Article from the London Times pretty much arguing this and quite well, I thought. It was written by a substitute columnist for Lord Hague of Richmond (former UK Conservative Party leader), who was away at the time, and who has a regular column in this newspaper.

NB: As the date will make clear, this article was written before the UK election of July 2024.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/gandhi-party-demise-india-warning-left-rsfp0n38j#main-container

For those who can't access because of paywall, read text below:

Gandhi party’s demise is warning to the left
Bereft of positive ideas and culturally adrift, the once mighty Congress faces being wiped out by Narendra Modi’s BJP
Philip Collins
Monday April 08 2024, 9.00pm, The Times

Would you vote for a political party that offered the slogan “a shop of love”? Even if that party had been the political handmaiden of your nation’s fledgling years as a democracy? What if its rival, headed by the most charismatic leader in the country, had presided over real wage growth of 5 per cent a year? That is the predicament the once mighty Congress party faces in India, in the world’s most consequential democratic election.

The Indian Lok Sabha will be elected, in the largest democratic experiment on Earth, from April 19 until June 1. Approximately 960 million people are eligible to vote and, if turnout is the same as usual, at least two thirds of them will do so. No tutored eyes can see anything other than a third emphatic victory for the prime minister, Narendra Modi. In a recent poll, 64 per cent preferred Modi to the 17 per cent who selected Rahul Gandhi of Congress. In polls conducted this year the alliance on the right, headed by Modi’s BJP, have taken close to 50 per cent of the vote and usually a double-digit lead over the alliance on the left, headed by Congress. On the latest projection, Congress could hit an all-time low with 38 seats, close to a wipeout.
This is the party, remember, that ruled India almost unimpeded from independence until 1989. It is the only political party in the country that has run the government of every Indian state. In a vast and heterogeneous nation of 15 major languages and over 800 dialects, the Congress party used to be a national institution and, as Sunil Khilnani observed in The Idea of India, one of the solvents into which differences of identity tended to dissolve.
No longer. India is now ruled by a government that makes a fervent issue of identity, and Congress is on the edge. All short-term fixes have been tried. Indian party politics is highly local and diverse, with 39 parties in parliament and over 1,800 nationally, and so binding agents like Congress are crucial. Its leaders established the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India) to maximise the force of the anti-BJP parties, but to little avail. Party strategists have tried to entangle Modi in crony capitalism, and Gandhi declared the election to be a choice between democracy and dictatorship. Though it is true that the Modi government has an alarming record with respect to the judiciary and press freedom, the charge does not stick, at least not when it is levelled by Gandhi. This is how they got to the meaningless alternative of the “shop of love”.
Nothing is working and this draws inevitable attention to the leadership question. Gandhi, the latest scion of the Nehru family to sit at the top of Congress, is always cited as the de facto leader. In point of fact, that post has been held since 2022 by Mallikarjun Kharge, an 81-year-old lawyer from Karnataka. Yet this hardly feels like the herald of post-dynastic politics and Gandhi has been vague about which of the two, himself or Kharge, will be prime minister in the unlikely event of a Congress victory.

The organisational and leadership problems, though, are symptoms of a larger failing. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Congress deserves the obscurity to which it is headed because of its acute intellectual shortcomings. The residual Congress ideology is a sort of English Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun. Congress built an Indian economy that discouraged foreign trade and inward investment and caught up commercial transactions in a web of regulations. To some extent the Nehruvian state was dismantled by PV Narasimha Rao’s government from 1991 but the change was short and liberalisation is not a current cause within a party that lacks a clear economic doctrine.
By contrast, Modi has a record on which he can run. India’s growth rate of 7.2 per cent is the second highest in the G20. More people have heat and light, more people have inside lavatories. India has been adding 10,000km of highway every year. Capital expenditure as a percentage of total government expenditure has doubled since 2010 and India now makes more digital payments than the next four leading countries combined.
Modi’s Hindu nationalism is an important part of his political movement, to be sure. The construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a destroyed mosque in Ayodhya, on what its advocates claim is the holy site of the birth of Ram, is a popular move from which the prime minister extracts all the political credit going. His party does not like dissent and is impatient with institutions which, in a democracy, are designed to question and curtail power. A revived Congress party should not yield on these points.
But this is not a path to victory. Congress needs to avoid being orphaned as the party solely of the dispossessed. The Congress manifesto, published on April 5, was a standard left-of-centre list of desirable state handouts. It said little about more inclusive growth. The top 10 per cent of Indians hold 77 per cent of the national wealth. Unemployment is as high as it has ever been and less than half of urban workers have full-time jobs. The India Skills Report 2023 found only half of young Indians are employable — one in five Indians cannot yet read. And, most alarming, India’s female labour participation rate has dropped from 32 per cent in 2005 to 19 per cent in 2021. In the second most unequal democracy in the world, after South Africa, there is a story that a revitalised Congress could tell.
To some extent the problems of the Congress party — lacking a convincing story about growth, sounding culturally distant from the nation and too keen to dispense state funds — are exemplars to the political left everywhere. Yet politics is also local and it is time — it has been time for a long while now — for Congress to go beyond the limitations of the dynastic Nehru family. The future of India will need good inclusive growth to fund good public services. It will also need a government that can be trusted with democratic freedoms. Congress is the only option to offer both, but at the moment it is no option at all.

For the time being, a new Labour government will not be able to deal with its sister party. Instead it will have to seek to finish a trade deal with the Modi government — which is by far the best way to detach India from its historic neutrality and proximity to Russia which are, strange to say, the other great legacies of the Congress party.

Shut up. Better working hours would create more job opportunities for people. Moreover, if people are not stressed, they would do better job at work and hence contribute more economically. They would also use their free time for economic activities, thus ensuring more spending. The law should be passed asap

I think you are generalising a lot of things here, sir. Firstly, it's not the labour laws of Nehruvian Socialism that kept the country backward, but largely prevention of private enterprises to come up through law aka license raj. Secondly, weekly rest and reasonable work hours are essential for a healthy society and healthy families. Look at how Japan is collapsing as a nation, with government begging people to have babies and young workers paying firms to help them quit jobs. Sorry to say but the life in a law firm is not a healthy life to live and it's not that it is inevitable, it became such because the market did not find any incentive to make it more healthier lifestyle. Hence, government needs to step in because there is a limit to what market can do. Thirdly, I don't think long working hours is contributing to more money for the workers in as much as it is contributing to the economic inequality at the cost of health and well being of workers. Fourthly, every partner who comes here just says one thing: Don't whine, if you can't cope up, do something else. What we fail to understand is that in absence of regulation of work hours we will only race to the bottom. Today those who leave law firms move in- house and thankfully most in-house jobs have reasonable work hours. But what if it changes in future? What if the companies hire less people and give higher salaries. We are increasingly seeing that firms across fields are increasingly becoming more extreme (high pay-no wlb or peanuts with wlb). It's difficult to find the firms at the centre. Fifthly, the doom that you prophesied was also prophesied by the rich after industrial revolution and tbh it's prophesied with every pro labour government laws. Many of these dooms never actually take place. The market adapts. I am not saying that we can't destroy the market in name of labour rights, sure we can but this isn't that harmful for the economy even though it might mean lesser pay for workers and perhaps for senior management and employers. Remember India is a free market. All firm might have to keep the pay at same level, because few firms would choose to do the same even after these laws just to not lose talent. Lastly, forget about competing China, it is like Canada saying we need to beat US economy. We are okay with a bit of less GDP, if we can keep our sanity and rights.

Yes, thank you for going against the crowd and pointing this out. It’s a dumb suggestion by Tharoor designed to make him popular with Gen Z , which has no clue of economic realities. The truth is that a developing country like India cannot afford such luxuries. We need our workers to work at least 70 to 100 hours a week to compete with China.

And for Tharoor fanboys: It’s universally acknowledged that it was Nehruvian socialism and the low rate of growth under the Congress that kept India backward. So we need to play catch-up.

Does anybody think it is ironical that Tharoor is calling for this now in India at the same time that it has been a hot topic of conversation in the UK, because of certain proposals (including 'the right to switch off', banning of zero hours contracts, introducing presumption of flexible working) that Labour has advanced to strengthen workers' rights?

Shashi Tharoor proposes new law legislating fixed working hours for private sector. This should soon become a reality and shall also apply to law firms, CA firms etc. 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day. You can leave at 6:30 with no questions asked policy. You need to work 7 hours a day + 1 hour for break including lunch/ tea. This will prevent exploitation of corporate slaves. Organisations that do not comply should be fined heavily and fast track courts should be set up solely for this. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/death-of-ernst-and-young-employee-shines-light-on-intensely-competitive-india-work-culture-by-shashi-tharoor-2024-09

There can be a monthly exception of 4 days a month, but that would entitle extra compensatory holiday for the employee.

Any comments on this law?