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Congress struggles for revival |
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by Vijay Sanghvi |
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After the
deaths of Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi was installed as
the Prime Minister by the powerful regional leaders and nine chief
ministers who preferred her to Morarji Desai.
Narasimha Rao had fully committed
the Indian economy to the care of WTO-controlled market forces where the
earlier ideological commitments had no place or space. |
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 T he
Congress leadership is desperate to limp out of the trauma of the
unexpected outcomeof the Gujarat Assembly polls last year. The shell
shock was so severe that the Congress leadership did not even attempt a
serious and in-depth analysis of the causes that belied its hopes of
winning a clear mandate in Gujarat. The Congress rhetoric after the
elections would suggest that it held the violent Hindutva card played by
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its allies in the Sangh Parivar as mainly
responsible for the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party. However it
does not explain why the BJP failed to impress voters in Saurashtra and
South Gujarat with a similar campaign based on communal logic? It also
does not explain how the Congress improved its vote base in the State by
four per cent? Why the Hindutva campaign or the Modi mantra affected
voters in Central and North Gujarat, the areas that had seen much
violence during the eight months prior to the Assembly poll. Unable to
explain why it allowed itself to be carried away to reducing its
campaign to appear to be a campaign of the B team of the BJP,
 the
party leadership has resorted to the route that it is familiar with and
adept at. It initiated the process of changing the personnel to man the
party units in the States that are scheduled to go to Assembly polls in
the coming 15 months. The change of the Chief Minister has already been
effected in Maharashtra. Changes in other States are in the offing. The
media has described the process as an attempt by Congress President
Sonia Gandhi to consolidate her hold over the party by nominating
persons who she thinks would deliver good results in the Assembly polls.
Some media analysts have even compared her process of change to the ones
that were carried out by Indira Gandhi during her transition from an
ineffective Prime Minister to the supreme leader of the party in the
late ‘Sixties. The analysts have obviously not taken into consideration
that Indira Gandhi had not merely changed the personnel to man the State
units but had also consciously changed the image of the party by
providing a different ideological tilt to it. Nehru ruled supreme for 16
years without a change from within or without the Congress Party because
of his mesmerising personality and his image that was deeply wedded to
the welfare state. After the deaths of Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri,
Indira Gandhi was installed as the Prime Minister by the powerful
regional leaders and nine chief ministers who preferred her to Morarji
Desai. They had thought they would be able to run her as the Prime
Minister from behind the scenes. The then Congress President, K. Kamaraj,
had said so in so many words. It was not an acceptable condition for her
though she knew that she did not have a majority support within the
party in case she decided to take them on in a confrontation. Hence she
began to change the ideological base of the party to tilt it towards the
left of the Centre. She nationalised the banks and several other
sectors. She abolished Privy Purses and promised two square meals to
every family. She had identified the party with the aspirations of the
masses. In the 1971 elections, she won a massive mandate because of this
identification of the masses with her promises. Consequently she had
broken the spell of fatalism under which the Indian masses had eked out
their lives for centuries without protesting against poverty and social
and economic inequalities. They had waited for two years for her to
deliver on her promises. When there were no signs of the promises being
kept, they became restless and their discontent erupted in several
agitations and movements against the Congress. There was the Nav Nirman
in Gujarat at the end of 1973; there was a railway strike in May 1974
and the Sampurna Kranti in Bihar in early 1975. She lost the Lok Sabha
election in 1977 despite being the only charismatic leader on the
political horizon of India. The masses that were liberated by her from
the spell of fatalism had become demanding for performance because she
had diluted the ideological content from her governance. The Janata
Party could not sustain itself as it refused to transit from a movement
against the Congress Party into an alternative to the Congress with a
firm ideological commitment. The 1980 vote was a negative verdict
against the conglomerate of several parties that had come together
against Indira Gandhi. The 1984 results were due to entirely different
reasons. But Rajiv Gandhi, who had won an unprecedented majority in the
1984 elections, could not come to grips with the ideological issues and
aspirations of the masses. He had handed over the Indian masses to the
care of market forces for he was led to believe that the market forces
would spur the Indian economy to take it to the next century in a
decade. The trickle down effect would improve the conditions of the
masses. Nothing that was promised happened because market forces do not
allow profits to trickle out of their hands. The Narasimha Rao regime
was probably the last bright spot of the Congress but he had fully
committed the Indian economy to the care of WTO-controlled market forces
where the earlier ideological commitments had no place or space. With
the economic content removed from the Congress ideology, the only issue
that the Congress could hold on to oppose the BJP-led government at the
Centre was secularism. It could not effectively do so as fears continued
to grip the coterie around the top leader that a clear stand on the
issue might annoy the majority community. The Party has remained
ambiguous on the issue of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple at Ayodhya. It has
conveniently tried to leave the responsibility of the decision one way
or the other to the judiciary when the issue has clearly become a
political rather than a religious one. That too after having launched
its election campaign in 1989 from Faizabad and ordering Home Minister
Buta Singh to leave his electoral trail in his constituency to attend
the foundation stone laying ceremony at Ayodhya. The Congress
strategists and advisers have not been able to find an effective answer
to the BJP charge that the Congress practised pseudo-secularism for the
sake of Muslim votes. It could not find an answer to the BJP appeals to
Gujarat gaurav as well as to the Gujarati anger against the "outsider"
for targets inside the State. It had no antidote to the poisoning of the
whole linguistic culture prior, during and after the Assembly election.
The strategists could not find answers to the patently false, distorted
and twisted interpretations of Hindutva during the campaign period. In
the absence of any ideology or programme, the Congress tried to make
development an issue, or at least claimed, prior to the election, that
it would emphasise development issues. But development issues have been
with the people for 50 years. For 45 years the Congress ruled and did
not resolve these issues. Then how can the party blame those who had
come to rule only for the past five years and convince the people that
the new rulers were responsible for their miseries? Are the masses so
naïve as to believe such arguments? The Congress leadership has yet not
understood that its leadership had broken the spell of fatalism in 1971
to make the masses demanding performance by their elected
representatives. When the party lacks ideological content in its
election kitty, it was obvious that the voter would make up his
political mind only on the basis of performance. How can there be
performance with ideology missing and the men in power facing several
other extra-political demands from the leadership. One such is
continuous demand for resources to run the party and expenses of the
party leadership to move about in the country. Vilasrao Deshmukh could
not feed the bottomless pit. Hence he had to go. How can any one else
succeed under these circumstances? Sonia Gandhi has no doubt inherited a
political edifice that has been on the decline for the past three
decades and has no advisers who can understand that in the name of
ideological content, mere change of horses is not enough to survive.
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