trying to change the age and social composition of the organisation. Venugopal says at least half of those appointed were below 50. Of the nearly 16 lakh office-bearers appointed, around eight lakh were expected to be under-50.

Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities account for at least 70 per cent of the new appointments, says Venugopal. The representation of women had also increased four-fold, although it has remained below the party’s expectations. As a result, older leaders and ex-ministers have become DCC presidents.

Sonalben Patel is among those who became Ahmedabad’s DCC president through the process. The 62-year-old, a former Gujarat Mahila Congress president and Maharashtra in-charge for six years until 2024, says she would not have applied otherwise. “When the observer came to our district, I thought, here is my chance to throw my hat in the ring. I could finally do the things I had been asking leaders in Maharashtra to do. I could follow my own words. There were other leaders too vying for the post, so I hardly lobbied,” says Patel, stressing that she left it to the process. In Madhya Pradesh’s Rajgarh district, 48-year-old former state minister Priyavrat Singh applied for the DCC post after seeing the process first-hand as an AICC observer in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar district. “Looking at the grassroots, I felt I needed to focus on Rajgarh, both from the Congress’ point of view and my own,” he says.

Critics of the Process

The assessment of the SSA is mixed. Rahul Verma, political scientist and fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, says the involvement of the high command and central leaders has increased centralisation, while some also argue that money has gained a greater role in securing positions. Within the Congress, there is also a sense that the exercise has not overhauled the party as much as it was hoped, points out Verma. “Historically, it is very difficult for a party to build a cadre-based organisation without a clear ideological platform,” says Verma. He says the Congress traditionally relied on charismatic leadership and patronage, but as it lost power nationally and across states over the past 10–12 years, those organisational links have weakened.

Verma says the Congress had a good reason to undertake the SSA, but could have adopted a more decentralised approach. “The Congress perhaps should have gone about empowering regional leaders and allowing them to constitute their own teams,” he says, with state-level leaders held accountable for the performance of DCC presidents. “That might have been a better way to create a more robust structure on the ground.” The party could also have tailored its approach to individual states rather than applying “one-formula-fits-all” method.

However, a highly-placed source says that whenever the party has received complains about observers, they have been replaced, including in states like Telangana. Several leaders agree that the system may not be perfect, but several new names have come up. “Sometimes the best person may not become the district president because of social engineering. And sometimes, if it is the district of a senior leader, their choices will be given weightage,” explains a Congress leader.

There have been complaints in Gujarat too. Congress leader Pradip Kotadia questioned the selection in Amreli district, alleging that DCC president Pratap Dhuddhat, who held the post in 2023, was reappointed in 2025 despite being active only in Amreli and Kundla blocks rather than across the district.

All DCC presidents undergo 10 days of training led by the AICC in-charge for training Sachin Rao. He describes the training as “more like an orientation for organisational leaders”, with multiple tracks. One focuses on ideology, with participants examining constitutional values around gender, social justice, caste, the minority experience, socialism and rights-based schemes. “These are elements of our ideology that are being contested today and we want people to be clear about the Congress position,” he says. During the 10-day training, Rahul Gandhi and occasionally Kharge meet the DCC presidents and their families. The interaction gives them a sense that they can reach out to the party’s top leadership when needed.

From Appointment to Accountability

But the leadership knows that changing the names on organisational posts would achieve little unless the new office-bearers had work to do. A party source likened the Congress to a car that had everything except the fuel to make it move. “In an organisation, the fuel is work. If you don’t give work, the motivation will die,” says the source. That gap is now being addressed through Congress Connect, a digital portal where the DCCs receive tasks, report their work and provide feedback. More than 20,000 tasks have been completed so far, says the source.

Adding strength to this exercise is what the Congress calls the ‘Connect Centre’. It was established in all assembly constituencies during state elections where each centre maintained contact with around 20–25 mandal in-charges. Each mandal in-charge oversaw around 10–15 booths. The idea was to establish a direct line with workers, beginning at the mandal and block levels rather than relying on a top-down structure. The work is verified on the ground before being assessed and DCCs can receive ratings based on their performance. DCC presidents are being brought onto the platform first, followed by block presidents and then mandal-level workers. “Once we reach mandals, then we can give work directly to the mandal,” says the source.

Their performance is reviewed every quarter, and after six months, those who fail to meet expectations are removed. That is the shift the Congress is now trying to make: from an organisation where workers were often dependent on individual leaders to one where they are expected to have defined responsibilities and be judged on what they deliver.

The system is also beginning to have consequences. Venugopal says three people had been changed in Gujarat and two in Odisha, including people who had themselves come through the new process. In states where DCCs have been appointed, including Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, SSA 2.0 has begun, with committees below them being appointed through a similar process by the district and state leadership.

The exercise remains incomplete in Kerala and Assam, largely because of the elections. Even in Kerala, where organisational structures are already in place, appointments will follow the new process, says Venugopal. He described the exercise as a “silent revolution”. The ultimate test, however, is whether the new machinery can translate an instruction from Delhi into action on the ground. Venugopal points to a protest outside the prime minister’s residence in July as an example. The party had asked district units to hold protests that evening and, he claims, “There were protests in almost all the districts.”

“This is not just about the 2029 election. It is about strengthening the organisation,” says Venugopal.