RIDING A TIGER
THE CAPTAIN’S WIN IN PUNJAB IS THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOT IN A DESULTORY CONGRESS STORY, BUT EVEN FULFILLING POLL PROMISES WILL BE AN UPHILL TASK
OVERWHELMED!” a beaming Amarinder Singh exulted as he emerged from his room on the first floor of his Chandigarh home, a little past noon on March 11. Even though early trends had been positive, the man who is now Punjab’s new chief minister refrained from celebrating victory until Congress’s leads firmly edged past 66—the number he had predicted for the party through the anxious 35 days between polling on February 4 and the results. But two hours on, the final tally—77 out of 117 assembly seats—exceeded his wildest expectations. And it was unprecedented. Never in the history of elections in Punjab has the Congress achieved such a spectacular victory, taking close to two-thirds (65.8 per cent) of the total seats.
After losing two successive elections—in 2007 and 2012—to the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party combine, Amarinder has succeeded in crafting a formidable election campaign that brought the party clear leads across the three geographical regions of Punjab. Virtually sweeping Majha with 22 of the 25 seats, and taking 15 of the 23 Doaba constituencies, the Congress also recorded its biggest ever success, winning 40 of the 69 seats in the electorally significant Malwa region.
The euphoria outside Amarinder’s Chandigarh home was appropriate, given the occasion. Although victory was clearly on the cards this time, no preparations had been put in place (perhaps because of lurking memories of the ignominious drubbing received after days of premature celebrations in 2012). But there were chaotic scenes soon enough, with Amarinder barely managing to wade through the crush of supporters to claim Punjab at his first news conference after the victory.
Later that afternoon, all of Patiala turned out to greet the victor as his motorcade rolled into the city. Motibagh, the ancestral palace of the erstwhile Patiala royals, was literally overrun by ecstatic Congress workers waiting for the new chief minister as he returned home after a brief prayer of thanksgiving at the samadhi (shrine) of Patiala’s founder, Baba Ala Singh.
So how did he pull off this huge victory in Punjab’s first triangular election—a contest that unsettled most politi-
cal pundits and pollsters?
Admitting that even he had some initial misgivings in the wake of the huge traction that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) seemed to be gaining through its social media blitzkrieg, Amarinder says reports from Congressmen on the ground “consistently belied the hype around the AAP”.
In fact, Amarinder says, it was Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s repeated claims of an impending landslide in the Malwa which prompted him to concentrate on the vast region. “But when I went about the Malwa constituencies in the final fortnight before polling, I had no doubts that the people were overwhelmingly with the Congress,” he told india today at Motibagh on March 11.
The Captain also graciously acknowledged the key role played by poll strategist Prashant Kishor and his team of 250 Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) volunteers. “They did a tremendous job in crafting the strategy,” says Amarinder. “But eventually none of this would have been possible without the party’s rank and file,” he adds, explaining that every Congress worker knew that it would be impossible to recover from a third consecutive defeat. This, he says, “galvanised everybody like never before”.
ASERIES OF TARGETED, singleissue campaigns were put together by IPAC, which reached over 10 million individual voters by the end of campaigning on the evening of February 2. ‘Har Ghar Captain’, for example, which was launched three months before polling day, promised a job for every family as well as an interim Rs 2,500 berozgari bhatta (unemployment allowance) for the first 100 days after Amarinder becomes the CM. An unbelievable four million youths registered for it. Other campaigns, such as Karza-kudki
maaf, which promised farm debt waivers and ‘Captain Smart Connect’—smartphones and free gigabytes of data for young people to stay connected in an increasingly virtual world—drew similar subscriptions.
“IPAC’s campaigns were very cleverly constructed, but what finally worked was that every Congress worker, cutting across factional lines, went door-to-door in bringing these schemes to voters’ homes,” says Raveen Thukral, a former journalist brought in by Amarinder as his media strategist. While Kejriwal and the AAP leadership gloated prematurely about the massive response they were seeing on social media—Facebook, Twitter and a multitude of WhatsApp groups—Thukral says, “Congress workers quietly stole the march with their consistent connect with voters”.
Amarinder also concedes that professionals like
Kishor and Thukral were vital to scripting the party’s success. “Their strategy and guidance served as a significant force-multiplier,” he says. For instance, instead of the same, rehearsed spiel, the content of Amarinder’s speeches was consistently re-jigged to reflect local concerns of the district or constituency where he addressed voters.
The party was also the quickest among the three contesting rivals to respond to developing situations. After the bombing targeting Congress nominee Harminder Jassi in Maur on January 31, for instance, Amarinder’s response articulating his concern over AAP leaders including Kejriwal rubbing shoulders with Khalistani extremists, had been tweeted, posted on Facebook and released in a news communique hours before the others even took note. Expectedly, the Congress party hogged all the headlines on February 1, just three days ahead of polling.
Another arguably fortuitous boost came from vicepresident Rahul Gandhi’s belated decision to anoint Amarinder as the chief ministerial face of the Congress for Punjab, at a rally in Majitha. This happened just a week before polling, while the Congress’s rivals were winding down their campaigns. “It was perfectly timed,” Amarinder says.
Chandigarh-based political scientist and commentator Pramod Kumar says the clear message from the Punjab verdict is that campaigns or governments that are remote controlled by high commands in Delhi can no longer do the job. “The AAP campaign, driven wholly from Delhi, was destined to fail. On the other hand, the Congress high command’s decision to allow its regional leadership a fair bit of autonomy led to a spectacular victory,” Kumar says.
Amarinder too confirms that unlike in the 2012 polls when as many as 46 candidates were nominated against his advice, this time the high command under Rahul Gandhi granted him complete freedom in allocating tickets.
MEANWHILE, AMID HIS OWN giddying successes in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took time out to call and felicitate Amarinder on winning Punjab on the afternoon of March 11. “He also wished me on my 75th birthday,” says Amarinder.
Perhaps the phone call also reminded Punjab’s new CM of the rocky road that confronts him: a Rs 1.25 lakh crore state debt in last year’s budget that he believes may have inflated to close to Rs 2 lakh crore; a whop--
ping Rs 4,000 crore budgetary deficit; nine million jobless youth; farmers struggling under debt. Adding to all that will be the huge challenge of arranging the money to fund his manifesto commitments, a job for one youth in every family and debt waiver for small and marginal farmers. Amarinder will need Delhi on his side if he hopes to make good on his promises.
Yet another, more immediate, challenge that confronts the new CM will be to find legal and administrative remedies to resolve the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal row with neighbouring Haryana. For this too, he will need Prime Minister Modi’s assistance.
Addressing issues of governance, like his promise of tackling the drug menace, he says, will not be a problem (he’s already signalled his intention to set up a special police task force for that purpose). But he’s looking for endorsement from Prime Minister Modi and the Centre to end Punjab’s fiscal woes.
There’s some consolation in the fact that compared to his last tenure—from 2002 to 2007—Amarinder will not be burdened by dissidence from rivals within the party. Several erstwhile stalwarts, including former CM Rajinder Kaur Bhattal and ex-minister Jagmohan Singh Kang, have fallen by the wayside in these elections. Added to that, former state unit chief Pratap Singh Bajwa, who was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, is already out of the reckoning.
“This will be my last election,” the captain had promised when he set out on this poll campaign. At 75, Amarinder says he will stand by that, but will give it his best shot before hanging up his boots. And even though he ran an aggressive poll campaign, Amarinder in 2017 is far less brash than he tended to be in 2002. On the day of his victory, he not only promised to eschew any kind of political vendetta but also made distinct overtures in seeking PM Modi’s assistance in rebuilding Punjab.
Despite the bruising reverses the Congress has suffered in other states—particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand—Amarinder is convinced that the revival of the grand old party has begun with the victory in Punjab. “It has happened before too,” he says pointing to the post-Emergency resurrection of the Congress when it swept to power in Punjab in 1980.