Byword
WILL UPA SURVIVE THIS SUMMER?
MJ Akbar
A fall from grace is par for the course. A slide into humiliation is another discourse. Defeat is the familiar price of failure in democracy. Humiliation is retribution for a more dangerous sin, arrogance. Parties often blossom after an election victory, as Congress did after 2004; very few retain any relationship with reality after re-election. The trap of 2012 was set in 2009.
Rahul Gandhi sought to win his electoral spurs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh on the road to the Prime Minister's office. After two years of effort and expense, he has just discovered that he has neither horse nor direction along the Gangetic belt. Family, in these egalitarian times, is an inadequate rationale for office.
Dynasties are loath to admit mistakes, since they damage their principal claim to power, mystique. Even a punctured prince must be praised, therefore, if for nothing else than hard work, as if hard work is perfectly understandable for mortals like Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati but a labour of love for a prince. Everyone works hard in an election. Defeat cannot be a prince's fault: candidates were wrong, or the party was to blame, and not a whisper about who chose the candidates, or who was in charge of building the party. A curtain of alibis becomes a tattered cloak.
Rahul Gandhi is not young. At his age, 41, his great grandfather Jawaharlal presided over the historic 1929 Lahore session and pushed through, despite the skepticism of his mentor Mahatma Gandhi, the swaraj resolution which formally committed the Congress to complete independence from the British. Jawaharlal soared ahead in national esteem on the wing of ideas, not slogans undercooked by trainee chefs who do not know the difference between hot air and nourishment. Jawaharlal was an intellectual who bridged a formidable library with the poverty of a village, and was at home in both environments. He learnt his politics from peasant and Mahatma, as well as from the prescriptions of an ancient sage he so admired, Chanakya.
When in 321 BC Chandragupta sought to overthrow Mahapadma Nanda ['the son of a barber'], Chanakya offered some sensible advice: Remember how your mother taught you to eat a hot chapatti – begin from the edges. Rahul Gandhi's strategy, literally and metaphorically, was the reverse. He operated from the centre. From the comfort of a power perch in Delhi, he converted the chapatti into a jigsaw puzzle. His advisers thought each geographical or demographic piece could be adjusted by money, legislative illusion or emotional patronage.
From this emerged a campaign of smoke and mirrors. A cash award was assigned to Bundelkhand. The Dalit heart was meant to melt at the sight of a prince dropping in for a meal. Rahul Gandhi's problem is not that he is young, but that he continued to play with toy soldiers in his electoral war room. Gestures became a substitute for substance. He rolled up his sleeves. He toyed with the length of his beard. I trust that Rahul Gandhi is not going to tear up any opponent's manifesto for a long time.
The biggest play was made for the Muslim vote, with promises that were tainted with compromise. The dust of reservations was thrown into the eye and pantomime paraded as drama. Second rank Congress leaders began to compete for awards in histrionics. Those with literary fanstasies offered little drops of blood to fertilize seeds of future glory. The only astute player in this game was the Muslim voter: on a bulk level, he drove Mulayam Singh Yadav to office, and in constituencies where strategic voting made more sense, he elected fellow Muslims across labels. This UP Assembly will see the highest number of Muslim MLAs, 69. Every major party-- SP, BSP and Congress-- will have the same percentage of Muslim MLAs, between 20 to 30 per cent. After all the huff and puff, Congress has four Muslims in its total of 28. The Peace Party has three out of its four. There should be a lesson in this somewhere.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi thought the crisis was serious enough to merit that rare indulgence called a press conference. She let slip a thought that should trouble her colleagues, that the problem was too many leaders rather than lack of leadership. But we shall let the party worry about that. Her more substantive comment was that UPA still had time to correct its mistakes, since the next general elections were in 2014.
It is possible that news from Kolkata had not reached her. Her ally, Mamata Banerjee, publicly celebrated Mulayam Singh Yadav's victory in Uttar Pradesh. This does not quite sound like a ringing endorsement of UPA as it presently exists. Long before the general elections of 2014, there will be an electoral test for UPA, in July this year, when the next President of India is elected. If the Congress fails to get its candidate through, the party might not be over, but the government will be.
During its first term, when Pranab Mukherjee was in charge of UPA's security, he played off friend, foe and the large grey mass in the middle with finesse and dexterity; he postponed any budding problem till the point where the advantage tipped in the Congress' favour. After 2009, the Congress has done everything to alienate its allies, and snub those it might have reached out to. Others have, as a consequence, created space in the middle, where even parties within the ruling alliance can occasionally rest when tired of being nice to Congress. Those who do not dare step out, like DMK, are as sullen as scapegoats. Congress has used tax authorities to blackmail partners into good behaviour, not the best way to bond. Those without any option but silence, become good at waiting for their moment. That moment could be this summer.
In straight political mathematics, association with Congress is slowly turning into a liability. Congress leaders like spokesman Manish Tiwari are beginning to admit that there is sweeping urban resentment against the party. This is, once again, a reversal from UPA1, when Congress added value to an ally's vote base. But the decisive impetus will come from the Agatha Christie question: who benefits from death in the drawing room, or, in a more straightforward simile, the collapse of Dr Manmohan Singh's second government?
Just as the Congress, as Mrs Gandhi pointed out, needs time, others need to be in a hurry. Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa, Jagan Reddy, Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik, Prakash Karat, Nitin Gadkari, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Prakash Singh Badal, Om Prakash Chautala may have enough contradictions between them to confuse a doctorate in logic, but they want an election when the Congress is at its weakest. Throughout 2012 Congress will remain shaken by the UP-Punjab earthquake. By 2013, Congress could begin to recover. Why wait?
If these leaders can find a common candidate for President, UPA2 is toast. Even without April's Rajya Sabha elections, where Congress will slip further, the numbers are dicey for the UPA. Once a body starts to bleed, unsuspected pores begin to gush.
This is the weakest that Congress has been since Narasimha Rao lost the elections in 1996. UP, where the Congress vote dropped by seven per cent, is not the only tale in town. Equally lacerating is Punjab, where Congress began to celebrate long before the votes were cast. The Akali mastermind, Sukhbir Badal, read ground reality brilliantly. He turned his cousin Manpreet Badal's defection into an asset. He protected his base while Manpreet divided the anti-establishment vote. And so in a crucial segment like women, while Akalis lost five percent from their vote in 2007, they still led Congress by 43 to 39 per cent. In a string of other demographics, the Akali-BJP alliance actually increased its vote: among Hindu Dalits, Hindu OBCs, Sikh OBCs and Sikh Dalits. It was always pompous to believe that Anna Hazare's campaign would have no impact, a view cooked up at Congress headquarters and disseminated with alarming ease by sections of the media.
Some facts will linger like a terrible, toxic cold. Dr Singh, the first Sikh Prime Minister, has lost Punjab twice to the Akalis. The first time could have been carelessness; the second time is punishment. Mrs Sonia Gandhi has lost all Assembly seats in Rae Bareli, despite the continual presence of Priyanka Gandhi, internally touted as a bigger campaign star than brother Rahul. Earlier this year home minister Chidambaram was in Tamil Nadu, and cannot be sure of re-election in his own seat. SM Krishna, the external affairs minister, is at a dead-end in Karnataka. AK Antony, the defence minister, is at a tipping edge in Kerala. Finance minister Mukherjee may look happier, but not if he glances towards his mercurial ally in Bengal, Mamata. Rahul Gandhi has blamed the party infrastructure for the UP defeat, but has he looked at the structure at the top? Not a single Congress heavyweight is heavy enough to lift his own state, or even a part thereof. Why blame the worker at the base? Congress might claim that it has jailed a corrupt minister, but it quite forgot to arrest its chief minister in Goa, who has been sentenced by voters to long exile.
The Congress can revive, of course. But it must return to what it used to be, liberal in spirit and democratic in ethos. It can either be a national trust or family property, not both. The fact that other parties are run by families is irrelevant. There were many turning points in the UP election. One of them was the arrival of Priyanka Gandhi's husband Robert Vadra and her still young children to Rae Bareli. The electorate was being given advance notice for 2030. I don't know what voters will do in 2030, but we know now what they did in 2012.
In 1739, the Persian butcher-marauder Nadir Shah shrugged aside token military resistance outside Delhi, occupied the Mughal capital and ordered that the khutba at the Friday prayers be read in his name, acknowledgement that he was overlord of the wretched Mughal emperor, Muhammad Shah Alam Rangila. Persian nobles laughed and coined a doggerel: Hukumat-e Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam. The translation is not inspiring: The rule of Shah Alam stretches from Delhi to Palam.
If Congress loses Rajasthan, that will be the extent of its realm in north India.
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