Why Rahul Gandhi wants to keep Mayawati in good humour despite snubs

Congress President Rahul Gandhi | PTI

Congress president Rahul Gandhi has to choose between short-term and long-term gains.

In his eagerness to replace Prime Minister Narendra Modi next year, Rahul Gandhi is committing the same mistake that his grandmother Indira Gandhi once made: overlook the Congress party’s long-term interest for immediate gains.

At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit Friday, the Congress president re-affirmed his interest in the country’s top job. He said that if the allies (in an incipient alliance of non-BJP parties) “want” him to be the Prime Minister, he “sure will”.

Despite repeated snubs by Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati – first over alliance in Chhattisgarh and then in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – he is still looking up to her with hope. He said Mayawati has indicated that alliances in states and at the Centre are “two different things”.

Rahul’s apparent desperation to keep Mayawati in good humour despite her snubs can only be explained by his eagerness for the top job, an offer that was there for him on a platter when the UPA-2 was in power.

The Congress needed an alliance with the BSP more in Chhattisgarh – where less than one per cent of the voters are known to decide the victor – and Madhya Pradesh, where Mayawati’s party saw its vote share decline to 6.29 per cent in 2013 election from 8.97 per cent in 2008. In MP, the combined vote share of the BSP and the Congress has often fallen short of the BJP’s in the past elections.

Therefore, Mayawati’s refusal to tie-up with the Congress in the forthcoming assembly elections is a big blow to the latter. And if she persists with it in the Lok Sabha elections, it could be a blow to Rahul’s ambitions in the immediate context but not necessarily to the Congress in the long run.

The Congress president has to choose between short-term and long-term gains. Indira Gandhi faced a similar choice in the 1971 Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Tamil Nadu. She chose the first, a decision that cost the Congress the state for good.

After the showdown with the Syndicate and split in the party in 1969, her government had been reduced to a minority and she was forced to take support from the DMK, the party that came to power in Madras state by replacing the Congress for the first time in 1967. The quid pro quo came in 1971 when she asked the state leadership of her party, Congress (R), not to contest the assembly elections in exchange for nine Lok Sabha seats offered by the DMK. Indira virtually handed over Tamil Nadu to the DMK on a platter then.

Some may argue that it was the Congress (O) under K. Kamaraj that wielded real influence in Tamil Nadu, and not the Indira faction. But that doesn’t dilute the irony of her decision to write off her party in the assembly elections, that too, barely four years after it lost power in the state for the first time since Independence. And, that was the last time the Congress was in power in the state on its own. The party has since been piggybacking on the DMK or the AIADMK in the elections even as it struggles to regain relevance in the state’s politics.

In the 1990s, when the Congress was struggling to come to terms with the Mandir-Mandal politics, its party presidents – Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri – chose a similar route in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In fact, then-Bihar chief minister Lalu Yadav, who brought an end to the long Congress rule in the state, personally worked to make Kesri’s rallies a huge success.

In 1996, Rao was happily shaking hands with BSP supremo Kanshi Ram after stitching an alliance for the assembly election. The Congress, which had ruled Uttar Pradesh till 1989 – except for short intervals totalling about five years – contested 126 of the 425 seats in the assembly, agreeing to play second fiddle to the BSP. Ironically, the Congress ended up watching the installation of the Mayawati government supported by the BJP.

Sonia Gandhi took over the party’s reins in 1998 and soon accepted coalition politics as the cornerstone of her party’s electoral strategy. She brought the party to power for 10 years but did it gain from her tactic of coalition politics?

Except in the 1977 post-Emergency election when it got 34.5 per cent votes, the Congress party’s vote share was always over 40 per cent until 1989 elections: ranging from 44.99 per cent in 1951 to 49.1 per cent in 1984. In 1989, the tally came down to 39.5 per cent and then 36.4 per cent in 1991. That was the last time the Congress’ percentage vote share was in 30s. In the next five elections, its vote share has hovered between 25 per cent and 28.5 per cent (when it gained 2.1 per cent in 2009). It was down to 19.5 per cent in 2014.

The Congress’ alliance politics hasn’t really benefited it in the long run, even though these electoral compromises might have helped individuals temporarily. If alliance politics has worked for the BJP, it’s because the saffron party has its own cadre and committed groups of supporters – upper castes, traders, and those believing in the RSS brand of Hindutva. They have served as the critical mass for the BJP’s expansion, at the cost of the Congress and regional outfits.

Today, the Congress doesn’t have any committed social group that it can count on. Its traditional vote banks have been gradually eaten into by new parties claiming to represent specific interests or groups. For instance, upper castes and a section of tribals by the BJP; Scheduled Castes by the BSP in the Hindi heartland and Karnataka, different factions of the RPI in Maharashtra, and the VCK in Tamil Nadu, among many other claimants.

Similarly, minorities’ support has been claimed by an array of parties ranging from the AIMIM to the IUML, the AIUDF, the SP, and the RJD, to name a few; the OBCs by the SP, the RJD, and a host of others; the Kapus by the Jana Sena; and the Reddys by the YSR Congress Party. There are myriad other registered and non-registered political parties and pressure groups claiming to represent different social groups.

Unlike the Congress, many of these national and regional parties have been working on social engineering to expand their support base. Mayawati, for instance, successfully wooed Brahmins to come to power in 2007. And Modi went beyond the traditional vote bank of the BJP to successfully woo OBCs and Dalits in 2014 Lok Sabha and subsequent assembly elections.

When Rahul Gandhi was appointed Congress general secretary in charge of the Youth Congress and the NSUI in 2007, he looked conscious of the follies of coalition politics or parasite-politics as a party leader once described it. Congressmen were suddenly talking about ‘ekla chalo re’ and the Tamil Nadu unit of the Youth Congress gave slogans of ‘Kamaraj rule’ (implying single-party rule).

Over a decade later, his political outlook has obviously changed and he looks impatient in his pursuit for power. He is pinning his hopes on regional parties to regain power, unmindful of the inherent contradictions in such an alliance. These parties have grown and will grow further at the expense of the Congress. If Mayawati has to expand her party’s reach in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh or any other state, she must undercut the Congress’ vote base. The same is true for most regional parties.

Rahul Gandhi, therefore, has to first decide whether his priority is to defeat Narendra Modi in 2019 or to rebuild his party. The two goals may not necessarily be mutually contrarian, provided the Congress projects itself as the natural alternative to the BJP and leads from the front. For instance, in UP, instead of contesting half-a-dozen seats as part of a SP-BSP-RLD alliance, the grand old party should go for the jugular and hope to be the main beneficiary of anti-incumbency, if any, against the BJP. After all, the same people had sent 21 Congress candidates to the Lok Sabha in 2009.