That what should have normally been the silly season turned out to be such a politically charged fortnight was probably to be expected, with a much delayed AICC plenary and the BJP’s big rally in the capital. But the surprise of surprises is evidence of the first stirrings of some real introspection in the Congress. Not much of it is openly articulated, or even whispered. That would be too much to expect from a party whose basic instinct is sycophancy. Yet you now sense an unprecedented, deeper, healthier rethink. This change is probably led by none else than the Family. Sonia Gandhi’s belated and fond remembrance of Narasimha Rao is a more significant event than it would seem. The Congress has spent nearly a decade-and-a-half disowning and condemning Rao, and generally holding him responsible for whatever may have led to the downturn in the party’s fortunes. Babri Masjid was demolished under his watch and the Congress moved to soft Hindutva leading, it was concluded, to the loss of the Muslim vote. So he was responsible for both calamities: decline of the Congress, and the rise of the Hindu right. He was so reviled that the truck bearing his body was not allowed even symbolic entry into AICC headquarters.
You could, indeed, dismiss this hint of Rao’s rehabilitation as a response to the challenge in Andhra. But I will be more optimistic in guessing that this is a signal for some subtle, and significant, course correction by Sonia Gandhi herself. One would have to be brave to argue that maybe now the Family itself is willing to give the sycophancy-driven party a signal that the times when simply the call from a Gandhi, or two Gandhis as is the case now, will win them elections are now over. That, the party may now need to remember the contribution of some significant others as well?
The larger argument, however, is not about the political resurrection of a long-demised individual. It is about what and whose achievements the Congress party of today, and more significantly, in 2014 goes to the voter with. If it has seen the need to remember Rao after 15 years, for how long could it afford to overlook the real legacy of UPA’s 10 years? This is an important question because in this new, and uncharacteristic, churning in the Congress today you see a fascinating interplay of two views. The dominant one, of course, is that the party needs no more than the name of the Gandhis, and a return to the pre-Rao ideological positioning: hard socialism, hard secularism and even a kind of anti-Americanism. This, it is argued, would bring back the old votebanks, the Muslims, adivasis, the Dalits and the poor in general. The challenger view, held by a very small, brave minority, is that slogans that got you votes until 1980 can no longer work, nor can the mere name of the Family, in 2014, particularly when more than half the population in 2014 would have been born after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. But this view will have no future unless the Gandhis themselves encourage it.
The Congress party’s instinctive old view was fully articulated by Digvijaya Singh at the AICC meet and if you read it with what he has been saying on Naxalism and tribals, the pattern becomes clear. His idea, and his is by no means an insignificant support base in the party, is to return to hard secularism (even more than socialism) and thereby first scaring the Muslims of the RSS and then impressing them by taking it on frontally. The only problem is, the Muslims need no further persuasion to fear the RSS. Even as they have abandoned the Congress as a permanent votebank, they have voted tactically to defeat the BJP. Except, they are no longer willing to be taken for granted. In each state they look for the party, or the candidate, most likely to defeat the BJP and vote with that one purpose. So if the Congress does not have the ability (the Urdu word, auqat, might be more apt) to defeat the BJP in, say, UP, they would not waste their vote out of some old affection but vote for the SP or BSP instead.
Where the Congress is a credible opposition to the BJP, as in Maharashtra, Andhra, Karnataka or even Gujarat, they vote for it. So this entire new strategic turn to hard RSS-bashing is so much hot air. The same would apply to the 2010 Congress party’s Old Guard’s nostalgia for hard socialism. You talk sadly of the poor all the time, of two Indias, of the hapless aam admi who suffers for lack of connections, and the voter turns around and asks, so what have your party’s governments been doing for 50 years out of 63 since 1947? Some in the party now acknowledge the laziness of this approach. Because if it impressed anybody even a bit, the party would not have lost its deposit in 221 of the 243 seats in Bihar.
I had said last week that some of the lingering distortions in the Congress worldview are rooted in a faulty analysis on the 2004 verdict as being some kind of a permanent condemnation of the idea of a shining India. These distortions have also been compounded by a faulty reading of the 2009 verdict. You ask a Congressman and he will tell you they won because of NREGA and farm loan waivers. Almost nobody would credit their re-election on five full years of 8 per cent growth. It is the NAC-driven largesse, they say, that made the poor return to the Congress. What does the data say? In Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where the largest percentage of the population is under the poverty line, the Congress got just 10 seats out of 86. Even if you add the other Bimaru states, MP and UP (but not Rajasthan which has moved on), the party’s tally was just 48 out of 208. So the poor and the tribals really did not return to the UPA in spite of NREGA, loan waiver and the Forest Rights Act. In fact, in 47 ST seats countrywide, it won 19. The ones who voted for it, on the other hand, were the cities and upwardly mobile, urbanising, aspirational states.
The Congress or its allies swept every major city (except Bangalore and Ahmedabad), and urbanising states. Out of the 204 seats in Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra and even Gujarat, it collected 134 seats, exactly two-thirds.You could argue, therefore, that what got the UPA re-elected was growth rather than the scattering of povertarian largesse at the poor. Looking ahead to 2014, you could either believe that another five years of 9 per cent growth would bring you even better results than 2004, and mould your slogans and political agenda accordingly, or make a hard reverse to 1980 in the hope that the oldest formulae would still work best. Evidence of data tells you clearly which is the smarter course. And since 1991 did not merely mark the beginning of India’s modern growth story, but also the final burial of old-style socialism, you can be forgiven for hoping that Sonia’s restoration of Narasimha Rao in the Congress pantheon might mark the first stirrings of a welcome rethink.
Also read: Intelligence Bureau could’ve saved Babri Masjid by alerting PM Rao to demolition conspiracy