Congress members are frustrated nowadays. For one, they had thought history would repeat itself. Students’ protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on campuses, preceded by those against fee hikes in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, reminded them of Gujarat’s Navnirman Movement and Jayaprakash Narayan’s ‘Total Revolution’ of the 1970s. But to their chagrin, the Bharatiya Janata Party is in control of the CAA debate and has given it a Hindu-Muslim spin.
Congress members can, however, take heart from the fact that the CAA has pitchforked Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in the opposition front line in Uttar Pradesh. She is all over TV screens and in newspaper headlines. So much so that Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati is attacking Priyanka over the death of infants in Rajasthan’s Kota hospital.
Are opposition leaders over-reacting to Priyanka’s travels across Uttar Pradesh to meet the victims of alleged police brutality? To answer this question, one needs to understand her politics.
Also read: Congress’ CAA-NRC strategy — vocal protests but no communal overtones
The faces around Priyanka in UP
Nothing captures her politics better than the cast of characters that one sees around her in those TV camera frames.
The most prominent of them is Sandeep Singh, Priyanka’s political guide and mentor, who was a member of the All India Students Association, the students’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), in JNU. He had shown black flags to then-PM Manmohan Singh in 2005. Rahul Gandhi took a liking to Sandeep Singh and made him his speechwriter, and later gave him charge of his sister’s political training. When a TV reporter tried to get Priyanka’s comment on the scrapping of Article 370 in August last year, Singh manhandled him, threatening: “Thok ke yehi baja doonga. Maroonga toh yahin gir jaoge.” It endeared him to the Gandhi family more.
Another prominent face seen with Priyanka is Imran Masood, the controversial leader from Saharanpur who had once threatened to “chop” Prime Minister Narendra Modi “into tiny pieces” and was arrested for his hate speech. Masood now accompanies the Congress general secretary during her visits to victims of UP Police excesses.
The third face in the TV frame with Priyanka is Acharya Pramod Krishnam, the tilak-dhari baba whose name figured in the All India Akhara Parishad’s list of “fake” babas. Krishnam had unsuccessfully contested against Rajnath Singh on the Lucknow Lok Sabha seat in 2019.
The fourth face in the TV frame is of former Union minister Jitin Prasada, a prominent young Brahmin leader who is perceived to be the right person in the wrong party. He is a true-blue politician who believes in agitational politics, a fast-disappearing breed in the Congress. The 46-year-old caused a lot of heartburns last week as he kept pace with Priyanka when she walked for 4-5 km in Lucknow to meet IPS officer-turned-activist S.R. Darapuri. Pramod Tiwari, 67, another Brahmin leader, couldn’t keep pace and rushed back into his car. He drove ahead and waited to join her, but couldn’t make it into the camera frame.
Another leader who is with Priyanka everywhere in UP is 40-year-old state Congress president, Ajay Kumar Lallu, a promising backward community leader who is a protégé of Sandeep Singh.
Also read: Priyanka Gandhi visits family of dead anti-CAA protesters in UP as toll touches 16
What’s Priyanka’s politics?
The faces in the camera frame with Priyanka Gandhi make a clear statement: Rahul Gandhi may be her role model, but when it comes to politics, she is learning from former Madhya Pradesh CM Digvijaya Singh’s book. Remember Singh’s controversial claim about Delhi’s Batla House encounter being “fake” and his visits to Azamgarh to meet the families of Muslim youngsters who had been arrested in terror cases? As AICC general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh, Digvijaya Singh played Muslim politics hard. He has been sidelined by Rahul Gandhi for the last two years, but Priyanka seems to have discovered merit in Singh’s politics.
Unlike her ‘janeudhari’ Dattatreya Brahmin brother who has been wary of overtly courting religious minorities, Priyanka’s calculations in Uttar Pradesh are centred on Muslims who constitute 19 per cent of the state’s population. To this end, she is not afraid of being seen with hardcore elements such as Imran Masood. Rahul Gandhi had cancelled his rally in Saharanpur after Congress candidate Masood’s controversial statement against PM Modi, but Priyanka did a roadshow there. Another constituency she is looking at is that of Brahmins, who constitute about 10 per cent of the state’s population. That explains the presence of Brahmin leaders around her, which is also expected to allay any possible apprehension among Hindus about her Muslim outreach. If Lallu could bring some OBC votes, it would be a bonus. OBCs constitute 45 per cent of Priyanka’s UP team.
Given Yogi Adityanath government’s alleged thakurwaad, the Congress is hoping to eat into the BJP’s vote bank of OBCs and upper castes. Priyanka, say her team members, is also preparing to lay claim on the party’s traditional votebank of Dalits, who had switched their loyalty to the Bahujan Samaj Party.
Also read: CRPF says no breach in Priyanka Gandhi’s security during visit to Lucknow
Will Priyanka’s Muslim politics work in Yogi’s UP?
If you ask Congress members, Priyanka’s calculus is already working. For the first time in three decades, bus-loads of people from every UP district went to Delhi to attend the party’s Bharat Bachao rally last month. She knows there is no party cadre in UP. “She is, therefore, trying to make the Congress what it always was — a party of movements, be it against the CAA or atrocities against women or something else,” said one of her loyalists.
Priyanka has a lot of ground to cover to revive the Congress ahead of the 2022 UP assembly elections. The party’s performance in the last three assembly elections is anything but inspiring: 22 seats in the 403-member assembly in 2007, 28 seats in 2012, and 7 in 2017. The Congress MPs’ tally from UP in the last four Lok Sabha elections read: 9, 21, 2 and 1.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is, therefore, going for broke in UP by courting the Muslims — and the New Hindu who shouldn’t mind her minority politics.
Digvijaya Singh’s biggest success in UP — 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 — came in the backdrop of the controversy he stoked over Batla House encounter in late 2008. But those results reflected much more than his Muslim appeasement politics. There was a pro-incumbency wave in favour of the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre. Digvijaya Singh had also worked on UP’s complicated caste arithmetic to identify and focus on 30 Lok Sabha candidates; he deployed them in the field in early 2008 to start campaigning for the election next year.
After the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress aggressively took up communally polarising issues such as terror cases against Azamgarh youth, alleged ‘saffron terror’ and the conspiracy theory about the killing of Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare. These issues didn’t seem to help the Congress much in the 2012 assembly election as the party’s tally went up by only six seats. Singh’ close aides maintain that the results would have been very different if Rahul Gandhi hadn’t tied him down. Singh had apparently identified 150 candidates for 2012 assembly election a year in advance, but Rahul’s team weeded them out during the screening process.
Priyanka’s gambit in Uttar Pradesh, modelled on Digvijaya Singh’s politics, may be adventurous but she has her own reasons. With Mayawati becoming a spent force, Dalits are looking for an alternative. Although Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar Azad is emerging as a potential leader, the Congress may count on regaining a section of its traditional votebank. As for the Muslims, they might be disappointed with Akhilesh Yadav due to his armchair politics.
Priyanka’s hope lies there.