Opinion: Opinion | Congress Wants Professionals. Can It Deal With What They Say?

In the Congress, creating an organisation has rarely been the difficult part. What has been challenging has been sustaining its relevance. The All India Professionals' Congress (AIPC) was one of those rare experiments that, when launched in 2017, appeared to answer a genuine political problem rather than merely accommodate another leader.

Rahul Gandhi had correctly identified a constituency that had drifted almost completely outside the Congress ecosystem: doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, bankers, academics, technologists, management professionals, and an expanding urban middle class that followed politics intensely but wanted little to do with conventional party structures.

Shashi Tharoor, as the AIPC's founding chairperson, was an obvious choice to lead it. He had the intellectual profile, an independent public following, and, crucially, the ability to make political participation respectable to people who were more comfortable in a boardroom or university seminar than inside a district Congress office.

Nine years later, the wheel has turned again. On September 9, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge appointed former Nizamabad MP Madhu Goud Yaskhi as the AIPC chairperson, succeeding Praveen Chakravarty, who has moved to the Rajya Sabha.

Yaskhi inherits an organisation whose original argument has actually become more compelling with time. Tharoor understood something about professionals that conventional politicians often do not: most of them were not looking for political careers.

They wanted political access without having to become full-time political workers. The early AIPC, therefore, deliberately behaved differently. Chapters met on weekends, sometimes in hotels and clubs rather than party offices.

Professionals could contribute knowledge, policy suggestions, research, or campaign expertise without first mastering the Congress hierarchy. By April 2018, it had established 45 chapters across 20 states. A year later, membership was approaching 8,000.

Professionals associated with it were helping the Congress with research, communication, and manifesto-making. In Chhattisgarh, the AIPC teams accompanied the manifesto committee through extensive stakeholder consultations ahead of the 2018 election.There was also an interesting contradiction.

The more successful the experiment became, the more Tharoor himself became politically consequential. What began as Rahul's experiment in opening Congress politics to outsiders increasingly carried the imprint of a leader with an independent political constituency.

Tharoor remained the AIPC chairman until November 2023, when Praveen Chakravarty replaced him. Chakravarty was hardly an illogical appointment. An investment banker and political economist before entering Congress politics, he had headed the party's data analytics operation and had been closely associated with important policy exercises.

On paper, he was precisely the sort of professional the AIPC was intended to attract. Nor is it accurate to say that absolutely nothing happened during his tenure. The AIPC reorganised its professional domains, ran membership initiatives, sought inputs for party programmes, and took up issues affecting salaried professionals.

Its campaign against the withdrawal of indexation benefits after the 2024 Budget was one example. Chakravarty also repeatedly made an argument the Congress badly needed to hear: that social justice alone could not substitute for an appeal to urban aspiration.

After the Haryana defeat in 2024, he argued publicly that the Congress had failed to speak sufficiently to urban voters and should tell young Indians that there was nothing wrong with wanting to become prosperous - that the politics of aspiration and the politics of justice were complementary, not contradictory.

It was an important argument. Yet the AIPC itself never acquired under Chakravarty the political personality it had possessed during its early years. The difference was less between activity and inactivity than between presence and consequence.

This is what makes Madhu Goud Yaskhi's appointment interesting. Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy described Yaskhi's appointment as "a well-deserved recognition of his long years of service and his ability to connect with people across walks of life".

He said, "His experience will help the party deepen its engagement with India's professional community and bring their expertise into nation-building." Yaskhi is not a political novice dressed up as a professional. Nor is he merely a technocrat parachuted into the Congress system.

He has inhabited both worlds. That combination may prove useful. The AIPC's problem has always been structural. If it remains too insulated from the Congress, it becomes an agreeable debating society. If it is swallowed entirely by the regular organisation, the very professionals it hopes to attract begin staying away.

Yaskhi's task, therefore, is integration without suffocation. A successful AIPC cannot function in parallel to PCCs, DCCs, and the AICC. Its people must enter manifesto committees, research teams, spokesperson panels, election management structures, and eventually candidate lists.

A doctor who spends five years discussing public health inside the AIPC must see some route to influencing the party's health policy. An entrepreneur must be able to alter the Congress' thinking on regulation, taxation, or job creation.

A female professional should not merely be invited to a panel on women's empowerment; she should have a credible route into decision-making. Otherwise, membership becomes ornamental. For much of the Narendra Modi era, the BJP has enjoyed a formidable advantage among India's aspirational classes.

Entrepreneurship, upward mobility, technology, nationalism, and personal advancement could all be fitted relatively easily into the Modi proposition. The Congress, by contrast, increasingly spoke the language of protection, redistribution, inequality, and grievance.

Those concerns are...