Under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership, the only trump card with Congress is the mahagathbandhan

File photo of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi along with Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee | Photo: PTI

The Congress has been raising key issues to make Modi uneasy. The party, however, forgets them after a Parliament session or an election.

Former US president Barack Obama had to wait for 20 minutes in the corridors of a Paris hotel to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recalled minister Piyush Goyal Friday. He was describing it as a “56-inch-chest moment” for Indians.

On the fourth anniversary of the Modi government, the minister was highlighting India’s growing stature in the comity of nations.

Obama and Modi were in Paris in 2015 to attend the climate summit – the Conference of Parties or CoP21. Such was the aura of the Indian Prime Minister that world leaders vied with one another to get “two minutes” with him. When Obama arrived for the meeting, Modi was still holding talks with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe. For 20 minutes, with his arms on the shoulders of Piyush Goyal and Prakash Javadekar, Obama waited outside. He was trying to convince the two ministers how Modi’s role was crucial to the climate deal.

“I also felt it was a 56-inch-chest moment for me,” said Goyal while making a presentation on the achievements of the NDA government in four years, including surgical strikes and India’s emergence as the fastest growing economy, among others.

 Amit Shah’s task for 2019  

The tagline of the government’s fourth anniversary blitz is: “saaf niyat, sahi vikas” (clean intent, right development). The thrust of the speeches by ministers and senior party functionaries appears to be the BJP’s poll plank ahead of 2019. It takes forward the 2014 campaign slogans on call for a ‘strong and decisive PM’ (as compared to “weak” Manmohan Singh in 2014 and ‘immature and inexperienced dynast’ Rahul Gandhi in 2019). It emphasises the value of a government with clean intent (as opposed to the tainted opposition leaders, notwithstanding their cries of vendetta politics), and the transformational changes in the lives of the poor with welfare schemes benefiting 22 crore households so far (no matter what political adversaries say about job creation and farm distress).

Goyal’s slide show featured some images of Muslim beneficiaries to bolster claims of inclusive growth. This, of course, was more of garnishing as the core Hindutva politics needed no reiteration.

The party is now all set to launch a year-long campaign for 2019. BJP president Amit Shah has his schedule worked out for the next one year. He will spend at least 35 days in West Bengal, where he has set himself an ambitious target of bagging 22 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats. Of the 120 Lok Sabha seats the BJP has never won, 60 have already been visited by Modi and Shah, and they will cover the rest in coming months. With Modi’s public meeting in Cuttack on Saturday, the two top BJP leaders have visited every single constituency in coastal Odisha, the region where it has a limited influence. Shah is eyeing eight out of 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, where it had won just one in 2014.

A BJP strategist claimed that in Andhra Pradesh, the TDP was a beneficiary of the ‘Modi wave’ in 2014 but now that the southern party has parted ways with the NDA, it’s time for the BJP to politically encash Modi’s popularity in Andhra. The saffron party has already set up committees in 39,140 of the 41,000 booths in the state.

Congress in denial mode

Now, compare all this with the preparations in the opposition camp. It is easy to see merit even in otherwise-discredited surveys that predict a majority for the NDA in 2019.

The Congress doesn’t even have an organisation in place in many states. Since taking over the reins of the party, Rahul Gandhi has been giving charge of states to his trusted wazirs to edge out the old guards, but there is little activity on the ground.

Rahul has been making bombastic statements, vowing to cause an “earthquake” if he was allowed to speak in Parliament, and declaring that Modi wouldn’t be able to stand and face him for 15 minutes in the Lok Sabha. These hyperbolic claims have sparked much mirth, instead of serving the desired purpose of enhancing Rahul’s political stature as Modi’s principal challenger.

Under his leadership, the party has been raising key issues, but quickly forgets them after a Parliament session or an election is over. Rahul raises issues of jobs, skill development and farm distress, but just when these appear to start making the government and the BJP uneasy, he moves on to other issues.

The lack of direction and confusion in the principal opposition party was again manifest recently when it moved an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Dipak Misra in the Rajya Sabha and later went to the Supreme Court to challenge Chairman Venkaiah Naidu’s decision to reject it, before beating a hasty retreat.

As of now, Rahul seems to have put all his eggs in one basket – that is, mahagathbandhan or grand alliance of anti-BJP forces. It had worked in Bihar assembly election. In Karnataka also, if the JD(S) and the Congress had a pre-poll alliance, the two parties could have won 150 of the 222 assembly seats. Rahul and his cohorts are now eager to replicate this model at the national level.

But BJP strategists say that such an alliance could pose a problem to them only in Uttar Pradesh and Rahul will soon realise that politics is not arithmetic. What the mahagathbandhan proponents seem to overlook is that they have no counter to the personality cult of Modi. It suits the BJP if an array of ‘vested interests’ (count on the BJP to use this phrase) are ranged against Modi, a chaiwalla who stays away even from his family to serve the poor and fight the corrupt.

In August 2013, Rahul had said at a party workshop that if India was a computer, the Congress was its default programme. The party’s confidence may have shaken following the continued electoral battering since November 2013. But it hasn’t shaken the Gandhis’ faith in the party being the only national alternative. That probably explains why the Congress leadership remains in denial mode about the existential crisis the party is faced with.