Congress fails to tom-tom its own success

The Congress leadership has missed an opportunity to showcase the Bhilwara model. Rajasthan and Punjab, under Congress rule, were the first states to announce the lockdown. While testing for Covid-19 at the national level has been slow, the Rajasthan Government screened lakhs of people in the textile town of Bhilwara, earning all-round praise.

Conciliatory note: After PM Modi spoke to her and Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi went public with five ‘concrete’ suggestions.

Rasheed Kidwai

Senior Journalist & Author

Rasheed Kidwai
Senior Journalist & Author

Taking a cue from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to engage Opposition leaders in the fight against the coronavirus, the Congress is working on the ‘unity and struggle’ model to support the Centre’s resolve to fight the pandemic.

The Congress strategy has its own flaws and initial failures due to leadership vacuum, faulty communication and the inability to showcase the Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh governments’ localised strategies to combat the Covid menace. However, on a broader note, Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi have adopted individual styles to shape the party’s tactics.

True to her style and as interim chief of the Congress, Sonia has been acting and sounding conciliatory towards the Modi regime. Hours after the Prime Minister spoke to her and other Opposition leaders, including Dr Manmohan Singh, Sonia went public with five ‘concrete’ suggestions.

In doing so, Sonia’s response has been guided by past precedent when during a period of national crisis, the heads of rival political parties came together. Sonia is well aware how Atal Bihari Vajpayee was instrumental in shaping her as an astute politician. Vajpayee was the PM in June 2001 when his government chose Sonia as the leader of an Indian delegation to the US.

As a young MP, Vajpayee had attracted the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s attention when he sought a special session of Parliament in the middle of the Sino-India war. Nehru conceded and debated the issue even though he was on the defensive. When Bangladesh was created in 1971, Vajpayee described Indira Gandhi as Abhinav Chandi Durga. Three days after PV Narasimha Rao's death, Vajpayee, on December 26, 2004, made an important disclosure, crediting Narasimha Rao as the ‘true father’of India’s nuclear programme’. Vajpayee had fought bitter political battles with Rajiv Gandhi over Bofors, Shah Bano, Ayodhya etc but when the former PM was killed in a bomb explosion at Sriperembudur in May 1991, Vajpayee called journalist Karan Thapar to disclose that when Rajiv was the PM, he came to know that he was suffering from an acute kidney ailment and required specialised treatment abroad. Rajiv included Vajpayee in India’s delegation to the UN so that he could use the opportunity to get the treatment he needed.

On another occasion, Vajpayee chose to name Sonia Gandhi while speaking in New York in 2002. He recalled that when Parliament was attacked by terrorists on December 13, 2001, Sonia Gandhi had phoned him and asked: “Where are you, are you okay? I am okay, are you okay too?” Sonia was the Leader of the Opposition then. “This is the greatness of Indian democracy,” Vajpayee told his audience. “We have differences in our politics, but the whole world also believes that India is moving unitedly ahead.”

If Sonia is working on a projection of India moving ahead unitedly, her son and former AICC chief Rahul Gandhi misses no opportunity to exhibit the Modi government’s ‘shortcomings’ in dealing with the coronavirus. Rahul’s February 12 tweet in which he had drawn the government’s attention to the crisis, has constantly been retweeted and referred to by the Congress leaders. Rahul has constantly been highlighting job loss and plight of daily wage earners, farmers etc.

AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has been taking the middle ground, often supporting Modi and Yogi Adityanath governments but insisting on more and more coronavirus tests. She wrote to various religious institutions pledging Congress support in Uttar Pradesh in the fight against the virus.

The Congress leadership has, however, missed an opportunity of sorts in showcasing the Bhilwara model. Rajasthan and Punjab, under Congress rule, were the first states to announce the lockdown. While testing for Covid-19 at the national level has been slow, the Congress government in Rajasthan screened lakhs of people in the textile town of Bhilwara, earning all-round praise. Even Union Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba asked other affected states to adopt the Bhilwara model. Similarly, the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress regime in Chhattisgarh started by approaching each family early to record their travel history and symptoms and quarantined over 77,000 suspects. As per a report, nine of 10 patients have already recovered in the past two weeks.

Sonia’s suggestion to put a ban on TV, print and online media ads by the Narendra Modi government for two years (with the exception of coronavirus-related information) amounts to a political googly, inviting instant wrath of media organisations. It remains to be seen how Modi, considered to be a darling of the media, would react to this particular suggestion.

The Association of Radio Operators for India (AROI) and News Broadcasters Association (NBA) have strongly opposed Sonia’s suggestion. The NBA’s statement states, “At a time, when media personnel, without fearing for their lives, are doing their national duty, by disseminating news on the pandemic, a statement like this from the Congress president is highly demoralising.”

Sources close to Sonia, however, defend her move pointing that the Congress has not been anti-media, but is against the manner in which government ads are distributed. Moreover, public money, during a national crisis, needs to be used judiciously. Sonia has asked for scrapping of Rs 20,000 crore ‘self-indulgent beautification project’ in the heart of Delhi and the suspension of official foreign tours.

For the past few years, Congress-media relations have seen a nosedive with the grand old party refusing to send representatives to TV news debates. Many senior Congress leaders accuse a section of TV news channels of propagating and manufacturing ‘agenda’ that is detrimental to the Opposition, minorities and the under-privileged. In fact, Sonia has, directly and through intermediaries, tried to prevail upon media houses with whom she had a personal rapport, to adopt a more nuanced and balanced coverage, without success.

Incidentally, the Congress has a history of treating freedom of speech with a qualifier. The Jawaharlal Nehru government was quick to link issues like ‘public order’ and ‘ties with friendly states’ with Article 19 of the Constitution. Nehru, otherwise a first class democrat, had a dim view of the media. A quote from Time magazine, dated May 28, 1951, illustrates this: “It has become a matter of the deepest distress to me to see the way in which the less responsible news sheets are being conducted... not injuring me or this House much, but poisoning the minds of the younger generation.”