No Left Turns: Rahul Gandhi And Congress Only Stand A Chance If They Attack BJP From The Right

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi are in complete control of: the government of India; fourteen other state governments that govern close to 70 per cent of the population; and the largest political party in the world. The most populous state in the country – Uttar Pradesh – has just been brought under their sway. The Congress party on the other hand is, to understate it, in a shambolic state. It has now been reduced to stitching up alliances with regional players that have poached its vote-bank over the last two decades.

Given the fact that most of these regional parties appeal to narrow ethnic and caste combinations, it is unlikely for any one of them to emerge as a strong opposition to the BJP at the national level. Furthermore, quite a few regional satraps including the likes of Sharad Pawar and Mulayam Singh Yadav are not widely accepted even across the length and breadth of their own respective home states. The same people who were telling us that Rahul Gandhi was the future of the country, even as late as 2011, are now telling us that he is the albatross around the Congress’ neck.

Frankly speaking, the putative Congress president should ignore them completely as their political prognosis has been invariably wrong over the past few years. Even on the eve of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, they were telling us that Narendra Modi was a liability upon the BJP, and was unlikely to ever win the election.

As a modern Indian, dynastic politics is distasteful to me. Having said that, there is no doubt that the Gandhi family remains the glue that holds the Congress party together. There is a lot of talk today about how the ‘brand value’ of the dynasty has faded. However, as students of contemporary history, we must also explore how and why the brand attained success in the first place. There is also no doubt that a functioning democratic polity needs two national parties to compete against each other in the electoral arena. Today, the BJP looks and seems impregnable. However, in five, 10 or 15 years voters shall definitely be tired of it, and as an Indian, I would like to have it replaced by the strongest opposition party that like the BJP of today brooks no compromise with respect to the unity, integrity and strength of our country.

I do not know if Rahul Gandhi reads this magazine. However, what I can be sure of is (a) he is going to be Congress president in the foreseeable future and in many ways he is the president of the Congress party already. (b) the people who advise him have evidently not done a very good job of it, and hence, he might be well-served if he listens to an outsider, who is not a Congress voter but is nonetheless a well-wisher of the Congress given that it is the only other national party in the country.

So here are my suggestions:

One, lose the coterie that surrounded your mother: There are some Congressmen and columnists, who have suggested that Sonia Gandhi deserves credit for having catapulted the Congress to power in 2004, when it won a grand total of 145 out of 543 seats, and that Rahul Gandhi is the one who deserves the blame for having brought the party to the sorry state it is in today. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is that the only reason why the Congress could steal a march over the BJP in 2004 was because it won Andhra Pradesh in the most resounding possible manner in a bipolar contest, and that too was not against the BJP but against the Telugu Desam Party. (Ms Gandhi has now ensured that the Congress shall never ever come to power in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh for that matter. But that is subject for another column). The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance also won a majority in 2009 on the back of impressive economic growth delivered by Manmohan Singh and his team.

However, the coterie surrounding Sonia Gandhi, which included positive Hinduphobes and half-naxals made the leadership of the party believe that the victory had been due to ‘pro-poor’ legislations such as MNREGA and the Right to Information Act. Eventually, the moment the BJP projected a credible prime ministerial face, the fight went out of the Congress party’s ranks and it simply folded up despite promising bhookh toh itihaas banegee on the eve of the election. Today, the situation has come to such a sorry state that regional players look at Congress as a liability, and indeed this impression is supported by solid empirical evidence from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

Two, lose the Hinduphobia: There is a perception which has been created over the past 10 years by the then Opposition party that the Congress is anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim. This has not always been so. It was a Congress government led by Swami Sampurnanand that banned cow slaughter in Uttar Pradesh. Most anti-cow slaughter legislation across India had also been piloted by Congress state governments in the 1950s. The Niyogi Commission report that severely castigated missionary activities in undivided Madhya Pradesh was also authored by a Congressman. Even though Jawaharlal Nehru was widely criticised as being anti-Hindu by a section of the Hindu right as it existed then, his daughter Indira Gandhi (arguably the more successful politician) made it a point to visit Hindu temples throughout her many stints as prime minister. What her personal religious conviction was is a different matter, although the impression one derives from contemporaneous sources is that she was a practising Hindu as well and was known to have contemplated drastic measures after the Meenakshipuram conversions of 1981.

To my mind, the reasons for her decidedly public religiosity were simple. She knew that her pre-eminent position in the Congress, something that a Kamaraj or Nijalingappa or Ajoy Mukherjee could never even dream of challenging, was something that she owed to the fact that she was the party’s biggest vote-catcher in the largest state of India – i.e. Uttar Pradesh. Now, in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress party’s supporters were from three main communities:

(i) The Brahmins, who regarded the Nehru Gandhi family as members of their own community and had supported the party en bloc even during the pre-Independence era inter alia for the same reason. It is obvious that most members of the aforementioned community would be staunch practising Hindus themselves. Most leadership positions in the party and even in the government were also reserved for them often leading to the exclusion of communities such as the Rajputs, the Ahirs and the Kurmis. This created the disquiet that the political geniuses like Ram Manohar Lohia and Deendayal Upadhyay managed to exploit with varying degrees of success. But that is not relevant to the discussion at the moment.

(ii) The Dalits, who were sought to be integrated into the larger Hindu community by social activities such as communal dining as well as by giving them a share of the political leadership (Jagjivan Ram is an apt example in this regard although he belonged to the neighbouring state of Bihar).

(iii) The Muslims, for whom the Congress ran something of a protection racket given the high level of animosity that existed between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the immediate aftermath of Partition.

To my mind, the Congress lost the plot in Uttar Pradesh the moment it adopted an ambivalent attitude to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Not only did it alienate its Brahmin voter, it also alienated the larger Hindu vote bank which subsists, as Modi has shown in 2014 as well as 2017, across caste lines. Furthermore, the aforementioned vote bank is decidedly even more staunchly political Hindu than the Brahmin community itself as a whole. The Muslims, at any rate, were never going to vote for a party that did not have substantial support from other communities. The Congress lost their support the moment it lost its core ‘Hindu’ vote.

Finally, the Congress party offered the ‘Dalit’ vote bank to Mayawati and the Bahujan Samaj Party on a platter by not offering the most oppressed classes of society the narrative of integration of all Hindu castes and communities that had been its calling card even before India’s Independence.

The limits of Mayawati’s politics have been cruelly exposed today. However, the Congress is nowhere close to taking advantage of it. Former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao might have had his own reasons for building up Mayawati at the cost of the local Congress leadership, but why is it that Rahul Gandhi is not attacking the former chief minister and her politics, and corruption as trenchantly as the BJP did in the run up to the assembly polls?

If the Congress has to revive itself in UP, it must shed the Hinduphobia and make an aggressive overt display of its Hinduism. The state’s polity is divided and Narendra Modi has conclusively displayed the utter irrelevance of the ‘Muslim veto’. It is about time the Congress realises this too and stops trying to court the Muslim vote. As reiterated earlier, the limits of Mayawati’s politics have been exposed and the Samajwadi Party looks likely to disintegrate further. The Opposition space is occupied currently by a vacuum.

The Congress can and should step into the breach and it can do so only if it ‘out-Hindus’ the BJP and stops listening to its well intentioned but worthless brain-trust that included many Hinduphobes. The narrative of exclusionary caste-based politics can work for caste-based political parties that have a limited shelf life at the hustings. If the Congress is to occupy the space that it has occupied in the past, it must give the people a fresh narrative, which is a departure from what is offered by regional players. And I repeat, the Gandhi family can regain its pre-eminence if and only if, it can revive the Congress in UP. It is only then that they shall be able to rein in their own regional satraps and re-establish their grip over the party.

Fourth, stop creating the impression that the Congress is soft when it comes to issues of national security, Pakistan and anti-nationals: As a prime minister, Indira Gandhi had many faults. She retarded the country’s economic growth. She also stoked the fires of the Khalistan movement because she thought that she could use Bhindranwale to ‘out-Akali’ the Akalis after the Anandpur Sahib resolution was passed. There is of course the ‘Emergency’. One can compile a very long list of her blunders. Having said that, there is one achievement that it is even a Narendra Modi-led administration is unlikely to ever match and that is the dismemberment of Pakistan in the 1971 war. She also used air power to pulverise insurgents in Mizoram even though she was technically bombing her own citizens, thereby doing something that the ‘flower-children’ of the current Congress are unlikely to approve of. She signed the Indira-Sheikh accord that snuffed the anti-nationalism out of the National Conference (A proudly pro-India party today).

The list of hard Machiavellian decisions she took ostensibly to protect the country from the machinations of ‘fissiparous’ elements can also go on and on. Even the Rajiv Gandhi government’s foreign policy during his initial years before he was hamstrung by the Bofors scandal was so aggressive that General Zia-ul-Haq was compelled to resort to the nuclear bluff by claiming that Pakistan was ‘one turn of the screw’ away from making a nuclear bomb in an interview to the Straits Times of Singapore.

In this view of the matter and especially since Rahul Gandhi’s only calling card is his lineage, it is nauseating to see him sympathise with anti-national slogan shouting students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This strategy of courting the Kanhaiya Kumars of the world is clearly not working. Does it not then make sense for Rahul Gandhi to go back to the formula that made his grandmother such a successful politician (this is not to say that she did not take a lot of other policy missteps) instead of soliciting support from the ‘hippies’ of JNU and elsewhere? If Narendra Modi can win public support for surgical strikes on Pakistan, why is it that the Congress cannot market the fact that the political leadership of the day exhibited the political will to dismember that country?

Very clearly, the povertarian schemes of the Sonia Gandhi years are just not selling at the electoral box office. Isn’t it high time that the formula was overhauled completely if the Congress wishes to retain some of its relevance in today’s day and age?