Delhi disconnect

File photo of Mamata Banerjee and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy | PTI

The rise of regional parties and leaders is no longer news. Last week’s results have brought in two phenomenally strong single-state leaders, Mamata Banerjee and J. Jayalalithaa. A third has risen too, Jaganmohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, though that has passed under the radar a bit, thanks to the overwhelming noise of the bigger upheavals elsewhere. So, what’s the news, if the rise and rise of regional leaders is an old story?

This election provides further evidence that the days of the very centralised, high command-led parties are now over. The Congress has been paying for a decade now for this inability, and unless it makes a correction now, it will face a disaster in 2014. Today it has much fewer regional leaders capable of winning their states for it than even the BJP. New evidence that this distant, Delhi-centric management of national politics no longer works also comes from the plight of the CPM. Its leadership has shown itself to be as far removed from reality, and as alienated from its state-level leaders and issues, as the Congress. And the results are with us.

The Left’s pulling out of support to the UPA, presenting a cynical, unprincipled and opportunistic third front alternative under Mayawati, left its voters in West Bengal and Kerala totally confused. But the bigger damage was strategic: it helped the Congress and the Trinamool discover each other as natural allies in West Bengal. That one blunder led to the Left’s total loss of clout in the 2009 Parliament elections, and now power in its most important state.

This argument is not so much about strategic errors as about the growing impossibility of managing national politics through centralised decision-making structures. This is a fundamental shift in our politics.

Delhi-based leaders of the CPM, for example, could argue that their decision to pull out support to the UPA was principled and dictated by ideology. But anybody who travelled in West Bengal in this election, as this columnist did, rarely heard the two words that were used to justify that decision: America, and Imperialism. In fact, the only time I heard that was when Dipak Sarkar, the CPM’s suave tyrant of Jungle Mahal, suggested that the uprising in Lalgarh may have been an imperialist conspiracy. So the high command was driven by issues that were of no concern to the voters in the one state that mattered to it the most. As a consequence, it also exposed its government in the state to the combined assault of the Trinamool and the Congress.

The Congress is celebrating its victories in Kerala and Assam and its successful joint venture in Bengal. But looking ahead to 2014, it should now be a deeply worried party. In the last Lok Sabha election, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh gave it 41 MPs, one-fifth of its tally of 206. Tamil Nadu now looks hopeless, unless it can change partners. But more significant is the near-certain destruction of its base in Andhra Pradesh, the one large state it could call its pocket borough and without sweeping which it cannot come to power. The victory of rebel Jaganmohan Reddy by more than five lakh votes is the real takeaway from this election for the Congress, way more significant than retaining power in Assam and the return of Kerala.

A quarter century’s political history tells you now that it is, for some reason, Andhra Pradesh where the Congress makes its most suicidal strategic blunders. And in each case, these stem from its high command’s inability to show even basic courtesies and political respect to the local leadership in a state it needs to be so grateful to for ensuring its hold on Delhi.

If the earlier insults to its Andhra leaders led to the rise of N.T. Rama Rao, enabling him to build a campaign of Telugu self-respect, the insensitive and unwise, if not contemptuous, way in which it treated Jagan after his father’s death is now a case of history repeating itself. His demand of immediate succession as chief minister was juvenile. But he, and his mother, had to be handled with greater care and respect. His father was the Congress party’s only stalwart capable of delivering a large state (Sheila Dikshit and Bhupinder Singh Hooda being the remaining two, but together, their states have just over one-third of the seats of Andhra).

Yet, the high command and its core decision-makers had no time for Jagan’s insolence. The party, of course, is greater than any individual, but it is many individuals, spread all over the country, that make a party and bring it votes, not a dozen or less people in New Delhi, far removed from realities of ground-level politics. In fact, while most of the Congress leadership has refrained from commenting on Andhra, Digvijaya Singh demonstrated rare political maturity and wisdom in underlining this as a most worrying development, one that should make our party put its house in order in Andhra.

The BJP has some of these problems too. It allowed the egos and ambitions of some members of the high command to destroy Vasundhara Raje’s prospects of re-election in 2008. Now it has made a correction and put her back in charge in Jaipur, and she has already made an impact. Probably because its high command itself has so many divisions and rivalries, it is not able to squash its regional leaders as the Congress and the CPM do.

That is why the BJP has Narendra Modi, Raman Singh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan who have all won their second terms and are still capable of delivering their states to the party. Or even Prem Kumar Dhumal and B.S. Yeddyurappa who both look unassailable in their states. Add to this the rise of Naveen Patnaik, Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee. If the Congress looks at the likely national political map in 2014 honestly, it will be staring at a real problem. Can it fix it? A good beginning would be to give no more than one Rajya Sabha term for each individual. At least that will force the high command dadas to go back and smell the earth, connect with people, instead of making a living sitting back, pulling strings and cutting their own regional leaders, and ultimately their party, to size.