2019 AHOY!
THE WINS IN THE THREE HEARTLAND STATES HAVE RE-ENERGISED RAHUL’S CONGRESS, BUT CAN THE PARTY STITCH TOGETHER A STRATEGY TO CHALLENGE MODI IN 2019?
The wins in the heartland states have re-energised Rahul’s Congress, but can the party stitch together a strategy to challenge Modi in 2019?
Success, George S. Patton
observed, is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom. A year ago, when Rahul Gandhi took over as president of the Congress, his own as well as the party’s fortunes had touched a nadir. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah juggernaut was thundering along and the Bharatiya Janata Party now controlled 18 of the 29 states. The Congress, on the other hand, after its worst ever showing of 44 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, kept slipping further and further in state assemblies where it had been in government, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Manipur and Meghalaya. It also failed to prevent the BJP from registering its sixth consecutive victory in Gujarat. The only big states where it won polls were in Punjab and Karnataka (that too through a post-poll coalition).
A year later, the Congress has bounced back by capturing power in three vital states in the Hindi heartland—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The wins spell a dramatic revival of the Grand Old Party as a force to reckon with. They have enhanced Rahul Gandhi’s status as the prime challenger to Narendra Modi in the 2019 general election. They have stripped the Modi-Shah combine of the aura of invincibility, forcing the BJP to go into deep introspection. More importantly, they have put a big question mark on the re-election of Modi as prime minister—no longer the certainty it seemed a year ago. It’s game on for 2019.
Rahul Gandhi has finally arrived. From a reluctant heir apparent, the Congress scion has matured into a leader who has been able to manage the contradictions besetting his party, get the old guard and the young turks to work together as a cohesive team as in MP and Rajasthan, reinvigorate Congress workers at the grassroots, build a convincing political narrative for voters, give back to his opponents, particularly Modi, as good as he gets and yet maintain civility even in the heat of political battle. Rahul has shown that decent politics is not an oxymoron. He eschewed triumphalism when he told the press after the poll results were announced, “I’d like to thank the outgoing BJP chief ministers for the work they have done over the last term. We are going to take over from them and do an excellent job.”
Holding a press conference was also Rahul’s way
of showing how his style differed from Modi’s. If the BJP wins a poll, Modi prefers to head to the party headquarters where he is heralded with great fanfare and then addresses party workers without taking questions from the press. In contrast, Rahul was willing to expose his vulnerable side when he said, “I was speaking to my mother yesterday and telling her that the 2014 election was the absolute best thing for me. I learnt a lot about how to think about things. I have learnt that the most important thing is humility. And that, as a politician, you have to listen to what the people of the country feel and work with that sentiment.” Then, delivering the coup de grace, he concluded, “Frankly, Mr Modi has taught me that lesson because I see what not to do. I feel bad for him, even though I’m in the opposition, that he refused to listen to the heartbeat of the country.”
Rahul seems to have listened well to the woes of the people, particularly the widespread farmer discontent apart from the rural distress caused by demonetisation and the palpable lack of jobs in these states. The Axis My India-india today exit polls, which predicted the outcome accurately, showed that in MP, in particular, the unemployed, students, farmers, including farm labourers, and those in traditional businesses shifted in large numbers from the BJP to the Congress. In Chhattisgarh, the Congress had far greater traction among the young voters than the BJP. Importantly, for the Congress, the SC/ ST, Muslim and OBC votes in these states have begun returning to its fold. Not a bad performance for someone whom the BJP had mockingly dismissed as a pappu (novice) in politics.
Sure, the wins,
particularly in MP and Rajasthan, were not as convincing as they could have been. In MP, the BJP had almost the same vote share as the Congress—41 per cent as against the latter’s 40.9 per cent— and the contest could have gone either way. In Rajasthan, bungling the ticket distribution and infighting saw the Congress lose momentum and practically gasp to the finishing tape. At 39.3 per cent of the vote share, the Congress was half a percentage point ahead of the BJP’s 38.8 per cent. The Chhattisgarh win, though, was categorical. Rahul refused to be brow-beaten by the Ajit Jogi-Mayawati combine into conceding more seats, preferring to go it alone and getting the four senior Congress leaders to work as a team. In the other two states, however, more than the allure of the Congress, it was the negative vote against the BJP that won the day for the Congress, with the people wanting change. The Congress has also been routed in Telangana and Mizoram. There is much, therefore, that both the Congress and Rahul can learn from these elections even as they celebrate their success.
Rahul knows that while the wins have given the Congress a massive boost, the party is still far from ready to take on the might of the BJP and defeat it in the 2019 election. Barring half a dozen states, the party is not the major player it was in the past. Even in the states where it is the principal opponent, it remains disorganised. In Haryana, for instance, Rahul has been promoting the younger Ashok Tanwar despite opposition from former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. He has resisted removing Tanwar as the state Congress chief in the face of a written resolution from MLAs who support Hooda.
Rahul will now have to work out a satisfactory resolution to the debilitating tussle. In Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, the state units need to be invigorated by appointing younger leaders to take charge.
In large states like Maharashtra, the Congress has not been able to register victory in any of the 24 municipal corporations, except Nanded, the home town of state president Ashok Chavan, in the past two years. A change of leadership is clearly called for if it has to win the assembly election in September 2019. For the Lok Sabha, it has smartly agreed on a seat-sharing arrangement with Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) for 40 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats. The party’s performance in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh—which together account for 65 Lok Sabha seats—is likely to go up after its wins in the assembly polls. But Rahul needs to charge up the party in Gujarat, Assam, Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh—which have a total of 120 Lok Sabha seats.
The problem for the Congress is that in the other big states, it is now playing third fiddle or worse. In West Bengal, which sends 42 MPs to the Lok Sabha, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) continue to hold sway
over the electorate. The BJP has pushed aside both the CPI(M) and the Congress to emerge as her main challenger. In Odisha (21 seats), Chief
Minister Naveen Patnaik of the Biju
Janata Dal (BJD) continues to be the dominant force and the Congress is steadily being relegated to third place with the BJP overtaking it as the principal challenger.
In Uttar Pradesh, which, at 80, sends the largest number of MPs to the Lok Sabha, the Congress remains a fringe player. It has two seats from the state in the current Lok Sabha and seven out of 404 seats in the UP assembly. While the state party unit is energised by the victory in the Hindi heartland states, it will have to work out a satisfactory seat arrangement with the two principal opposition parties—the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The Congress failed to strike an alliance with both parties in the latest assembly polls and will have to do some hard bargaining to get them on board any opposition alliance it can stitch together to challenge the BJP.
In Bihar, which has 40 Lok Sabha seats, the Congress is beset with organisational weaknesses while its alliance partner, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), is struggling to consolidate its support base. with its charismatic leader Lalu Prasad Yadav serving a jail term in the fodder scam cases. Under his son, Tejashwi, the RJD is showing signs of revival by winning one Lok Sabha and two assembly seats this year in March and May, respectively. But the BJP is ahead of the game by already working out a seat-sharing arrangement with its alliance partner, the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
Rahul is acutely aware that if he has to topple Modi and the BJP in 2019, the Congress cannot go it alone and will have to be part of a grand alliance of Opposition parties. Understanding that imperative, he has changed his leadership style and is ready to walk the extra mile to reach out to potential allies for 2019. The Congress scion quite often drives down to Sharad Pawar’s home in Delhi for political deliberations. CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury has emerged as another political counsellor for Rahul. Down south, he has a steady supporter in the form of DMK’s Stalin.
The biggest catch for Rahul in recent times has been his friendship with TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu, who has evolved as the pivot of opposition unity. Several top Congress leaders advised Rahul against forging an alliance with the TDP in Telangana as it was likely to hurt the party in the state, but the Congress president decided to sacrifice the half chances in Telangana for a better bargain in the run up to the Lok Sabha poll. So, though the TRS routed the Congress-TDP grand alliance, Rahul still has reason to smile. On December 10, Naidu took the initiative and got the leaders of 21 Opposition parties to meet in New Delhi. Leaders such as Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal, who had earlier stayed away from such meetings called by the Congress, also joined in to show solidarity. “The semi-final proves that the BJP is nowhere in all the states. This is a real democratic indication of the 2019 final match. Ultimately, people
are always the ‘man of the match’ [in a] of democracy. My congratulations to the winners,” tweeted Mamata Banerjee. The SP and BSP were quick to extend unconditional support to the Congress in MP even though the party had snubbed their pre-poll overtures.
The challenge for Rahul now is to carry forward the unity to the 2019 Lok Sabha election and enter into strategic alliances in UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Odisha, which together have 270 seats in the Lok Sabha. In the south, while the prospects appear bleak in Telangana (17 seats), the Congress is hoping to do well in Karnataka (28), where it is in alliance with the JD(S), join hands with the DMK in Tamil Nadu (39), forge a seat-sharing arrangement with the ruling TDP in Andhra Pradesh (25) and adopt the good alliance practices it has learnt as part of the United Democratic Front in Kerala (20), besides the lone Puducherry seat that takes the total in the south to 130.
Rahul also needs to come up with an alternative vision rather than merely picking faults with how the Modi government has handled issues. At the post-poll press conference, he outlined the central issues facing the country as providing employment for the youth, ensuring that farmers have a future in the country and curbing corruption. Now that the Congress has returned to power in major states, it will have to find ways to address agrarian discontent and, as Rahul has conceded, not through loan waivers, which are a temporary solution. The challenge will be to evolve suitable structural reforms and that too in a short span of time, as Indian voters are impatient. Rahul has been honest enough to admit that “rather than attacking the current dispensation, we will be setting the structure and architecture of a new vision going forward for our country”. Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said a massive effort has been on for several months to talk to large cross-sections of people to develop a vision for the party to implement.
Rahul is also conscious
that it will be a mistake to underestimate the Modi-Shah duo. Despite the setbacks in the Hindi heartland, Modi’s personal popularity, as the Axis My India-india today polls reveal, remains extremely high not only in these states but also across the country. In the past four-and-a-half years, Modi has presented himself as a messiah of the poor and executed a host of development schemes designed to benefit the needy apart from specific plans for women and youth.
While the jury is out on the implementation of these schemes, Modi’s rule has been relatively scandal free and the prime minister continues to be regarded as sincere, hard-working and honest. Rahul’s efforts to kick up the Rafale deal as a major scam is yet to gain the traction he is hoping for. The BJP, along with the RSS, also holds the Ayodhya card and has stepped up the tempo in recent months. The plan, according to one of its leaders, is to bolster its chances not only through the development plank but also by appealing to the sentiments of the hardcore BJP voter through the temple issue.
Rahul, though, has shown in the past year that he has what it takes; the three big wins are a confirmation of that. The Congress president has his task cut out for the next six months and time is clearly short. He has to move with speed, clarity, firmness and far-sightedness if he is to succeed in his mission of defeating Modi and the BJP in 2019. In this endeavour, he could perhaps take Jack Welch’s advice: “Before you are a leader, success is about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
—with inputs from Kaushik Deka and state bureaus