Polity & its plight

Without doubt Narendra Modi’s victory in the Gujarat Assembly elections, third in a row, is impressive. Yet many, principally the Congress propagandists, are trying hard to downplay it. Union finance minister P. Chidambaram’s declaration of his party’s “clear victory in Gujarat, too”, in addition to that in Himachal Pradesh, was pathetic.

The final fatuity is the assertion by several high-profile Congressmen, that “Modi won because the Muslims voted for him from fear or because of his spurious blandishments.” This is a strange reversal of the votebank politics by a man constantly under attack for not fielding even a single Muslim candidate.
Mr Modi also must accept his share of blame for his big win losing some of its shine. He allowed the masterminds of his high-tech campaign, reportedly NRI Gujarati fans, to blow up his persona as well as achievements out of all proportions. Overkill is never the best stratagem.
It is also odd that few are underscoring what is the Gujarat poll’s real message.
Mr Modi’s famous victory is the Congress’ decisive defeat. A complacent Congress Party might like to delude itself that the defeat in the western state and victory in the hills cancel each other out, and that honours are thus even between the two mainstream parties. Leave alone the difference between the sheer sizes of the two states, Himachal Pradesh has never re-elected its government. In Gujarat, on the other hand, the Congress has been out of power for nearly two decades. Gujarat has now become the eighth state where the party leading the ruling coalition at the Centre has been marginalised so completely that it has little chance of coming back to power.
Merely to mention the seven states would be instructive. These are, Tamil Nadu, from where the Congress has been banished since 1967; West Bengal, where it has lost out since 1977 (except for a short period when it squirmed in the torment of being Mamata Di’s junior partner); the populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, once its bastions, where the Congress has not been able to regain even a foothold since 1990; Orissa where Naveen Patnaik has been ruling the roost for three terms; Sikkim and Tripura. Together with Gujarat, these states elect a little over 250 of the 545 Lok Sabha members.
By an exquisite quirk of irony, both the Gujarat and Himachal elections have taught the Congress the same and supremely important lesson. As already stated, in Himachal Pradesh the Congress’ triumph would have been in accordance with the established pattern. Yet, things could have been different but for the rather curious case of Virbhadra Singh. A former Union Cabinet minister, he had to resign because a court of law had framed charges of corruption against him and his wife. Having been chief minister of Himachal for five times in the past, he then jumped into the fray of state Assembly
elections.
Since the Congress high command was naturally reluctant to hand over the stewardship of the Assembly poll to him, he threatened to quit the party and join the Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar. The Central leadership surrendered, and because he had a base at the grassroots he was able to lead the party to victory. Remarkably, the court trying his case gave him a “clean chit” just before his swearing-in as chief minister yet again.
In Gujarat, the Congress was thrashed for the sixth time running because, as in almost all other states, there is no state leader worth the name or even a semblance of a party organisation. The two gentlemen heading the state Congress committee and leading the party in the state Assembly have both lost the election. To add to the party’s woes, the two other leaders it was greatly relying on — former chief minister Shankersinh Vaghela who joined the Congress a long time ago, and a new ally and former chief minister, Keshubhai Patel — are both stalwarts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of which the BJP is the political face.
Since the main cause of the Congress’ discomfiture in state after state and the continuous rise of one regional party or the other is crystal clear, why isn’t the once grand old party taking appropriate remedial measures?
The answer to the question is equally obvious. A vigorously functioning party, enjoying inner-party democracy, while letting state leaders to emerge on merit and dynastic succession at the national level simply cannot coexist. And this glaring contradiction exposes the Congress’ monumental hypocrisy.
Whenever asked why it doesn’t declare its chief ministerial candidates in advance, Congress members compete in asserting that theirs is a democratic party that leaves it to the MLAs to choose their leader.
What actually happens is that every Congress legislature party requests Congress president Sonia Gandhi to nominate its leader and she gracefully obliges. The solitary exception to this iron rule was the late YSR in Andhra Pradesh, who had given the high command a wide berth from the start, in any case.
This said, one must hasten to add that not everything is negative from the Congress point of view. Indeed, the ruling party has the great consolation that the BJP’s plight is far worse than its own. Totally leaderless, the saffron crowd is torn by dissensions and has earned notoriety as disrupter of Parliament. Its “crusade against Congress corruption” has boomeranged because of the shenanigans of its president, Nitin Gadkari. If he is given a second term by his mentors in the RSS, the BJP would have shot itself in both its feet.
Yet precisely this might well happen, if only because the head of the Sangh Parivar wants to get even with Mr Modi who has already declared his independence of it in Gujarat. It is arguable that he would succeed in pursuit of his proclaimed objective of becoming the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. But this crucial choice is still relatively far. Meanwhile, the double-edged sword that Mr Modi is might cut deeper into the BJP than into the Congress.