There are no easy tradeoffs
Congress will benefit by being pragmatic about its prospects
Former finance minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram’s comment that the party will not project Rahul Gandhi as a Prime Ministerial candidate ahead of the 2019 elections is entirely appropriate. As is another senior Congress leader Salman Kurshid’s comment that the Congress can’t win 2019 on its own. Both should be seen as a pragmatic assessment of the political situation.
Mr Gandhi himself has twice said he is open to the country’s top elected job (during the campaigning for the Karnataka elections in May and at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in October ) but both times he has qualified this by adding that it is a function of the numbers and the approval of allies. Both Mr Chidambaram and Mr Gandhi recognise that the important thing for the Congress and other opposition parties is to defeat the BJP. As the latter said at the Hindustan Times event, “This is a two-stage process — one is to get together and defeat the BJP and stage two is, once the election is over, decide what happens.” The truth is, it is to the BJP’s advantage to push the Opposition parties to name a Prime Ministerial candidate ahead of the elections. At one level, this will force them into a mano a mano contest with prime Minister Narendra Modi, who remains hugely popular. At another, it is likely to increase tensions within any grand alliance-in-the-making because there are several leaders across parties who have prime ministerial ambitions. Sure, the Congress and the Opposition will be handicapped by not naming a PM candidate ahead of the elections, but this is something they can manage. The choice between fighting the election in an alliance but without a prime ministerial candidate and fighting the election separately is a no-brainer, although it is not an easy trade-off to make.
Should the alliance win — there’s no certainty that it will, although it is a given that an alliance will make the contest tougher — there’s the risk of post-election squabbling. For the Congress, there’s also the additional risk of accommodating allies at the cost of its own relevance. In Karnataka, for instance, the party’s desire to keep the BJP out of power meant relinquishing pole position in the government to the Janata Dal (S) despite having more representatives. Its 2019 gambit, then, will be worthwhile for the party only if it is accompanied by efforts to strengthen the organisation across states -- and it manages to not give up too much political space in a desire to keep the BJP out.