by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
If ants are the first to sense
where the sugar crystals are positioned, politicians of India are the quickest
to set themselves navigating towards the party likeliest to win. With 10 weeks,
or so, to go till the Lok Sabha election,
the quinquennial migration in
politics is gathering momentum; as expected, the BJP under the banner of
Narendra Modi is the destination of every smart mover.
Almost every non-Congress
constituent of the UPA is restive and is itching to join the Modi bandwagon,
with minimum collateral damage, of course. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata
Banerjee, who flaunts her secular card all too often, addressed a huge rally in
Kolkata last week in which she lambasted Congress, BJP and CPM but pulled
punches on Modi, nor did she commit in public that she’d not support a Modi-led
government if such a situation could arise. The studied absence from her speech
of such a commitment disheartened a section of her supporters, but “Didi” as
she is called obviously had her antennae active. On the other hand, the
National Conference, which is in alliance with Congress in Jammu & Kashmir,
is deftly stepping out of it as its Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, has played
his state’s ‘special status’ card to take on the Centre. The NC-Congress
alliance in Srinagar
Also unstable is the 10-year-long
troubled ‘living-in’ between Congress and Sharad Pawar’s NCP, at both the
Centre and the Maharashtra capital of Mumbai.
The Pawar-Modi meeting Modi may not have taken place. But that hardly eclipses
the fact that Pawar has long since been a persona
non gratawith Congress and he’d have joined hands with Modi long since but
for the bitter reality, as far as he is concerned, that BJP has a trusted ally
in Shiv Sena in the state, and NCP and Shiv Sena are arch rivals in regional
politics. How the paradox of their mutual exclusivity gets resolved, if at all,
is to be seen. But, either way, Congress is nobody’s choice in the richest
state of the country. The antipathy towards Congress is now spreading to fringe
players and to civil servants, social workers and even the entertainment
industry.
Inching close to BJP is Maharashtra farmers’ leader Raju Shetty who got elected
to the Lok Sabha with Congress support. The secularist RPI’s Ramdas Athawale is
shaking hands with untouchable communalist BJP. But what came as a bomb shell
was the news of Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh giving up his job to
join BJP to be a Lok Sabha candidate. As if it was not enough, Bappi Lahiri,
the weighty Bollywood crooner and composer, announced that he too was joining
BJP. If rumours are correct, Lahiri may get a ‘lotus’ ticket from Bengal , a state where a strong BJP current is felt for
the first time. Congress president Sonia Gandhi has upped the ante by slamming
Modi as one who “sows poison”, but even some of her party leaders privately
comment that her earlier description of Modi as “merchant of death” yielded
negative result for her party, and that the contest between Congress and Modi’s
BJP has gone way beyond rhetoric. It is now to be decided almost entirely by
the reliability of the person elected to take
charge of the government after the election.
It is this test that Congress vice
president Rahul Gandhi flunked in his first televised interview in 10 years,
conducted by Arnab Goswami and aired on Times Now last week. In the hour-long
interview, he slipped up all too often as he shot off remarks without
anticipating the counter-questions that might be triggered. It is this lack of
ability to think on one’s feet—an essential trait for leadership—that pushed
him into the mire of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, an issue which is still as
live, if not more, as the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat .
Then he made remarks about the relative culpabilities of the governments in the
two carnages which are hardly grounded on facts. All his remarks did was to
scratch an old scar on the eve of a national poll.
However, more than Rahul’s
self-goal on 1984, it was his tendency to avoid the nitty-gritty of governance
issues and to hide behind impressive but far-fetched ideals (“must change the
system”) that have brought to the minds of his party colleagues a sense of
impending doom and they are chosing Rajya Sabha route one by one. Rahul spoke
of changing the candidate selection system by introducing US-style primaries in
15 constituencies on an experimental basis, without realising that
institutionalising inner-party democracy should have taken place much earlier,
not weeks before election. Congress, like every other party with the exception
of communists, perhaps, is feudal at its core and nobody would dare challenge
an acknowledged ‘heavyweight’ being nominated. Besides, such grandiloquence on
candidates being vetted by party workers is hardly consistent with a party
surviving on dynastic succession of leaders for more than half a century. As
Rahul’s list of the 15 trial constituencies became known, with Delhi
It is evident that, despite a
“NaMo wave” now gathering up, BJP still has roadblocks ahead with many strong
regional leaders themselves aspiring to lead a coalition government. Tamil Nadu
chief minister Jayalalitha is known to nurse such an aspiration, and regional
leaders are using it as a lever to manipulate it as drawbridge against Modi.
But, after jacking up Rahul Gandhi
at the helm, Congress has invited a crisis of leadership. While he promises to
change the system, the party wishes if he is able to stop Modi if he himself
cannot climb up to the ladder. The AAP, propelled by Rahul, has failed to
deliver in 40 days of its rule in Delhi
Like ants, politicians also
sense where sugar crystals
are positioned.
They too are navigating
(The author
is National Editor of
Lokmat group of newspapers
at Delhi
