KS Muralidharan
The toughest job In India, is obviously Narendra Modi’s, running the Government as Prime Minister, fighting national and global challenges, some of them beyond his making such as the Ukraine war, supply side disruptions, global inflation, and the like. On top of it as if his hands are not full enough, he has to win so many elections for his party, right from Panchayat to Parliament!
But there is an even more tougher job than this — and that is to rescue the Congress party from facing oblivion!
Consider: The party which is mainly responsible for building the national capital’s infrastructure is today reduced to single digits (9) out of 250 seats in the MCD polls.
Gujarat reveals the depths it has descended to. From having nearly 42% vote share in the 2017 assembly elections, the party virtually gift-wrapped nearly a third of its vote share to Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), lost another third to the BJP, and ended up with 16 seats out of 182, without even putting up a fight.
Rahul Gandhi, ran away from Gujarat to take out a Bharat Jodo Yatra in other parts of the country. This, despite knowing fully well that the AAP led by the super-ambitious Arvind Kejriwal was sweating it out to poach its vote bank.
In the country’s largest State, Uttar Pradesh, it is reduced to a fringe party battling for supremacy not with the BJP or SP or BSP, but with the independents in the fray, and even then not win more than them! For those who don’t remember, the GOP won a grand total of 2 out of 403 seats in the assembly!
But is anyone surprised by its relentless decline? If anyone is surprised, it must be Rahul Gandhi, if you go by his antics, imitating Narendra Modi’s temple runs and surprising everyone by the new lows in his thinking.
Being Rahul is getting more and more tough, with every election. He campaigned in Gujarat in 2017 and the Congress lost, though respectably. He then figured that without him helming the campaign, his party might actually do better. But it got downsized to low double digits.
His strategy to not campaign and win, did work in Himachal Pradesh, but obviously he can’t take credit for it, by saying he didn’t campaign and so won HP for his party!
Going forward, the party’s decline is only a matter of when and not if. And that timing of its decline will be decided by how fast the AAP will take over its space.
That’s what has happened in the MCD polls. AAP got only 8 seats over the required 126 majority mark, but it got there because it ate into the Congress votes. The BJP did better than what most exit polls figured, and even increased its vote share, while getting 104 and put up a valiant show, considering it had its back to the wall with a15-year-old incumbency.
Now, the next challenge in Karnataka can potentially prove to be the last nail in the Congress party’s coffin, if does not get its act together and reinvent itself in a more attractive avatar.
Just when it looked like the Congress has the best chance in Karnataka given the lacklustre performance of the ruling BJP, the decimation of the party in Gujarat has come as come as an evil omen for it.
All political analysts are agreed that there can be no better chance for the Congress than in Karnataka as the BJP government is facing a lot of heat on multiple fronts. The people’s disenchantment against it is palpable and the various charges against the Bommai government have confused the people, at best, or disillusioned them at worst.
But post-Gujarat, and MCD elections, the voters will be more inclined to believe that the Congress will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Consider: While in Gujarat the Congress’ 42% vote was 5% less than the BJP in the previous state polls, in Karnataka it got 36% vote share which was 2% more than the BJP, though it ended up with lesser seats than the BJP.
So, conventional logic will tell you that with 2% more vote than the BJP in the previous polls, it should be romping home, riding on the visible disenchantment of the people against the BJP.
Plus, there are more factors working in its favour, if only it can milk them to its benefit.
Consider the optics of having a Vokkaliga as the party president in D.K. Shivakumar and a backward class leader as its main electoral charioteer, in former chief minister, Siddaramaiah, which can be diced to work in its favour.
It can realistically work to split the Vokkaliga Gowda vote bank and thus weaken the JD(S), the traditional home of the Gowdas.
It can strengthen its hold on the backward classes, with Scheduled Caste veteran, Mallikarjun Kharge as its national president.
All of this makes it a winning horse to bet on against the BJP, and so you can trust the minority votes to fall on its lap, almost in entirety.
With so much that can go for it in its favour, one would expect that all that the Congress has to do to defeat the BJP, is to wait for the voter to turn up at the booth, and get the vote counted!
But hold your winning horse. This is precisely where the Congress does what it does best — commit suicide.
Blame it on being in winking distance of power, or supersized egos, but there are any number of factions working at cross-purposes against each other.
If you go by popular perception, there are many things at play that queer the picture for Congress.
First and foremost, party president, DK Shivakumar does not see eye to eye with Siddaramaiah, its only popular, mass leader.
But here’s the irony or the jinx, depending on how you want to see it.
While DKS can win his seat without even canvassing, his ability to win votes for the party across the State is untested and not even his diehard supporters believe he can win the State mainly on his own appeal.
While Siddaramaiah is the most popular leader across the State, he is in search of a safe for himself and not even his diehard supporters believe he can win from anywhere in the State.
To make things worse, there are many foxes and foes within.
The Jarkiholis cannot get along with DKS, while that old warhorse, G Parameswara, has not forgotten how Siddaramaiah plotted his defeat in the previous polls and probably lost him his chief ministership.
Another SC veteran, Muniyappa is at loggerheads with Siddaramaiah, and will do anything possible to see that he is defeated or at least, defanged.
And what about Mallikarjun Kharge? He might well be wishing that in the tug of war between Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar, he can become the compromise CM candidate, given that he is the tallest Dalit leader in the party — and remember, this is his last chance to realize his lifetime dream.
In the midst of all this, things will go dicier if the Gandhis decide to campaign actively in the State! The Gandhis now are now recognized as the unofficial underwriters of a Modi victory, given their optics, antics and silly brand of politics.
Yes, the party won Rajasthan in the previous elections, but the credit for it is mostly due to Sachin Pilot. Like how the win in Chattisgarh is attributed to Bhupesh Bagel and the anti-incumbency against the BJP government there.
So where does that leave the Congress? Hoping that the BJP in Karnataka will continue to mess up to an extent where even the storied and tried, tested and trusted Modi Factor is not enough to bail it out.
This, is like hoping for eternity, as an end in itself, and ending up at a dead end.
Even the worst of Modi haters will now acknowledge that Modi is and will always be the X Factor in any election from Panchayat to Parliament. He may not win always, but if you have to neutralize him, you have to change the game, and dare to play it against him. And then pray the tide will turn.
This is the only way left for the Congress. This may not guarantee the Congress a win, but at least it can genuinely hope to win and be a player.
Yes, the Congress can reinvent itself to be a serious contender. But for that, it has to alter its newly acquired DNA.
Here’s the laundry list of Don’ts: Don’t blindly appease the minority community and the leftists. Don’t carry a love affair with the tukde tukde gang. Don’t oppose anything and everything about Modi. Don’t badmouth the Prime Minister. Don’t have sponsored temple runs. Don’t indulge in silly antics. And don’t embrace the widely perceived anti-nationals.
Now for the list of what it has to do. Be a fighter like Indira Gandhi. Accept your historic flaws, boldly forsake your ill-gotten baggage of the past, shed your old skin, and acquire a new one for new India. Take up issues that genuinely concern the common man, and bring all communities together, which can resonate with the people.
And lastly, sorry but really and truly, shed the Gandhis. And their puppets. Or retain them merely as family silver for ornamental value. Infuse fresh blood from the grassroots to the very top. Play the patient game. And after all this, if it still doesn’t work, repeat the exercise one more time. It’s time will come. If not in power, but at least as a credible, responsible and respectable opposition. But after that, it is just one election away from winning Delhi.
The Congress has to revive for the sake of Indian democracy, for the alternative of a clutch of regional parties with diverse and no unifying interests, whose chance of getting closer to power is only through a lucky draw or a game of numbers, is much worse, as we saw in the mid-1990s.
Maybe Rahul Gandhi should make a quiet call to Amit Shah and sincerely seek his counsel on how to respectably win over the opposition space and not be booted out to the opposition benches! And who knows, Amit Shah may share his gyan, for this will also help the BJP to clear the endless nuisance from the regional satraps!