In search of an Opposition
At half time — two-and-a-half years after Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister for the second time — the focus, strangely, is on the performance and quality of the Opposition’s leadership and not that of the government’s. The most frequently asked political question is about Rahul Gandhi’s ability to take on Modi. But the real question is often left out: Is the Congress on its own capable of taking on the BJP, which has assumed an all-India presence without, obviously, an inclusive pan-Indian character? It is easy to blame Rahul Gandhi but difficult to understand that it was not the late Ahmed Patel’s backroom manoeuvres that took the party to power in 2004. In fact, not a single person in the Congress believed that it would form the government, just as nobody in the Vajpayee cabinet foresaw a crushing defeat and a complete rejection of its India Shining campaign. The Congress had 145 seats in the Lok Sabha, just seven more than the BJP’s tally, when it got to lead the country. So the question is — what clicked then and what fails now?
Indians love those who renounce what is theirs, rightly or otherwise. It could be a gamechanger if Rahul declares that he will not be the PM candidate.
The biggest imponderable was the needless splitting of Andhra Pradesh, ensuring that a leader of Rajasekhara Reddy’s calibre will never emerge from a big state. If Mamata Banerjee was only insulted and forced out of the party by Sitaram Kesri and Co., Jagan Mohan Reddy was kept in jail for 16 months by his father’s colleagues. The Congress party instituting a corruption case against the family of its own mighty satrap, who won about 35 seats out of the total 206 in 2009, is a mystery that needs to be unravelled before Congressmen seriously talk about reaching out to its old friends. It was the so-called old guard that threw Mamata out of the party and Jagan into jail, so they probably have the answers to the question why the Congress has got reduced to a small all-India party, incapable of splitting or rejuvenating itself to create something new and vibrant.
Much of the Congress’s present-day troubles are legacy issues of a party that thrived on the insecurity of the minorities and on cynical manipulation of caste identities. This was swept aside by a grand narrative of hope and change in 2014, which has since regressed into a bigger plot to turn Hindus into a vote bank. Every Opposition attempt at mobilising the minorities or energising caste identities is met with a bigger counterattack from the BJP to turn Hindu masses into a vote block assimilating caste identities. When the Jats of western UP began asserting their separate peasant caste identity, identifying themselves with similar groups in Punjab and Haryana as a result of the mobilisation against the farm laws, the BJP government responded by repealing the farm laws and appealing to the Hindu sentiments in a grand show of over-the-top religiosity at Varanasi. The ploy might be too late to work in the BJP’s favour during the UP elections, but the party’s strategy of managing important caste groups with the aim of electoral gains stands out in sharp relief.
While dealing with an election machine calibrating every move in caste and communal terms and the number of votes and seats that accrue as a result, what is required are satraps of the size of Jagan Mohan Reddy and Mamata Banerjee, who can assimilate caste and communal identities and create a political whole. They were forced to prove their mettle out on the streets all alone, seeking and getting endorsements from all communities. Why would they want to kowtow to a leadership that threw them out in the first place? So, Mamata is right when she says the UPA is dead and chooses not to join hands with the Congress in Parliament. And there is no point in trying to whisper conspiracy theories about Jagan’s relationship with the BJP or Naveen Patnaik’s attitude towards the Centre. In the current composition of the Lok Sabha, the Congress is only as big as Trinamool, YSR Congress and NCP put together; worse, except Maharashtra, the Congress does not have any hope of revival in any of the states that have at least 40 seats each in the Lok Sabha — UP, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu (+Puducherry) and Bihar. The Congress is in contention in only tier-II states that yield at least 20 seats each — Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Kerala — that too without any significant improvement in the last 10 years (Kerala offered 29% or 15 of all the 52 seats the Congress won in 2019).
The road ahead could be the repeat of the 2004 model, but without a Congress prime ministerial candidate. In 2004, the Congress had the biggest tally amongst all the allies and hence could become the natural leader of the post-poll alliance. Yet, Sonia Gandhi, the party president and the leader of the alliance, relinquished her claim and offered the prime ministership to Dr Manmohan Singh. In the run-up to 2024, the Congress could do a repeat by offering the top post to one of the big satraps who emerge successful in the elections. Only prime ministerial ambition can bring the leaders of the Indian masses together. Indians love those who renounce what is theirs, rightly or otherwise. It could be a gamechanger if Rahul Gandhi declares that he will not be the PM candidate but a facilitator for a genuine alternative. That would immediately catapult him to the head of the high table as an honest arbiter amongst the toughest mass leaders of the country.
Finally, the winner could be Naveen, Mamata, Jagan or someone else, but each one would be enthused to put in an honest attempt and make the fight a real one, in which each one has a huge stake. That is the kind of contest the Indian democracy deserves and the only way it can be done is for the Congress to become a facilitator. Rahul Gandhi has long been heard talking about transformational politics — there is no better way to practise it than to build a welcoming umbrella for a grand coalition of Opposition parties.
