The Congress is also better equipped than BJP to
mobilize its voters on the day of election. Modi can still come to power in Delhi, but, for that,
there has to be a tsunami of anti-Congress sentiments. It seemed possible in
most of 2012. Now it doesn’t.
The three-day chintan shibir, or conclave, ended this Sunday in Jaipur leaving plenty of smiling hoteliers. In a year of collapsing European economy and jobless growth in the US, the Congress delegates and media crew made up for the depleting numbers of foreign tourists, filling up over the weekend nearly every room in most of the city’s 43 top-of-the-line hotels. Also to smile all the way back home were the party’s 1,200 delegates.
Their mood was quite different even a couple of months
back, when years of being bombarded with corruption charges, an economy that
began floundering since a “Bengali Napoleon” had stormed the North Block in
2009, and the “triple whammy” of Narendra Modi’s third consecutive victory in the
Gujarat assembly election, made them visit their astrologer oftener than the
party office. Of course the conclave had its share of lighter moments, the best
being the Twitter joke: “Sonia Gandhi said, ‘now we must look at our
weaknesses.’ All eyes allegedly turned to Manmohan Singh, A K Antony and Rahul
Gandhi who were sitting in a row”.
However, the fact is that nobody expected lots of
ideas to be churned at the conclave. Some of the ideas that did toss up were
either pessimistic or drab. Kamal Nath said the Congress should aim at
alliances post poll, not pre-poll, thus venting the Rahul Gandhi view that the
party should try hard on its own. Ironically, even Sonia Gandhi was averse to alliances
in 1999. The drabness of the conclave was evident in the orchestrated paeans to
Rahul Gandhi. In the Congress’ dynastic setup, his succession is automatic. The
party’s unwillingness to step out of the dynastic format and experiment with
inner-party democracy may be a subject of ridicule to others—and it’s also true
that Rahul Gandhi is not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree—but nobody
questions the inevitability of his choice. Therefore, there was not much point
in beating drum about getting him as the 2014 prime ministerial
candidate—unless some people relished to watch frowns on the face of P.
Chidambaram, a prime minister in waiting or even Manmohan Singh who is keen to
lead UPA-III (who knows?).
When it comes to homilies, Congress President Sonia
Gandhi is second to none. Before retiring to her Raj Mahal Palace Hotel suite,
she advised young party members to lead austere lives. However, at least one of
her remarks was way beyond the usual politics-speak in its poignancy and
simplicity. She reminded the delegates that the Congress is still a party with
“pan Indian presence”. The relevance of this observation is to be found in the
2009 Lok Sabha tallies of the two largest parties, the Congress and the BJP. In
that election, it was only in four rather marginal states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim
and Tripura that the Congress drew a blank, winning no seat. But the failure of
BJP are spectacular. It has no Lok Sabha member from such large states as
Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Orissa, apart from the hilly states of Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Nagaland, Mizoram and
Manipur. There was none from West Bengal and
Tripura either. It scored a symbolic victory in the south with 19 seats in Karnataka.
Following B. Yedurappa’s revolt, the Deccan
plateau seems closed to the party again. The BJP rings no bell whatsoever in
large chunks of the country. In that sense, it will not be inaccurate call it a
regional party, though its turf includes most of the so-called Hindi heartland.
It is big, but not big enough to form government in Delhi, unless it has a non-controversial
leader who can attract many regional leaders towards him post-poll, like Atal
Behari Vajpayee did in the 1990’s.
The Congress president is perhaps gambling on the
BJP’s lack of preparedness to make a national pitch. A large section of the BJP
dislikes Narendra Modi, its most ambitious leader, partly out of envy and also
for the fear that, if he is projected as the party’s candidate for prime
minister’s office, his reported (never proved) complicity in the Gujarat 2002
riots will cause most regional parties to close their doors. But the party’s
other ranks have high hopes for Modi, and it is pushing him to take the 2014
challenge seriously. The RSS has its own reservations of Modi irrespective of compatibility
on ideological front.
Rahul Gandhi may not be a match for Modi, but the
latter does not have the undivided backing of even his relatively localized
party while the former enjoys the backing of everyone, from courtier to foot
soldier. It was only once, in 1998, that the recently anointed dynastic
Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, had failed to galvanize the party; but that
could be because there was no clarity on who’d lead the government if the party
won the poll. However, Congress dynasts have always commanded full party support
on their installation: Jawaharlal Nehru in 1928; Indira Gandhi, when Lal
Bahadur Shastri’s untimely death in 1966 paved the way for her to become prime
minister; in 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi’s claim to his slain mother’s seat was
accepted by every single soul in the party. Rahul Gandhi’s rise will be no
exception. Unfortunately for Modi, if he comes the PM candidate, BJP may not
rise to a man.
The Congress is also better equipped than BJP to
mobilize its voters on the day of election, due to the grand old party having
at least some supporters in each of India’s 425 towns and about five
thousand rural blocks. Election watchers in the US have gone to town eulogizing
President Barack Obama for his Internet-based campaign to get his minority
voters out of home on the polling day. But it was possible because his
Democratic Party has its supporters everywhere in the country. And so does the
Congress in India
like no other party.
Modi can still come to power in Delhi, but, for that, there has to be a
tsunami of anti-Congress sentiments. It seemed possible in most of 2012. Now it
doesn’t.
