The Congress chimera in UP

The recent Assembly poll seems to have given a false sense of confidence to the Congress Party. Aside from the surprisingly good showing in Chhattisgarh, the Congress barely managed to beat the BJP, with the latter actually getting half of one per cent more popular votes in Madhya Pradesh and merely a similar percentage less in Rajasthan. Therefore, there is no need for jumping around with joy as if the Congress has regained its old glory under its new dynast, Rahul Gandhi. To an extent, bluster and bluff may be justified to boost the morale of the party cadres, but the leadership is supposed to be realistic in its calculations and approach. However, what the announcement by the party in Lucknow on Sunday reveals is that it has lost all touch with reality following the Assembly poll. Senior party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said at a press conference a day after the BSP and the SP firmed up their alliance that the Congress would contest all eighty seats in UP. He insisted that the party was a force to reckon with in the State and it was not ready to play second fiddle to anyone. However, other parties ready to battle the BJP were welcome to ally with the Congress. Since the BSP-SP had slammed the door shut on the Congress, the latter would fight on its alone as it was the only national party capable of stopping the BJP. Seeking to undermine the casteist alliance of Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav, Azad said it was not a regional fight for the control of UP but a fight for Parliament where the Congress was better placed to take on the BJP. He cited the 21 seats the party won on its own in a multi-cornered contest in the State in the 2009 parliamentary poll to make the case for going solo in the State yet again. How the party will fare in a multicornered contest when the dominant BJP will face a stiff challenge from the SP-BSP combine remains to be seen, but it is plain that the Congress has lost much ground since the 2009. It is notable that in the last poll, the party leadership had to send an SOS to the Yadav chieftain Mulayam Singh when Rahul Gandhi found himself locked in a very tough fight against the BJP in Amethi. Yadav obliged, directing his party cadres to bail out the Congress’s prince. In the Assembly poll in the State in 2017, with 6.2 per cent popular vote, the Congress bagged but a mere seven seats of the 105 it had contested. The parliamentary poll will pose further difficulties to the party since unlike the last Assembly poll the SP and the BSP are set to contest it in alliance.

However, some analysts expect that the Congress contesting alone might harm the BJP more than the alliance of the casteists because it might eat into the BJP’s upper caste vote. Whichever way it turns out eventually cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty, but one thing is for sure that it has scuppered the chances of a Mahagathbandhan. The Congress is untouchable in most States where strong regional parties are in place. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has no use for Congress. Ditto in Odisha where Naveen Patnaik will not touch it with a pair of tongs. Remarkably, in both these states the BJP has emerged as the main opposition party, expecting to win quite a few seats in the coming parliamentary poll. In Karnataka, the JD(S)-Congress alliance is already fraying, with Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy publicly complaining that his plight is worse than a clerk in the government, with the Congress treating the JD(S) as a second class citizen. In Telangana, the Congress has no takers, with the recent Assembly poll rejecting it thoroughly along with its new-found ally, the TDP. In the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the TDP is likely to concede a few seats to the Congress in a pre-poll alliance while the two will face formidable challenge from the YSR Congress of Jagan Reddy who seems to have a tacit understanding with the BJP. In short, there will be a direct fight between the BJP and the Congress in a few northern and western States while elsewhere in the country regional parties will hold sway. In such a scenario, Modi’s prospects of a second straight term get brighter, especially when no other leader of comparable pull and charisma is on the horizon to lay a credible claim to prime ministership.