The party is brain dead

Representational image | A man holding the Congress flag | ThePrint | Manisha Mondal

Ever wondered why the Congress party is like the Indian cricket team? And it isn’t merely because they too keep losing most of the time. It is because just like our cricketers, defeat never seems to bother them. Actually, you get the feeling, they do not even seem to feel they’ve been defeated. Just as our cricketers continue to be stars, endorsing chewing gum and shampoo even after the whitewashes and blackwashes they suffer around the world, the Congressmen continue to walk around, preening after every electoral defeat as if that was the most glorious hour in their history.

If you have any doubts, look at your television screen in these allegedly fateful hours as results from the four state assembly elections pour in. Then think of how many Congressmen, if any, even admit that the party seems caught up in an unstoppable decline, that it has no new slogans, promises, appeal or even leaders to interest a large number of voters already showing signs of disillusionment with the NDA and, most importantly, that its only appeal to the people, to vote for a revival of the dynasty, isn’t working. In fact, the moment you raise that with a Congressman, he goes into holy outrage at the very suggestion. Then, you meet him on Delhi’s social circuit later in the evening. And he tells you the truth.

The results are still coming in. But the picture is emerging quite clearly now. The voters are already getting tired of the NDA much in the manner they had got tired of the Congress in the past. But since the Congress seems such a lousy alternative, they either vote for the inconsequential “others”, or go right back to the BJP and its allies. This leadership of the Congress party, which probably packs more experience in power and powerplay than any other political party in the global history of democracy, has now turned the old TINA (there is no alternative) factor on its head. In the past they got voted in by default, because the opposition was so divided. Now they give a similar walkover to the BJP and the rest.

The excuses the Congressmen give for the record are many. That they refuse to strike self-serving, unprincipled alliances. That they would never, never, exploit caste for electoral gain the way some of the others do. And that a little increase in their vote share here or there means that a consolidation –in their favour–is beginning to take place. Then you remind them that they were in bed with Laloo the other day, that their presence in elected houses all over the country is falling with every subsequent election and that their inability to find allies is beginning to look increasingly like the BJP’s pariah past and they are left speechless.

Barring a courageous few who speak the truth. They speak of a complete lack of direction, political thinking and philosophy, of coterie rule and the intrigues of gerontocracy, and of a Sonia “magic” that seems to be waning with each election. They may not quite have the nerve to say so publicly as yet, or initiate some introspection, if not a rebellion, within the party. But the whispers are getting louder now and the ranks of the “doubters” are swelling. Quite frankly, if the Congress party, in its wisdom, decided to slow-poison itself through self-delusion, why should we lose sleep over it? The middle-ground space vacated by it is being rapidly filled by the BJP. We have reasonable stability within the country and a government that looks more market-friendly than any we have seen in the past. So why bother what happens to the Congress?

The problem is, all democracies need, and deserve, a good opposition. But the Congress has been so inadequate in that role, so bankrupt and so wanting that you’d almost wish it would win elections again and become the ruling party. At least that way this great democracy will acquire a reasonably good opposition in the BJP. Then, even if the BJP had a dozen members in Parliament, and the Congress proffered them its equivalent of the current RSS controversy as a rallying point, you would see how an opposition is meant to function.

The Congress is so intellectually overwhelmed by the Dynasty that it is incapable of even thinking, strategising, and functioning as the opposition. When the controversy over government employees joining the RSS erupted in Gujarat, for example, no Congressman did a bit of homework to figure out that the CPM allowed the state government employees to join its party organisations in West Bengal. Dual membership, dual loyalty, then would have become a reasonable Congress campaign that cut both ways–into the ribs of both its enemies, the BJP and the CPM. Also, it would have left Mamatadi a bit confused. But who is thinking in the Congress? This belated show of muscle-power in the Gujarat assembly and lung-power in the Lok Sabha is a mere afterthought. The campaign will die out even before the counting of votes in Bihar is over.

If you ask many of the increasingly restless Congressmen, they will tell you the crux of the problem. It is their party leadership’s refusal to believe that they’ve been defeated and are sliding downhill and need imaginative, proactive solutions. They would, instead, wait and pray that the next election brings in an anti-incumbency wave and Sonia rides it to power. What they do not realise is that by the time that happens, by ceasing to be a credible opposition now, they may have even conceded that alternative ground to the others, namely the somehow indestructible Third Front.

But that is not the way the Congress leadership looks at its future. It is unwilling to acknowledge its failures or even the few successes it has had unless you can directly credit the Dynasty for these. After the last General Elections, for example, why didn’t Sonia hold, well, a tea party, at the AICC to display her two clear winners, S.M. Krishna and Vilasrao Deshmukh, to all of the high and the mighty in Delhi?

Even in such a disastrous election, the return of Karnataka and Maharashtra, India’s most industrialised states, into the Congress was something to write home about. But the Congress would not celebrate that for two reasons. One, it wasn’t possible to package these as the achievements of 10, Janpath. Second, this would have meant projecting Krishna and Deshmukh, the new kids on the block, and made the gerontocracy even more paranoid. In the past you saw Digvijay Singh and Ashok Gehlot treated the same way. Then Krishna and Deshmukh. This time, there isn’t anyone to display at all.