The Ghalib guide to politics

Congress has losing its grassroot

Who would you consider a better guide to contemporary politics: Chaudhry Birender Singh, general secretary of the Indian National Congress with charge of Delhi, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, or Mirza Asadullah Ghalib, Urdu-Persian poet-philosopher during the dusk of the Mughal Empire? The choice may not seem quite as obvious, on second glance. If you prefer the Chaudhry, you are clearly reasonable. The Mirza, however, might be a more illuminating guide during periods of great existential strain.

Let us examine the available evidence. On 17 April, the day Congress confirmed its general decline by losing the Delhi municipal elections, Chaudhry Birender Singh breezily explained, on television, that it was actually the voter’s fault; the voter didn’t know what he was doing. There were no elections in Ghalib’s era, more than a century and a half ago, and he probably would not have voted if there had been, but he understood the craving for comfort in illusion. Witness his verse: Hum ko maloom hai jannat ki haqiqat lekin/ Dil to bahalane ko Ghalib yeh khayal achcha hai. A rough translation: ‘I know the truth about heaven, but/ As amusement for the heart, the thought is pleasant, Ghalib’.

The Chaudhry knows the truth, but an alibi eases burdens in his soul. This is temporary relief. Politics is a practical art. It tends to punish illusion. It permits only a very thin margin between self-consolation and self-immolation. Any politician who believes that he lost an election because the voter was wrong has also lost the plot.

No election is minor, for the voter’s will is never insignificant, whether it shapes the micro or macro level of authority. The first signal from north India after Mrs Indira Gandhi’s devastating defeat in 1977 that the mood had begun to change, came when her Congress won a local bodies election. Her Janata Party opponents loftily dismissed the result as a pimple. They forgot that a pimple is often the only manifestation of an internal cancer. The link between a corporation in Delhi and the sprawl of Uttar Pradesh is an epidemic of disaffection, caused by the double jeopardy of poor governance and political mismanagement. It is pushing Congress out of the only perch on which it is comfortable, power.

Alibis were impotent in UP, and they will not be productive in Delhi either. The much-promoted excuse for UP was absence of party infrastructure. But it was, at the very least, the same infrastructure in 2009, when the Congress won 21 MP seats in UP, the rough equivalent of a hundred Assembly constituencies. The network that brought out the vote in 2009 could not have collapsed by 2012, since Rahul Gandhi worked for three years on nourishing and spreading fertiliser on these grassroots. In these three years, the Congress vote dropped by over six percentage points. The party imploded because it had lost credibility. Voters judge claims against performance if you are in office.

Rahul Gandhi monopolised the campaign in UP. Blame must therefore go where worship would have gone had the results been different. But the blame is not his alone. He was handicapped by the stench of corruption wafting around the Congress-led coalition in Delhi, and the rattling skeletons of broken promises. He was slapped in UP only because he offered himself as the face of his party. Congress would have gotten the same results, with or without his campaign. The story is not that Rahul Gandhi did not make a difference, but that he could not make a difference. This is a dangerous admission for an organisation that places a premium on dynasty; hence the need for alibis.

There is a secondary need as well. Survival is not merely a physical fact. It requires a psychological bed. While half the Union Cabinet has the fixed grin of someone who has won a lottery, because it has, the ministers of state in their 40s and 50s have acquired a frown that is deepening into anxiety and depression. Eight years of plenty have slipped by without promotion; and the prospect of wilderness is bad for the morale of those who thought, in 2009, that they had been given a license to rule for twenty years. If this group of energisers begins to look defeated even before the turmoil of the next general election, the body count will be high during battle. It is important to reassure them that the problem lies in circumstance, which can be altered over time, and not in the leadership, which cannot.

Victory is an intoxicant. Victory leads to a hangover, which best describes the state of the UPA government. Defeat is a teacher. But, to be an effective guide, it needs the prod of honesty. A Chaudhry may mollify the pain of defeat during a television stampede. But for the long run, trust Ghalib.

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.