UPA’s meteoric fall

Rahul Gandhi, accompanied by former PM Manmohan Singh and other senior party leaders, during filing of his nomination papers at the AICC office in New Delhi in 2017 | PTI Photo

Just a year back, everything looked as if it was playing out to script for the UPA government, and even more specifically, the Congress party. Now, it seems to have all gone wrong, much like the dramatic turn in a romantic couple’s fortunes after the interval in a 1960s Hindi movie. Except, just about 18 months into a five-year term, it isn’t quite interval time yet for the UPA. And further, unlike a Hindi movie of the 1960s, or at any time, in politics a happy ending cannot be presumed or guaranteed. The challenge UPA 1 had to tackle from difficult allies and the Left supporters from outside now feels like a breeze compared to the open war that has broken out among the members of the cabinet. More precisely, the Congress members of the cabinet. The senior-most ones are tired and disillusioned. The young lot, as politicians in their late-50s and mid-60s are described in India (factoid: Wen Jiabao is happy to be addressed as grandpa by schoolchildren, while Prithviraj Chavan, the young, new Maharashtra chief minister is exactly his age), are fighting, bickering, bitching and leaking against each other. It is no longer confined to whispers in any darkened corridors or the usual capital city scuttlebutt.

It is a widely known fact, and easy to substantiate, that UPA 2 has emerged as the most internally fractious Indian cabinet since Morarji Desai’s Janata in 1977. On the eve of the AICC session, the party’s leadership cannot even look at the states for succour and optimism. The Congress, today, has the most ineffectual chief ministers in the country. Its failure to stabilise Andhra after YSR’s sudden death and to build a new leader is only matched by its utterly cynical greed and incompetence in messing up Maharashtra. The party has now ruled the state for 11 unbroken years, under five chief ministers (Deshmukh served twice). You ask anybody in Mumbai about Prithviraj Chavan’s prospects now, and the answer you get is: he may deliver, but only if the party stops harassing him for more resources. And this, mind you, is no mere loose talk. The unanimity on this argument, and the promptness and uniformity with which it is spoken, is frightening.

The only other politically significant state the party controls, Rajasthan, presents an indifferent picture, even if not of alarm. The chief minister, always a lightweight, is further weakened as the political centre of gravity of his state unit now resides in Delhi, in the form of PCC chief C.P. Joshi. The debacle in this week’s by-elections and recent civic polls tells a story. Other Congress states, J&K, Haryana, Assam, Goa and Pondicherry, are insignificant.

Very few Congressmen dispute these facts. But, if you expected this sense of crisis to make them sober down or rethink their politics, you are mistaken. In fact, even if they tear their colleagues to shreds, or make patronising, even ridiculing remarks about the prime minister, the swagger is still all there. And it comes from the question all of them throw at you: but where is the opposition? Look at the situation within the BJP. But, post-Bihar, there are some stirrings. Nobody in the Congress would ever dare question the leadership, but for the first time in the history of UPA coalitions, some Congressmen have begun to doubt if their party’s future has indeed been pre-settled or whether politics hereon will play out to that script. In the three days preceding the Bihar results, I happened to run into at least six senior Congress ministers and two general secretaries. The most pessimistic estimate of Congress seats was 20. Of course, the most optimistic was 60 and the person who made it would be most embarrassed if I mentioned his name now. But just four? Congressmen now wonder once again, only in whispers if something indeed has, or is, going wrong.

They do not have to look far. Many, in fact most, of the Congress party’s current problems lie in the fact that they misread the verdict of 2009 to believe that the opposition had been vanquished for ever. Since May 2009 Congressmen have been celebrating the victory of 2014 and posturing, preparing, and of course poisoning their likely 2014 rivals’ lunch already. We know politics is the art of the possible, but jockeying for positions in a 2014 (Rahul Gandhi) government from May 2009 is about as illogical as a cricket team, however formidable and all-conquering, wanting to play the second innings first. This is where the party has blundered. All the problems that bedevil it today, squabbling ministers, restive allies, impatient and insecure general secretaries and apparatchiks and, worst of all, a frighteningly weakened prime minister and, more specifically, his PMO, are rooted in this. Several members of this cabinet make no bones of their belief that they draw their power from the Gandhi family and as long as they have their backing, they have nobody to fear and, frankly, respect, and that includes the prime minister. In the Westminster system, whatever his personality, the prime minister is where the cabinet’s centre of gravity resides. If you look at UPA 2, it has not seemed to be the case at least in the last six months.

When it comes to political and strategic intellect, the Congress is blessed with an embarrassment of riches. You will see these on display at the AICC session. But all their collective wisdom and cleverness will not reverse the downslide unless they start to look within rather than draw comfort from the BJP’s situation. And if they pull themselves out of complacence, or are pulled out by the Gandhis, they will also see two new realities in the Indian national political balance of power. One, the post-2004 party-government compact where the party, or more precisely the Gandhi family, totally de-risked itself by distancing itself from its government’s major decisions so it could later claim the credit for successes and disown its setbacks, like Sharm el-Sheikh, will no longer work. It won’t work because people won’t accept it. And the party cannot go to the polls in 2014 seeking an anti-incumbency vote against its own government. So, from economics to environment, from diplomacy to terrorism, the party and the government have to work firmly on a sink-or-swim together basis. Two, the party has to accept that the days when pan-national leaders could swing entire elections are over. Political and electoral power have now moved to the states. Look at the Indian election now like a best-of-nine-sets tennis match. The nine sets are UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, MP, AP, Kerala, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Together these send 351 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Any coalition that wins five of these will automatically get close to 200 seats and the rest will then fall in place. How well-placed is the UPA of December 2010 in this nine-set game of electoral tennis? An honest answer to that would be a sobering and useful theme to the AICC session, rather than the usual swagger, verbose platitudes and loud declarations of loyalty and sycophancy.