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When election strategist Prashant Kishor signed up with the Indian National Congress to help steer its campaigns for the upcoming Assembly polls in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, there was a feeling that, maybe, this time Kishor may have ventured into deep waters.
There were two reasons being advanced for this rather gloomy reading of Kishor’s current career move. The first being that Kishor, who had been associated with the electoral triumphs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in 2015, was, for the first time, going to handle India’s oldest and most successful political party at a time when its fortunes were at a nadir and leadership in disarray.
The second reason for pessimism was the structure of the Congress itself, which is peopled by some of shrewdest minds in Indian politics who are well-versed in the snake-and-ladder game of the Congress durbar . The tolerance of the Congress system for a lateral entry of this sort is yet to be tested. And the nervousness among Congress leaders has been palpable.
The unique drama attached to Kishor’s new role was on full display when he visited Lucknow on April 21 for a strategy session with members of the Congress State unit. A party-worker, enthused by attempts by the high-command to rouse the party from its comatose situation in India’s most politically significant State, compared Kishor to Lord Hanuman, who revived a near-dead Lakshman on the battlefield in Lanka, by administering “Sanjeevani”. His submission was that Kishor’s skills as a strategist could revive a near-dead Congress in the State — a wish-list shared by party vice-president Rahul Gandhi.
The party-worker, news reports say, was quickly shushed into silence by senior Congress leaders, including general-secretary Prakash Joshi. who felt that this statement was an “insult” to national leaders of the party and that the Congress already “had an existing structure, and that Kishor had simply been given the task of preparing a strategy for the State.”
Congressmen would, however, be doing themselves a disservice by dismissing the form and content of what the snubbed party-worker was attempting to say. The analogy was drawn from the Ramayana, and speaks of an episode that was a particularly low point in the war — over Sita — between Lord Rama and Ravana. Lakshmana had been grievously wounded and the only way for him to survive was to be administered the miracle-drug, Sanjeevani. This was duly procured by Hanuman, who literally moved the Dunagiri mountain to get it.
For the party-worker, the Congress party is in a similarly low point in its 131-year-old existence. It has a meagre 45 seats in the Lok Sabha and a leadership that doesn’t exactly set the boards on fire. Power, like Sita, is incarcerated in the hands of the enemy (or the opposition in this case), and the Gandhi family, like Lakshmana, is desperately in need of the miracle-drug of victory in Punjab and a revival in Uttar Pradesh, in order to live to fight another day — namely the General Elections of 2019.
Like Lord Rama, who, despite being the son of the King of Ayodhya, spearheaded an army of outsiders from Kishkindha to attack Ravana, the Congress high-command has decided to rely on an outsider to see it through this battle, despite the depth of its leadership pantheon.
The rout of the Congress in 2014 was significant not just in terms of the decimation of its numbers in Parliament, but in how it brought into sharp relief leadership questions that being in power for 10 years had obscured from its view. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, in metaphorical vanvaas , or political wilderness, is yet to assume the mantle of leadership in toto, although Congressmen will have you believe that some of the more strategic decisions taken by the party recently — namely, to go into alliance with the Janata Dal (U) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar — were his ideas.
There is a definite resistance from the senior leadership in the party, his mother Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s cohort group, as far as control over the party organisation is concerned. Things had reached such a pass last year that Gandhi took off for a two-month-long vacation at the beginning of the all-important Budget session of Parliament, reportedly for introspection and reflection on just how to deal with the party.
Kishor, an outsider with no organisational position within the Congress and a proven track-record on delivery, may have seemed a safe bet as far as the battle for Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are concerned.
Gandhi needs to look no further than the rather truculent relationship Prime Minister Narendra Modi had with the RSS before being declared the BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate in 2013. It was electoral victories — a succession of them — with his own army of people from outside the BJP’s organisational hierarchy, that sealed the deal.
Gandhi needs a standalone electoral victory to validate his claims on the leadership of the party. Otherwise it would be an office without glory. He has to stage a comeback for the Congress to retain any authority. And nothing speaks louder than victory.
In that context, what is it that Kishor actually brings to the table? Initial reports on the Congress’ Punjab campaign show that he has prescribed some remedies that have already been suggested in the series of Congress post-mortems of the defeat in the 2012 Assembly polls.
The party’s face in Punjab, Amarinder Singh is to be referred to as “Captain” rather than as “Maharaja sahib ”, the scion of the Patiala royal family. Whispers of Singh’s habits — rising late, inaccessibility, and general aloofness from the party organisation — were also addressed, with his campaign’s Facebook page showing him eating a humble chicken dish at a roadside dhaba , and frequent meetings with district-level workers. ‘Coffee with Captain’, a series of youth outreach programmes, has already been kicked off.
In Uttar Pradesh, the party organisation is tottering, and there is talk of hiring some political workers for district-wise penetration. Front-pages of newspapers routinely see speculation around Priyanka Vadra or Sheila Dikshit as being the party’s chief-ministerial face in the State.
Some of it, say insiders, is just to create a buzz around the Congress campaign. In the haze of “also-ranness” that the party has suffered in the State in the past, it aims to be — in the words of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront — “a contender” in the State. For a party that stood a distant fourth in a field of four in the State, that may appear a reasonable goal to aspire to ahead of the polls.
For sulking Congress leaders, February 2017 will be the time of reckoning. Whether the gamble of an outside strategist works or not. Till then, Kishor’s hunt for the metaphorical Dunagiri hills in search of Sanjeevani in the dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab may be just what the doctor ordered.
