Rewinding to the past can throw up surprises and ironies that have a fantastical quality to them — almost as if what happened did not happen. Truth is increasingly only what you see today, divorced from its past, stripped of all context. And from today’s vantage point, no political truth seems truer than the Indian National Congress’s impending death. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president, Amit Shah, rubs it in that he has had the last laugh on Congress-Mukt Bharat (Bharat without Congress) or goes on to make the even wilder claim that his party will rule from panchayat to Parliament, few can challenge him. This is only in part because of the BJP chief’s “ dabang ” (strongman) personality which magnifies anything he says into established fact. The bigger problem is the Congress, or more accurately the First Family, whose responses suggest that it has been psyched into believing its own death predictions. Cornered by the media on the BJP’s relentless aggression, Sonia Gandhi came across as defensive rather than self-assuredly confident about herself and her party.
The BJP parallel And yet, the Congress story of today is not too different from the BJP story of yesterday. From the trough that is the Congress’s current favourite place, it is difficult to believe that for close to a decade, it was the victor to the BJP’s vanquished. During this time, the BJP was often written off by its own well-wishers who despaired that it had become the “bad boy” of Indian politics, obstructionist in Parliament, cantankerous and bitter towards the Congress and sinking further into the quicksand with two successive defeats. Post its shock defeat in 2004, the BJP had behaved abominably: it stopped Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from introducing his Cabinet, tore up the Budget papers and boycotted parliamentary committees. The BJP notched up magnificent failures. It supported a doomed Left Front effort to pull down Dr. Singh over the India-United States nuclear deal, forgetting its own ideological convictions.
By 2009, the BJP was in a state of civil war. Manmohan Singh had become the first Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to return to office after completing a term, and, electorally, the BJP was at its lowest point in 25 years. In his widely-followed blog, “Usual Suspects”, journalist Swapan Dasgupta, who is self-confessedly close to the BJP, wrote that the Congress’s victory was a result of a nation-wide positive swing in favour the trio of Manmohan Singh, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. Further, that the Congress had reinvented itself as a party of youth whereas the BJP was seen as hidebound. The media projected the Congress as wholesome and the BJP as ugly.
In a 2010 essay, A ‘dying party?’ written for Seminar magazine, Mr. Dasgupta noted that even though the BJP was in control of a few important States, it conveyed the “impression of being mentally defeated. Following the second successive defeat in the national elections, it has been engulfed in an existential crisis which has manifested itself in leadership squabbles, internal dissensions over policies and an inability to attract new adherents…” Further, “A former cabinet minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government , was overheard in the Central Hall of Parliament questioning the wisdom of persisting with a ‘dying party’…” Uncanny? Yes.
At the time punditry had it that the BJP owed its failures and troubles mainly to its ideological adherence to Hindutva and its institutional dependence on its spiritual guru, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Sudheendra Kulkarni, political aide to Lal Krishna Advani, in a June 20, 2009 article in Tehelka , “Hindu Divided Family”, argued that the BJP was trapped in a vision of Hindutva that was dogmatic, exclusivist and marked by an indifference to minorities that was of “Himalayan magnitude”. He urged the RSS to introspect on why its acceptability was limited to Hindu society.
Mr. Kulkarni’s gentle criticism was important because of who he was. However, days before that Mr. Dasgupta had dropped a bombshell that fairly shook the BJP. In a June 4, 2009 column, “A change of priorities” written for The Times of India , Mr. Dasgupta advised the BJP to dump Hindutva as Indians were repelled by bigotry: “The BJP must candidly recognise that assertive Hindutva marked by hate speeches and moral policing is seen as ugly mirror images of the Taliban. The spectacle of old and middle-aged men oozing sanctimoniousness and droning on about India’s ancient inheritance belongs to a bygone age…”
In a follow-up blog, he drove home the point lest it was missed: The BJP, he said, must drop the “H-word”.
This long journey into the past might seem pointless viewed from a 2016 perspective where the BJP’s conquest of the Congress seems complete and irreversible. However, this bit of history bristles with both ironies and possibilities. It shows a “dying party” can resurrect itself, confound its critics and exceed the most optimistic expectations. Second, Hindutva, which was identified as the BJP’s single biggest road-block deserving of an inglorious exit, is flourishing and is even more Taliban-like in the Narendra Modi Government. Middle-aged men and women, many of them ministers, have been unstoppably recalling the virtues of ancient India.
Analysing electoral verdicts So is there anything the Congress can learn from this? Before that, it might be useful to look at the Lok Sabha verdicts of 2009 and 2014 with respect to the Congress and the BJP. The two results are in a sense mirror images of each other. In 2009, the BJP won 116 seats for a vote share of 18.80 per cent. In 2014, > the Congress won 44 seats for a slightly higher vote share of 19.52 per cent. The two losing performances, at least on vote share, are eminently comparable. The winning performances are comparable too — the > BJP’s 2014 winning vote share of 31.34 per cent is only 2.79 percentage points higher than the Congress’s 2009 winning vote share of 28.55 per cent. In 2009, the Congress led the BJP by 9.75 percentage points. In 2014, the BJP led the Congress by 11.82 percentage points. The difference between the leads of 2009 and 2014 is a mere two percentage points.
Back in 2009, pundits mocked the Congress’s victory citing the party’s laughable vote share of 28.55 per cent. They were right. In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi sat in the Opposition for the sin of delivering 197 Lok Sabha seats for a vote share of, yes, 39.53 per cent. Nonetheless, when Narendra Modi romped home on a vote share of 31.34 per cent, he became superman incarnate in public perception. To be sure, the polity is so fractured today that the narrowest of vote shares can deliver big results.
Meeting the challenge To recap, history and statistics suggest that with some effort, the Congress can narrow the gap between the BJP and itself. The question is: is this task practically doable? The answer might lie in another question: what was that mega something that uplifted the BJP’s plunging morale and fortunes? The answer is not the dropping of the H-word, which unsurprisingly did not happen, but the Modi-Shah think-tank. If Mr. Modi caught the popular imagination with his development pitch and the Gujarat model, Mr. Shah met the twin objectives of micro-managing the booths and stoking the Hindutva fires. It was a lethal combination that is far from exhausted. Over the coming years, the twosome will stake out constituencies, strike impossible alliances, and adopt the Chanakya neeti of sam , daam , dand , bhed , (seek, entice, punish and divide) to try and win, first Uttar Pradesh, and then the national election.
The Congress’s answer to Team Modi-Shah is just one: Family. But Family has not only transformed since 2014 from tried and tested to tired and failing, it is not even making the requisite effort to fight back. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra could arguably reboot the party but the > Robert Vadra millstone is even bigger than 2G, > Adarsh , > Agusta and other scams put together.
There is little point in wishing the Gandhis away because without them there is no party. With them too there might be no party given that as of today, the Congress runs only six State governments: three in the north-east, Himachal Pradesh, Puducherry and the only large State of Karnataka, where its luck could soon run out. The potential winners for the Congress are Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The scam-ridden Madhya Pradesh Government is in its 13th year while Gujarat has been laid low by caste unrest and misgovernance.
To harvest the discontent in these States, the Congress needs strong local leadership which is visible only in Rajasthan. Nationally, the Congress is stuck with its image of a corrupt, bankrupt party, clinging to a fifth-generation, moth-eaten dynasty.
Can Rahul Gandhi do something, anything to reverse the rot? Can he show precisely where and why he is different from the Modis and the Shahs? Yes, he can. Even if late in the day, he could take a cue from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and apologise for the Emergency and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. That would be setting an agenda which the BJP cannot follow.
Mr. Gandhi could make smart alliances targeting the BJP, rather than taking on Mamata Banerjee who is both ideologically compatible and a possible future partner. And finally, and most importantly, he could reach out to the youth, many of whom are idealistic and discomfited by the BJP’s extremism, and convince them that their future was tied to returning India to its liberal, Constitutional roots.
Will Mr. Gandhi do any of this? Even if he does, will the Congress’s disillusioned current and potential allies, sit up and take note?
Vidya Subrahmaniam is a Senior Fellow at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy. E-mail: vidya.subrahmaniam@thehinducentre.com
