ENARADA, New Delhi
By Ajay N Jha
In Indian politics, an electoral success may have a few recipe and ingredients but a defeat would have more than hundred reasons and excuses. The Sunday verdict on Assembly polls seems to have stunned the Congress and surprised the BJP as well. The rise of Aam Admi Party(AAP) and its sterling performance has surprised most of the poll pundits who thought, it was a flash in the pan.
The Congress party is faced with too many issues and it would be quite a humongous task to chart out a course of action which keeps itself relevant and vibrant. At the same time, it would have to take a closer look at both external and internal factors that put paid to its efforts in this round of assembly polls.
External
One, Inflation and price rise coupled with scams galore tarnished the image of the Congress party and the UPA II regime and it reverberated across these States in a big way. Moreover, the perception about Corruption was tagged along with Congress party more than others. The 10 years of anti-incumbency and BJP’s aggressive campaign against the Congress party was a big factor in the unprecedented defeat of Congress party in all the four Hindi speaking States. Apart from the sky-rocketing prices of potato and onion, the last minutes hike in the price of diesel and cooking gas was an ill-thought decision that turned the middle-class voters away from the Congress in all these four States.
Two, Instead of counting upon its own strength, the congress party kept demonising and in turn, maximising the image of Modi at national level. That was one factor which kept him relevant throughout the election campaign. More than himself, Modi enjoyed the heap of ridicule thrown upon him by a section of Congress leaders ‘ad nauseum’ which kept him on the front page of media almost every day. This was a strategy which made him the talking point and increased his popularity even up to small towns and villages but drained Congress.
Modi and his team carefully chose those subjects which not only touched the daily life of a common man on the road but also created a huge amount of disgust and aversion against the UPA government at the centre. Modi’s media managers and speech writers kept inventing catchy idioms and phrases for him to fire at every political meeting across the country and invited choicest of epithets and adjectives from the Congress spokespersons as well as senior leaders like Digvijaya Singh, P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and a few others including the Prime Minister. It was a very clever move to engage the Prime Minister himself who should have kept away. At the end of the day, team Modi succeeded in dragging and drubbing the Prime Minister repeatedly.
Modi chose his targets carefully and he kept lampooning the Gandhis and the Prime Minister regularly and that helped him in engaging and enlightening the cluster of undecided and floating voters in all these states and who made a big difference on the polling day. That was seen in a larger turn out of voters . In retrospect, while a section of Congress leaders enjoyed making Modi a favourite punching bag, they dragged their own party into a pit and wasted more time and energy in Modi bashing than talking about the achievements of UPA government and concentrating upon Congress party’s own strong points.
Three, the obsession of a few senior Congress leaders about depiction of Narendra Modi as a monster of Godhra carnage in Gujarat in 2002 also had some impact on the majority Hindu voters. Many Congress leaders always tried to rake up this issue without realizing that the Congress party’s own record in Gujarat earlier and other States in the past on this count had been more chequered and it would actually consolidate the majority Hindu community in favour of BJP. This was a move which helped Modi talk about consolidating the 70 percent Hindu majority of the resurgence of RSS and BJP cadre and galvanize them on the road. Modi’s statement in Jammu on the abrogation of Article 370 just a few days before Delhi Assembly polls was a carefully calculated gamble which paid off as more than 6 lakh Hindus who had migrated from J&K and settled in various parts of Delhi and elsewhere, came out in large numbers to vote for BJP.
Four, the Congress party’s Muslim appeasement policy also started getting knocked off by Modi’s aggressive campaign. Congress party Chieftains are still not prepared to concede that the party which has been so vociferously trying to be the champion of the minorities across the country, was given a cold shoulder since Bihar Assembly polls. If that was the case, then the Congress party would have won handsomely in Uttar Pradesh which did not happen. On the contrary, the Muslim voters preferred to pin their trust on Mulayam Singh and Mayawati in last two Assembly elections in UP. Even Digvijaya Singh’s outlandish statement on the Batla house encounter could not save the Congress party in 2012 Assembly polls in UP. Now the situation has come to such a pass that even leaders like Maulana Mahmood Madani have openly said that “the Congress party was trying to terrorise Muslims in the name of BJP”. No Congress leader had the gumption to ask its leaders for whom were they trying this appeasement policy when the Muslim vote bank had already slipped out of its hand long ago?
Five, the congress party still kept on persisting with the communal violence Bill which invite widespread furore from many Chief Ministers. This was yet another opportunity which Modi was waiting to pillory the UPA government and by writing a strong worded letter to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh against the proposed prevention of communal violence bill, Narendra Modi has kept his campaign momentum going. By broadly revealing the nature of his objections through a series of tweets, he not only succeeded in generating the political uproar he desired, but also put the UPA government on the defensive, forcing it to concede amendments in some key provisions. Modi also timed his letter to the Prime Minister sweetly and made its contents public a day after exit polls predicted a wipe out for the Congress in four key north Indian states.
The winter session of Parliament will only further weaken the UPA’s authority and diminish its political will for governance. It is anybody’s guess if the Congress leadership will have the appetite to suddenly push through this contentious piece of legislation in its current form. But as the government has only recently circulated a revised draft of the bill to the states and asked for comments to be sent “immediately,” there is apprehension among the BJP leaders that Modi’s concerns that “it appears that the Government of India is contemplating a hurried introduction of the Bill in the upcoming Winter Session of Parliament”, will be proved right. The UPA government had surprised the opposition in the monsoon session by suddenly introducing the food security bill and land acquisition bill towards the end of the session.
The BJP leaders have already cried foul alleging that the sole intention behind the Congress’s move to bring in the Communal Violence Bill was to create a so called ‘secular-communal’ divide, and send a message, particularly to the Muslim community, that they care for them so much, that they are even willing to write the provisions in such a way that it is heavily loaded against members of the majority community. This is something that Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley called “highly discriminatory since it discriminated against the majority and minority on basis of birth marks.” Modi and his team knows that dragging Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s name into this raging public debate makes the Congress uneasy. Also being seen as anti-majority brings the fear of majority community backlash since the party does not have the confidence of the minority community to the extent they would like.
Internal
The congress party fell back on the familiar style of soul searching and introspection after decimation and while Congress President Sonia Gandhi was more candid and dignified in admitting that the people’s anger was the main reason behind the party’s dismal performance, Rahul Gandhi was more audacious in promising to involve the Aam Admi in the working of the Congress.
The irony of his statement from the Vice- President of a party which has so far claimed to be wedded to the cause of Aam Admi, appears to have clearly escaped him. Yet he promised that he would do it better than AAP, in a way that would challenge the imagination of us ordinary Indians.
Senior Congress leader Sharad pawar was quick to take a pot-shot saying “the people of India do not like a weak leadership and prefer strong and decisive leaders”. He also attacked the influence of NGO over the UPA government, saying the “Jholawala gang” was putting forward unrealistic ideas before the government to further confuse it. It was a veiled attack on the working style of Rahul Gandhi and his core team members headed by Madhusudan Mistry (who used to run NGO earlier called Disha) and root-less wonders like Mohan Prakash, BK Hariparasd and few others who have been at the helm and managing the electioneering process over the last few years.
This round of poll verdict had thrown the congress party in a situation where it has a tough time explaining fall of party vice president and supposed youth icon Rahul Gandhi both as a leader and also as an organiser. The Congress still finds it difficult to explain why his rally in Delhi generated such poor response and why people didn’t even wait to hear him speak.
The Congress President also disclosed that She would name the Congress party’s Prime Ministerial candidate at appropriate time. However, political pundits interpret it in different ways. According to one political commentator, “Rahul Gandhi should follow his promise by insisting that the PM candidate be chosen in an open election in which every primary member of the party has a vote. On the other hand, if the Congress President anoints Rahul Gandhi in the same way as she did with Manmohan Singh, then the voters of India would know that the Congress has had no real change of heart.”
Another note political commentator said that “Rahul Gandhi needs to do something dramatic to restore people’s faith in him. It is no use invoking the merits of AAP as along as the Aam Admi in Congress has no say. Words have never been Rahul’s forte. Perhaps then, a radical action can save a fast sinking trajectory”. Even a few congress insiders are prepared to concede in private conversations that Rahul is turning into an object of voter apathy and they are worried that the party and Rahul need to re-discover their exact worth and charishma before plunging into LS 2014 poll preparations.
In this context, a few examples from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh are good enough for the Congress party to indulge in serious soul searching.
1. Finding credible leaders at the State and national level is going to be a huge challenge for the Congress party. It would have to start looking for them all over and repeating the same old war horses would serve no purpose. For example, Ashok gehlot in Rajastahn had no charishma, no mass appeal. His politics was conservative and parochial and he was caught in an image he found endearing but people considered him a facade. Little wonder then that he failed miserably against Vasundhara Raje and the Congress party could not even get 30 seats. There were many attempts to dislodge him but the blessing of a very senior leader always saved him from getting dislodged from the Chief Minister’s chair and consequently, the party had to face an unprecedented defeat.
2. The Congress leadership has always given preference to loyalty over credibility and gone on investing on failed leaders whether it was at AICC or in the State elections. No wonder then that the people have rejected them en masse. Had the congress leadership rejected them earlier, it would have had the opportunity to build new leaders at various levels. In the process, the entire party has sunk. The Congress party would find it extremely difficult to rise like a Phoenix from here in a span of just 150 days to spring a big surprise in forthcoming Lok Sabha polls.
3. The Congress party has also indulged in breeding sycophants. That could be seen in the appointment of various AICC general Secretaries who have failed to perform time and again and yet they continue to occupy prime positions. Be that Shakeel Ahmed, BK Hariparad, Mohan Prakash and a few more, they have maintained their loyalty to their bosses and Godfathers in the party and they remain a part of the Congress system.
4. The same is the case with many key persons having been foisted in various States on top positions in the party hierarchy because of their “proximity” to some senior leaders in Delhi than their own acceptability and credibility and popularity at local level. They were not able to connect with their own party workers and the result was disastrous and that kind of syndrome continues to haunt the Congress party even today.
5. There has been a big credibility deficit between what the Congress leadership has preached and practised. This was glaringly visible in the ticket distribution system. Policies were frames, principles were espoused, lectures on probity and integrity were delivered, detailed interviews were conducted and a high moral ground was occupied. At the end of the day however, the total gamut of ticket distribution became a laughing matter as many candidates who got tickets were wives, mothers and brothers of MLAs rotting in jails for murder and sex crimes and relatives of discards from previous elections. Obviously, voters punished this sham by defeating all of them.
6. The Congress party kept hitting BJP for its “Goebbelism” and Digvijaya Singh was the first to use this word against Modi and his media machine. There is no doubt the Modi machine has spent a fortune on advertising his achievements, both imagined and real. Crores were given to media houses for playing to the Modi propaganda. But the Congress party proved to be no match even as it has its government at the centre and its advertisement revenue was 13 times bigger than that of Modi.
7. The Congress party spokespersons have been the biggest irritant because of their mostly outlandish, ill-informed and quixotic quips and quotes. The batch of 36 odd spokespersons are even today, no match for even leaders like Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, forget Narendra Modi himself.
8. The Congress party just could not control local chieftains who were law unto themselves and they defeated their rivals within the party with a vengeance. This was very much evident both in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh to some extent. The Congress high command does not have the guts to show them the door.
Under these circumstances, the possibility of Congress party setting its house in order seems a tall order and there are strong indications that it would find it difficult to reach even 100 mark in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls if some radical measures at various levels were not carried out.
(Posted on December 10, 2013 @ 3.30pm)
(Ajay N Jha is a veteran journalist from both Print and Electronic media. He is Advisor to Prasar Bharti. The views expressed are his personal. His email id is Ajay N Jha <ajayjha30@gmail.com> )
The views expressed on the website are those of the Columnists/ Authors/Journalists / Correspondents and do not necessarily reflect the views of ENARADA.
