The key accused in Kerala’s gold smuggling scandal have reportedly alleged that the Kerala assembly speaker, P. Sreeramakrishnan, gave them a bag full of US dollars to hand over to the UAE consulate. This will make the top opposition leader in the state, Ramesh Chennithala, a happy man. Chennithala has, for months, been accusing the Speaker of being involved in the scam and demanding his resignation.
Never mind that voters in Kerala recently gave more seats to the CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) over the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). The noise that the Congress party has been making over the gold scam didn’t seem to discredit the LDF before voters. The UDF can only hope that the local polls were rather too localised, and the gold scam will show its impact on the assembly election in May this year.
For now, the Congress’ single-point agenda in trying to make the gold scam stick on the LDF hasn’t worked. It is turning out to be a bit of Rafale — just as Rahul Gandhi thought allegations over the Rafale deal would discredit a popular Narendra Modi, Ramesh Chennithala hoped the gold scam would bring down Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who had become rather too popular with Kerala’s initial good performance in handling the coronavirus pandemic.
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The wrong problem
The efforts to link the top Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM leadership with the gold scam are not doing well for want of evidence. The over-enthusiastic response of central agencies trying to link the gold scam to terror funding and what not is being used by the CPM to gain sympathy, making it look like the Modi government is targeting the CPM government.
The media in Kerala took this case up in a big way, salacious as it was. Eyeballs were focused on it. This was a dream situation for the Congress, where the media does some of the opposition’s work in discrediting a government. And yet, Pinarayi Vijayan seems Teflon-coated.
Ramesh Chennithala and his party forgot to ask themselves one basic question: how will the voter benefit if the assembly Speaker is forced to resign? It is nobody’s case that there was no scam, or that the incumbent government shouldn’t be asked tough questions about it. But from July to December, the Congress in Kerala made it the central issue. Is it the central issue? If Pinarayi Vijayan is somehow labelled a gold smuggler, will it provide jobs to unemployed Gulf-returned men and women? Will it prepare Kerala for the next flood? Will it help contain Covid-19? Will it create infrastructure in the state? Will it make Kerala as investment-friendly as the other south Indian states?
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Basic rule of an ad
Anyone in advertising will tell you the basic principle of an ad. It must fulfil a need. What pressing need of the Kerala voter is being fulfilled with the Congress party going on an on about a gold scam which, so far, seems to involve only private individuals and not CPM leaders?
At the same time, it is useful to see the kind of headlines Pinarayi Vijayan generates. He speaks non-stop about development. His government has fulfilled 570 of 600 promises, he claims. As the Congress licked its wounds, Vijayan went on a state-wide tour, talking of development issues everywhere. This is what the Congress should have been doing.
This is not a lone example. Kamal Nath recently made the same mistake in the crucial Madhya Pradesh by-polls. He could have regained his government if he had swept them. Instead, he lost badly. The Congress’ entire campaign was about how Jyotiraditya Scindia and the BJP unfairly toppled his government. Murder of democracy and all that. And Kamal Nath did a lot of Hindutva positioning, trying to give credit to Rajiv Gandhi for the Ram Mandir. In the villages of Chambal, how was this to impress the voter? Does the voter care about making ends meet or getting justice for a wronged Kamal Nath? Does the voter care about falling incomes or about deciding who should get credit for building the Ram Mandir?
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‘Aam aadmi ko kya mila?’
In 2004, the Congress party won an unexpected lead over the BJP in the Lok Sabha election, helping it for the first UPA coalition government. Absolutely nobody had expected such a result. Pollsters and the commentariat alike were proved wrong about their consensus that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was too popular to defeat. The Congress surprised itself. The achievement was thanks to a slogan written for the Congress by an ad agency: “Aam aadmi ko kya mila?” What did the common man get?
That is the question the Congress has forgotten to ask now. When it does, it reaps rewards. The Congress again surprised everyone including itself by winning the Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assembly elections in 2018 by focusing on the voter’s top problem and promising a farm loan waiver. If Tejashwi Yadav managed to create some buzz around his campaign, it was with the promise of 10 lakh jobs.
In 2019, Rahul Gandhi has just such an opportunity in his promise of minimum basic income in some form. The Congress called it NYAY. The NYAY campaign was launched so late, and even after it was launched Rahul Gandhi just couldn’t give up his slogan, ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’. The Congress party’s data analytics cell reportedly insisted that the Rafale issue was working for the people. As a result, the party didn’t give NYAY much of a chance.
Today, Covid has ravaged the economy, and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) managed to retain Bihar despite the recession. People’s incomes have fallen, if they have managed to retain employment at all. This would be the perfect time for an opposition party to launch a mass campaign demanding minimum basic income as a social safety net. It could help the Congress in the forthcoming elections in Kerala and West Bengal. But where is Rahul Gandhi? He was tweeting against Modi from Milan.
The author is a contributing editor. Views are personal.