Congress fails to script story of Oppn unity

Rasheed Kidwai

Senior journalist and author

As the year 2021 inches closer to an end, the story of the Congress and Opposition unity remains a non-starter. December 2021 is remarkably different from December 2017, when the Congress had put up a spirited fight in the Gujarat Assembly polls, or December 2018, when it had humbled the mighty BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

Even in December 2019, despite the near total annihilation in the Lok Sabha polls, followed by Rahul Gandhi’s resignation, there was hope that the leadership issue of the grand old party would finally get settled.

Nothing of that sort happened. Instead, Sonia Gandhi, 75, is continuing as the ‘interim’ AICC chief, while the list of in-house dissenters is growing. The latest to join is veteran warhorse Ghulam Nabi Azad, who has been a part of the group of dissenters, aka G23. He has been holding parallel political meetings in Jammu and Kashmir. The former J&K Chief Minister has had the tags of a ‘rootless wonder’ and a Nehru-Gandhi family loyalist. But at the age of 72, Azad is trying to prove his detractors wrong and, perhaps, chalk out a course that was adopted by Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Jagan Mohan Reddy and many others.

Rahul Gandhi, instead of sensing the drift and sense of despondency, is still looking at the elusive electoral success to stage a comeback. The goalposts of the Kerala or Assam Assembly polls have been shifted to Punjab and Uttarakhand, two poll-bound states. By early March 2022, Rahul’s managers are hoping that the Congress story would start looking brighter.

If the non-Congress Opposition, namely, the Samajwadi Party and its allies, succeed in edging out the Yogi Adityanath regime in Uttar Pradesh, the Opposition will get ready to go for the kill.

At one level, the story of the Opposition unity, rather disunity, is highly exaggerated and part of a hidden, politically motivated subtext that is being dished out: that the Narendra Modi government may have its weaknesses, but the Opposition is not capable of governance or that it cannot be trusted in serious matters, such as national security and economy.

The Opposition, instead of countering it, is not helping its cause. The discord among the Opposition ranks — such as Trinamool versus Congress, Trinamool versus Aam Aadmi Party, Congress versus Rashtriya Janata Dal and Priyanka Gandhi versus Akhilesh Yadav — was on full display during the recently held byelections as also in the run-up to the upcoming polls in Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Uttar Pradesh.

In the winter session of Parliament, too, the division among the Opposition parties was so visible that the non-BJP-NDA parties could not hold even a single meeting of like-minded parties which would have highlighted the Modi government’s abject flip-flop on the farm laws.

The Lok Sabha polls are due in May 2024. Therefore, the Opposition is guided by its immediate goals, which are opportunism, one-upmanship and quest for success, even in a tiny state like Goa where the Trinamool, AAP and the Congress are jostling for supremacy in a 40-member state Assembly against the BJP.

From Tripura to Goa to Haryana, the victor of the Bengal Assembly polls, Mamata Banerjee, is on the prowl. The Trinamool leader is on a poaching spree and even willing to accept the number two status (as was the case in the Tripura civic polls) as long as non-BJP players like the Congress or AAP (Goa) can be relegated to the third and fourth spots.

This bizarre approach may be unsettling for the grand old party, but it has brought glee in the BJP and ruling NDA ranks. For 2024, Mamata appears to be an effective insurance policy even though she remains stoutly anti-BJP.

The Congress has to share the blame. After more than a year of Ahmed Patel’s death, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have not propped up an effective political manager to reach out to the Opposition, hold backroom parleys and keep the façade of Opposition unity.

If Mamata can be accused of grandstanding and getting ambitious, the Congress also has to discard any notion of greatness. After all, Bengal has become the third state after Delhi (2015 and 2020) and Andhra Pradesh (2019) where the party has scored a zero in the state Assembly polls.

Had ‘Mamata for UPA’ got a nod from Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi could have focused more on Parliament and organisational matters while Priyanka Gandhi could have concentrated on her role as a campaigner in the company of Sachin Pilot, Bhupesh Baghel etc.

The Congress, rather the Gandhis, have been ignoring the non-NDA parties’ bid to revive the UPA, which has been dormant since 2014. Chandrashekhar Rao of the TRS, the Shiv Sena, NCP and Trinamool have been consistently raising the issue of a federal front, but 10, Janpath has remained silent. Perhaps, in Sonia’s scheme of things, the idea of an umbrella of Opposition parties is best suited when Rahul Gandhi is politically in a position to influence it.

Rahul is not a contender for the top job in 2024, but the Gandhis would want him to have a say in who should head any alternative government during the 18th Lok Sabha and play a Sonia-like role of 2004-14.

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