Will it survive this summer?
A fall from grace is par for the course. A slide into humiliation is another discourse. Defeat is the familiar price of failure in democracy. Humiliation is retribution for a more dangerous sin, arrogance. Parties often blossom after an election victory, as Congress did after 2004; very few retain any relationship with reality after re-election. The trap of 2012 was set in 2009.
Rahul Gandhi sought to win his electoral spurs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh on the road to the PM’s office. After two years of effort and expense, he has just discovered that he has neither horse nor direction along the Gangetic belt. Family, in these egalitarian times, is an inadequate rationale for office.
Dynasties are loath to admit mistakes, since they damage their principal claim to power, mystique. Even a punctured prince must be praised, therefore, if for nothing else than hard work, as if hard work is perfectly understandable for mortals like Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati but a labour of love for a prince. Everyone works hard in an election. Defeat cannot be a prince’s fault: candidates were wrong, or the party was to blame, and not a whisper about who chose the candidates, or who was in charge of building the party.
Rahul Gandhi is not young. At his age, 41, his great grandfather Jawaharlal presided over the historic 1929 Lahore session and pushed through, despite the skepticism of his mentor Mahatma Gandhi, the swaraj resolution which formally committed the Congress to complete independence from the British. Jawaharlal soared ahead in national esteem on the wing of ideas, not slogans undercooked by trainee chefs who do not know the difference between hot air and nourishment.
When in 321 BC Chandragupta sought to overthrow Mahapadma Nanda (‘the son of a barber’), Chanakya offered some sensible advice: Remember how your mother taught you to eat a hot chapatti – begin from the edges. Rahul Gandhi’s strategy, literally and metaphorically, was the reverse. He operated from the centre. From the comfort of a power perch in Delhi, he converted the chapatti into a jigsaw puzzle. His advisers thought each geographical or demographic piece could be adjusted by money, legislative illusion or emotional patronage.
From this emerged a campaign of smoke and mirrors. A cash award was assigned to Bundelkhand. The Dalit heart was meant to melt at the sight of a prince dropping in for a meal. Rahul Gandhi’s problem is not that he is young, but that he continued to play with toy soldiers in his electoral war room. I trust that Rahul Gandhi is not going to tear up any opponent’s manifesto for a long time.
The biggest play was made for the Muslim vote, with promises that were tainted with compromise. The dust of reservations was thrown into the eye and pantomime paraded as drama. Second rank Congress leaders began to compete for awards in histrionics. The only astute player in this game was the Muslim voter: on a bulk level, he drove Mulayam Singh Yadav to office, and in constituencies where strategic voting made more sense, he elected fellow Muslims across labels. There should be a lesson in this somewhere.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi thought the crisis was serious enough to merit that rare indulgence called a press conference. She let slip a thought that should trouble her colleagues, that the problem was too many leaders rather than lack of leadership. But we shall let the party worry about that. Her more substantive comment was that UPA still had time to correct its mistakes, since the next general elections were in 2014.
In straight political mathematics, association with Congress is slowly turning into a liability. Congress leaders like spokesman Manish Tiwari are beginning to admit that there is sweeping urban resentment against the party. This is, once again, a reversal from UPA1, when Congress added value to an ally’s vote base. But the decisive impetus will come from the Agatha Christie question: who benefits from death in the drawing room, or, in a more straightforward simile, the collapse of Dr Manmohan Singh’s second government?
Just as the Congress, as Mrs Gandhi pointed out, needs time, others need to be in a hurry. Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa, Jagan Reddy, Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik, Prakash Karat, Nitin Gadkari, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Prakash Singh Badal, Om Prakash Chautala may have enough contradictions between them to confuse a doctorate in logic, but they want an election when the Congress is at its weakest. Throughout 2012 Congress will remain shaken by the UP-Punjab earthquake. By 2013, Congress could begin to recover. Why wait?
Some facts will linger like a terrible, toxic cold. Dr Singh, the first Sikh Prime Minister, has lost Punjab twice to the Akalis. The first time could have been carelessness; the second time is punishment. Mrs Sonia Gandhi has lost all Assembly seats in Rae Bareli, despite the continual presence of Priyanka Gandhi, internally touted as a bigger campaign star than brother Rahul. Rahul Gandhi has blamed the party infrastructure for the UP defeat, but has he looked at the structure at the top? Not a single Congress heavyweight is heavy enough to lift his own state, or even a part thereof. Why blame the worker at the base?
The Congress can revive, of course. But it must return to what it used to be, liberal in spirit and democratic in ethos. It can either be a national trust or family property, not both. The fact that other parties are run by families is irrelevant. There were many turning points in the UP election. One of them was the arrival of Priyanka Gandhi’s husband Robert Vadra and her still young children to Rae Bareli. The electorate was being given advance notice for 2030. I don’t know what voters will do in 2030, but we know now what they did in 2012.
The columnist is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and Editorial Director, India Today and Headlines Today.
