Lose-Lose

Congress knows it cannot repeat its 2009 performance. It simply does not have a track record. So what do you do if you know you cannot win?

A vendor sells Congress souvenirs on a street in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh (Representational photo)| Photo: Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg

Precisely at a time for when it had promised a decision-making flourish, the UPA seems missing in action. Some changes have moved, but many others have got stalled. The prime minister hasn’t spoken for any of his policies for weeks, and nobody knows for sure where Rahul Gandhi is. Meanwhile, various ministries are fighting among themselves, scuppering reform and FDI increases in their respective areas. Yes, the food security ordinance has been passed and some long-withheld environmental clearances have come. But overall, there is too little coherence to convince you that the UPA is improving its governance report card. Yet, if I said that, in the build-up to the 2014 campaign, the UPA, or rather the Congress, has been the first off the block, will you, to steal the favourite line of our brilliant columnist Surjit Bhalla, tell me I am mad?

But the fact is, the Congress has made the first moves in this campaign. It has unveiled a minimalistic strategy. It knows it cannot repeat its 2009 performance. It simply does not have a track record. So what do you do if you know you cannot win? You deny the other side victory. Simply put, I may not be able to win, but I can ensure that neither will you. Then it will be down to post-election arithmetic, a kind of who-cannot-go-with-whom Duckworth-Lewis, when no clear decision is possible.

Armies call this the strategy of terrain denial. When you know you cannot win, you block your rival’s progress and then salvage something from the stalemate. The Congress knows that if they allowed this election to be fought on governance, they would be laughed out. And if they let the opposition set it up on corruption, they would be wiped out. So the Congress has gone right back to trying to convert this into a single-point contest: not to bring themselves back, but to keep Modi out. Surely, secularism is central to our Constitution and society, and there can be no compromise with this. But in simple, political English, what this means is, if I can set up this campaign on the single point, who the Muslims should fear and who they shouldn’t, I may be able to deny the NDA, or rather Narendra Modi, power. Talk to the seniormost people in the Congress, and the number they mention, with a gleam in their eyes, is 135-40. If they can get to that, and somehow keep the BJP (with its essential allies, the Shiv Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal) within 165, they will be much better placed to form some kind of a coalition eventually. Because the number of those who cannot go with Modi will always be higher than those who can. In fact, Modi’s presence in front may even give some of the regional and left parties a high moral excuse to bury their differences with arch enemies, just to keep him out.

There is another key number: to somehow keep the BJP below 25 in Uttar Pradesh. India’s electoral history tells you that for an anti-Congress combination to come to power, it has to sweep the entire Hindi heartland (1977, ’89, ’98-’99). That is because the largest of these parties, the BJP and the Lohiaite-Mandalite groups, are not even in the contest in the south and most of the east. With Nitish Kumar in the bag, the Congress believes this minimalistic approach is working. They have denied Bihar to Modi. Now if only they could hold him back in Uttar Pradesh. He can then sweep Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and the big urban centres. It will not be enough. The departure of Nitish has also encouraged them to believe that many of the other unhitched players, Naveen Patnaik and Jaganmohan Reddy in particular, may also find it tough to support the NDA. And if the campaign does get fought predominantly on identity, you may even achieve an impossibility, like both Mamata and the Left supporting a secular combination from outside, just to keep Modi away. Modi’s arrival, therefore, has changed, redefined and impacted the Congress strategy much before it has reflected in his own party’s. The Congress has now set a trap for the BJP. The heavy campaign on the Ishrat Jahan case, at the supremely cynical price of unravelling the Intelligence Bureau, is only the most visible example of this.

And the BJP, for now, has walked straight into the trap. Its first false move was not the elevation of Modi: that was supposed to work differently, as he has been repositioning himself for three years now as a much-reformed nationalist champion of economic growth. Then, he and his party sent Amit Shah to Uttar Pradesh. Just what were they smoking, drinking, eating, thinking, when they did so? Everybody has seen this move as the BJP following a strategy of polarisation. And Amit Shah, too much of a faithful to suppress his basic instinct, walked right to the deepest end of that trap with his initial statements in Lucknow, and then the visit to Ayodhya. Now, his party president can say a million times that Ram Temple is not an election issue. But the damage is done. Or, as they’d say in the heartland, samajhne waale samajh gaye….

Frankly, when you talk to Modi and his seniormost BJP supporters, they say they know that mere polarisation will not work for them. That the Modi they want to project in 2014 should look and sound nothing like the Modi of 2002. But politics is about faces and masks, or mukhautas. So if the Modi of 2014 is represented by Amit Shah, you do not leave much to debate on who is the face and who the mask.

This is precisely what the Congress had been waiting for. An election fought on performance, growth, governance and corruption would simply devastate them. A polarised campaign gives them hope. Building a temple, in any case, does not have the same oomph as destroying a mosque.

Unless Modi and the BJP make a course correction now, this is the way this campaign is headed. It will not work for them. They have to make a course-correction and ensure no more Amit Shahs poke their fingers in the eye of middle India. Otherwise, you can safely predict our most negative election campaign ever. An election fought on identity will be so unfair to Muslims, so contemptuous of Hindus, and so insulting to such a resurgent, young and aspirational India. It will also give the Congress a chance.