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Congress in U.P.: goodwill without votes

The astonishing thing about the Congress in Uttar Pradesh is not that it is widely acknowledged to be absent on the ground. It is that there should be so much goodwill for a party that has just bestirred itself to life — with only days to go for the Lok Sabha election. Now the party is either engaged in a battle to find candidates, or announcing them far too late to make an impact.

Travelling in Uttar Pradesh recently, I posed two questions to people: How many seats do you give Mayawati from the State? And, which party would you like to see form a government at the Centre? The answer to the first depended on who the respondents were. Dalits gave the Bahujan Samaj Party chief 50 seats and the prime ministerial chair. Muslims thought the BSP and the Samajwadi Party would each finish in the region of 25-30 seats. The Chief Minister’s urban critics said she would be lucky to retain the 19 seats she got in 2004. With most others, she averaged 30 seats.

Admittedly, a sample survey done this way leaves room for error. Yet it was amazing that the answer to the second question was so uniformly in favour of the Congress. Forget the ordinary voters, people in the BSP government acknowledged the positive voter sentiment towards the Congress.

Eight out of 10 people I spoke to on my journey gave the thumbs-up to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. The two exceptions were Dalits rooting for the BSP, and a small section of Muslims. In Azamgarh, which saw a rash of terrorism-related arrests, you mentioned the Congress at your risk. Atif Ameen and Mohammad Sajed, the alleged terrorists killed in the September 19 police encounter in Batla House in Delhi, were both from Azamagarh, and, Muslims here, convinced of the UPA government’s complicity in their elimination, have vowed to unseat it.

Other than this, the response was the same, whether the place was a qasba, village or a town, whether the people I interviewed were Hindu ‘upper’ castes, the OBCs or Muslims, and whether they were voting the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BSP or the SP. It was a baffling paradox: How could you vote the BJP or the BSP, or the SP in a Lok Sabha election if, in fact, you wanted the Congress to form a government at the Centre?

The answer to the puzzle lies in part in the transformed character of voting in India. With people voting as if for the State Assembly, the Lok Sabha verdict has over the years become the sum total of Assembly verdicts. Thus the vote in U.P. is for or against the Mayawati government. But there is a larger truth. It is futile to expect voters to queue up at the booth for a party without a committed vote base, base vote, which is not networked on the ground, whose workers have migrated elsewhere, and which, for the better part of the past five years, has remained inaccessible.

The mismatch between the Congress as the people’s choice at the Centre and the local unit’s struggle for survival was starkly evident. In Kaushambi, Dharmendra Kumar Pandey counted the achievements of the Centre, emphasising in particular the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the waiver of farm loans. In adjoining Phoolpur, Shyamlal, village headman, echoed his words as did two of his Brahmin friends. I reminded the latter two that the BJP used to be their choice for the Centre. “The BJP did nothing except talk of building a mandir,” they shot back, while Shyamlal said, “if nothing else, the Congress has given us NREGA which means 100 days of work.” Would they vote the Congress? “Where is the party,” they countered.

NREGA came up elsewhere too. There were many complaints against the way it was implemented. Poor farmers spoke of village headmen lying in wait at the bank to get a share of the wages. But in the end, everyone agreed that the job legislation met a vital need, though there was some confusion over who had authored it — the Centre or the State.

The other surprise was the quiet support for Manmohan Singh, normally considered a poor draw outside of urban living rooms. But in U.P.’s urban homes as in rural qasbas, there was praise for the Prime Minister’s sobriety and maturity, and recognition of his standing as an eminent economist. The Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh team got high marks for decency in public life — a quality regarded as absent in U.P.’s political class.

In the Allahabad High Court, my questions about Ms Mayawati set off a furious debate. Cheered on by fellow lawyers, Srirang Pandey and D.S. Mani Tripathi quarrelled about whether or not the Chief Minister had done anything for Brahmins. Yet there was near-unanimity on who they wanted at the Centre: the Congress. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was not even mentioned as a possibility.

Has the Congress done anything to deserve this? Precious little judging by the glaring absence of a party machinery to convert the goodwill into votes. At the time of the 2004 general election, too, there was much talk of a Congress revival with Rahul Gandhi seen as the harbinger of hope. A shake-out of the moribund organisation, and new and energised block and district units were the minimum pre-requisites to set the Congress on a comeback trail. Yet in these five years, Gandhi junior has been in the news more for spending a few nights in Dalit homes in Amethi than for getting the party to working order in the rest of the State.

Is chasing the Dalit vote in Mayawati country the best way to revive the Congress? Obviously not, considering that it is a vote bloc closely tied to the BSP, the least amenable to shifting, and the most disinterested in seeing the Congress return to power in Delhi. That effort was better directed towards groups that in fact support the Congress but have no means of showing that support.

The Congress needed to change the direction of the election and give it a Lok Sabha focus. The message could be conveyed only by strong, winnable candidates. But in a party where loyalty matters more than eligibility, this is hard to accomplish.

It is a tough road ahead for the party. In 2004, the Congress came fourth in nearly 45 Lok Sabha constituencies and fifth in another half a dozen. In 20-odd constituencies, it polled fewer than 20,000 votes. The party fared worse in the 37 by-elections held between 2004 and now. In eight of the 10 by-elections to the Lok Sabha, it polled less than 10 per cent vote, finishing fourth and fifth in all but two. The glorious exception was Sonia Gandhi’s brilliant showing in Rae Bareli in April-May 2006.

The party polled less than three per cent in 13 of the 27 by-elections to the Assembly, finishing fourth and lower in as many as 17. In the recent Bhadohi by-election, it polled just over 2000 votes, finishing behind the little known Pragatisheel Manav Samaj party.

Congresspersons might want to learn something from the BSP, which has built itself brick by brick in U.P., quietly but determinedly snatching first the Dalits and then a section of Brahmins from the Congress. Had the Congress announced its candidates a year in advance and put them to work on the field, the story might have had a happier ending. As a bureaucrat in the Mayawati administration said: “They were in with a chance to get up to 30 seats which they have blown.”

The Congress broke up its match-winning alliance with the SP contending that it needed to build the organisation. Party office-bearers argued that a seat-sharing arrangement that gave the Congress only a few seats would demoralise workers who would have to sit out the election. Few will dispute the merit in the argument. A party with a fund of goodwill is within its rights to want to capitalise on that goodwill. Yet the question arises: Why did the party sleepwalk through the past five years?

Had the Congress been alert and active, it is unlikely today people would have been going out with a toothcomb asking, “Where is the Congress”?

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