Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
The Bharatiya Janata Party has done well in what has generally been seen as a curtain-raiser for the big show in 2014 when the entire nation, not just five States that went to the polls these past two weeks or so, elects the new House of the People, electing men and women who will take charge of the country, replacing one of the most pusillanimous governments we have know these first seven plus decades of our democracy. Much as one fears for the future, given the level to which our politics have sunk, one can only hope that for the sake of our future, the new rulers, who emerge at the end of the exercise ahead in the next six months, are not as bad a letdown as the second UPA, led by Dr. Manmohan Singh, the meek don pushed into the Prime Ministerial chair by Sonia Gandhi, the Congress President and UPA chief.
The tragedy of the Manmohan dispensation has been that it raised high hopes in its first incarnation, UPA one, only to deceive in the end. The BJP by all available accounts has done well for itself and for Narendra Modi’s chances of leading the party to a win at the general elections. The BJP has done well in four States, three of these with handsome mandates two, bordering on landslides. In Delhi it barely fell short of a majority leaving the City-States future uncertain. If the BJP has done well in Delhi the Aam Admi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, the Babu-turned anti-graft evangelist (protégé of Anna Hazare) has done even better. So much so that the AAP may well upset the calculations of the Pandit and the layman alike during the 2014 elections.
Starting from scratch it has captured almost a third of the popular vote, denied BJP a majority and decimated Chief Minister Sheila Dikhshit’s Congress. The AAP has already girded up its loins for 2014 in 380 districts, more than half the country including all big towns and cities. If it replicates even marginally its achievements in Delhi it could well pick up a substantially large number of Lok Sabha seats to thwart the political majors’ search for an absolute majority. The AAP I had convinced myself once was being a mere dog in the manger, I am admit. I was wrong. The AAP is for real.
I don’t know how long and how seriously it will continue to espouse in the future the causes that have earned it widespread acceptance among the youth and the urban middle class but just now it appears set to make a dent wherever it chooses to put up its candidates.
The ground work, as I said, has been done in 380 districts and judging by the prevailing mood it should not be difficult for it to pick anywhere up to 30 to 40 parliamentary seats next year. That should put the fear of God in the principal parties, the BJP in particular, which believes its Modi bandwagon is unstoppable. AAP’s all-out war on corruption, crony capitalism and profiteering corporates may require Modi and his resourceful managers to tailor his message suitably, one that keeps the corporate and business happy and at the same time does not alienate the rest of the people. Unlike in Modi’s Gujarat, where the focus has entirely been on business and industry the party will have to shift it somewhat to highlight its concern for economic and social welfare programmers, the kind practiced by its other Chief Minister Mr. Shivraj Singh Chauhan of Madhya Pradesh. Chauhan’s achievements have rarely received the kind of attention that Modi’s Gujarat has. The Congress Party has hardly any time left to put its house in order. For one thing, the sooner it realizes that Rahul is not Indira or even Rajiv or Sonia, the better it would be for it. He must be the poorest of communicators. Worse still, he seems to be talking down to his audiences. In this he is even-handed, say, between the poor and the powerful. While entrenched Congress leaders are known to resist change, the increasing in-house skepticism seems to be more than a case of old guard vs. the young Turks battle. Most Congress leaders will not admit it but they do realize that Rahul’s style is out of sync with the ground realities.
The Congress Vice President’s personal team, good humouredly called the Aliens, want to do mass politics through laptops, just as the wiz kids who had initially led Rajiv Gandhi up the garden path. Rahul’s choice, outside his coterie, has often fallen on political lightweights such as a Madhusudhan Mistri, a Mohan Prakash, a Sanjay Nirupam or a C.P. Joshi, for key organizational and electoral assignments. None of them has commanded much respect within the party let alone party workers at the grass roots. You have the entrenched leaders, some of them barely able to walk, adamantly refusing to change.
The Congress Party has conveyed no impression of having understood the pervasive anger with its record in power. Rahul Gandhi in what was hailed by sycophants as a great revelation spoke post-the electoral debacle about his having listened to the people’s message with his heart as well as his mind but in the same breath saw the results as a cue that he should continue with pet projects of restructuring the party, promising to bring about changes that even the voters could not imagine! A more glaring example of Rahul’s political naiveté you would find hard to get.
Instead of listening with humility, analyzing the losses and accepting how badly the party had erred, the party top-brass is content with rapidly working out the verdict and spin out a web of justifications and rationalizations. The question is not what the party could have done away with but how it could have reformed itself but did not. The Congress has been its own Chief destroyer and Rahul’s presence at the helm, I am afraid, has been no help.
The results of what the media has come to refer to as the semi-finals are only a consequence of dysfunction. While Rahul Gandhi has been put in charge of the party he seems remarkably unconcerned about things like elections, preferring to gaze into the distance and talk “sagely” of systemic transformation. He rarely takes the lead on policy matters or even communicating his views; he seems busy charting his own lonely path, relying only on his handpicked coterie of whiz kids.
The Government and party have largely been out of sync and cannot script and own a common story. The dissonance between the party’s public positions and the UPA’s decisions have repeatedly embarrassed the Prime Minister, slowed the Government’s reflexes and diluted its authority and credibility. Sheila Dikshit, after her massive defeat, spoke of not having received support from the party for her campaign; UPA ally Sharad Pawar, the Maharashtra strongman, has publicly accused the UPA of indecisive leadership.
Even after two terms in office Sonia Gandhi and the Government led by her party has not been able to put together a narrative to engage and persuade the voters. It has singularly failed to sell even some of its good stories. The instinctive Congress reaction to charges of corruption is to tar the accusers with the same brush. And it is not particularly difficult to exchange corruption charges in today’s political environment. That leaves you nowhere.
Follow our WhatsApp channel