Congress withers, AAP blooms

By MR LALU

The greybeards in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) have once again pressed the support button for its interim president Sonia Gandhi. The committee tried to disentangle the party’s washout in the recently concluded elections in five states. The party had its worst level of performance in all the states and the CWC once again ensured not to pin blame on anybody for the collapse. With every single election from the panchayat to the parliament becoming an uphill task for the party, the Congress with its practically rudderless cadre has begun to face a massive existential crisis. This appears to be the toughest time that the party is passing through. With the fall of the Congress comes a vacuum that most of the regional parties want to fill. But at present, India’s political scenario is terribly unbalanced, with no credible opposition to raise its eyebrows over the government’s policies on issues of national interest. Passing the baton of responsibility for its failure time and again, the leadership of the party mostly forgot the values that a leadership is supposed to uphold. Until recently the fight was almost between a belligerent BJP and a critically downsized Congress, but a mettlesome contender. But the results of the state elections in Punjab brought an interesting picture to the political pundits. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has crushed open the last ounce of air that the Congress held tight in its chest. Neither its interim president nor her children would be held responsible for the defeat. Undoubtedly, the party is in search of someone from the middle of nowhere, on whom it can pin the blame on.

While proffering his resignation after the 2019 general election debacle, Rahul Gandhi was candid presenting his justification for the defeat in his tweet. The rank and file of the Congress was flabbergasted at his plain writing of words by passing the blame from his shoulder to someone who he did not want to shout the name of. For him, it was he who stood against Modi and the RSS, fighting a lone battle. Since 2014, the party has lost almost every election. Rallying its cadre to multiple humiliating defeats was the job that its leadership has been diligently executing. Unable to accommodate and incapable to mobilize and practically away from building an emotional connect with the essence of India, the party has been through an irreparable and turbulent internal rift. Unrealistic in strategizing and sharpening its weapons of political diplomacy against the BJP, the party has mostly concentrated on triggering its guns against a person, who indeed has managed to consistently find place in the hearts of the electorate. Every unplanned, immature attack that the Congress made against Modi, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him, strengthening him brick by brick, consolidating more power. Though the CWC pronounced the party’s commitment to remain a vigilant and vibrant opposition, it does not hold the strength to try an arm twist with the BJP at present. For the party, it is Rahul Gandhi in whose hands, its future is going to remain safe. The reforms that he promised to bring in the Congress as its president, blowing a fresh flow of oxygen, could not happen for long, except for the party’s loss in every election that it suffered under his presidency.

The AAP with its renewed vigor is mindless about the existence of Congress. It sees a gigantic potentiality in itself to face the BJP nationally. At present, the AAP is gaining from the Congress’s fall and is trying to fill the gap. Adding fuel to the fire, the already rebellious cohort, the G-23 is once again active, calling the conch of rebellion louder than before, shrieking at the blindfolded leadership to open its eyes. Murmurs from the G-23 kitchen reveals that the group wants the present leadership, who ruled the party for decades, to step aside and pave the way for a more creative, diplomatic, accommodative and open-minded leadership. For them, a last attempt of its revival was possible only, if the Gandhi family withdrew from the key posts and helped the party reestablish its relevance in India’s Modi dominated politics. The AAP, with its grand victory in Punjab, has a reinvigorated fertility to gain more seats nationally and accepts to have got enough power to dismantle the Congress. This appears to be possible as Arvind Kejriwal does not come with the baggage of any particular language or region on his back. He can more easily connect with the people of the country than any other regional leaders who are inarticulate beyond the restricted stretch of their local language. There is no denying the fact that the Congress had won multiple elections under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. But the party began to tremble and stumbled on to the rise of the Modi blitzkrieg in Indian politics in 2014. India’s political scenario is changing on a daily basis. My personal understanding about Rahul Gandhi suggests that there is a certain level of innocence that he maintains as a leader, beyond which, he finds it difficult to hold a credible space among the galaxy of leaders cutting across multiple parties. The Congress faced a consistent fall in many key states where the party was once a strong force. States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana and West Bengal, where the party once enjoyed a sound political legroom, as inching to 2022, it is facing a terrible existential crisis.

Vituperative of Modi in public, but being unable to show better alternatives, the Congress has probably been biting its own tongue all the time.  The politically intellectual Shashi Tharoor understands it better than anybody. He finds it not uncomfortable to offer an olive branch of appreciation to the Prime Minister when the government makes any tenable and remarkable achievement in the larger interest of the nation. Calling PM Modi, a “man of tremendous dynamism”, Shashi Tharoor was trying to take an out of track approach in the Congress recently. At the same time, he never forgets to question the politically disagreeable policies by the Modi government. With Priyanka Vadra at the party’s helm of affairs of the party in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the Congress had planted 148 women candidates in the election fray, out of which only one could relish the laddu of victory. The political scenario emerging in India is totally unfriendly for the traditional tactics of the grand old party. Its leadership needs to learn new strategies to keep the party relevant in the new dynamics of Indian politics.

(Author is freelance journalist and social worker based in Kerala. The views expressed are personal opinion of the author. He can be reached at mrlalu30@gmail.com.)