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.