A pyrrhic victory

Congress might need to project Rahul Gandhi as the chief ministerial candidate for the UP elections next year as a drastic resort to recovering its political fortunes

Sanjy Kapoor

National politics can really get bizarre. On May 11, when the results to the elections to the five state assemblies were being announced in which Congress got hammered in Kerala and West Bengal and barely scraped through Assam, party men were bursting crackers in front of the residence of their president, Sonia Gandhi—who had won her bye-elections by a margin of 4 .17 lakh votes—as if the party had swept the polls. In these surreal celebrations, one fact that was forgotten was that the Congress Party, after losing the heartland and getting tripped in Karnataka by an ally, was left ruling only a few states. Save for Maharashtra, where it has an alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Congress does not have much to show for its illustrious past and its indifferent present.

What is worse is party’s irrational masochism: it celebrates when it loses. There is more evidence of such a mindset. Congress leaders of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar really work hard to ensure that the party does not come to power in their states. Their twisted logic is that a party has to remain weak to make them look strong and indispensable. Little wonder that the same stock of betel-chewing upper caste gentry runs the affairs of the Congress Party in these states that did many years ago.

Especially in the case of Uttar Pradesh, the party’s high command’s lackadaisical attitude rankles many people who desire for the return of a national party in the country’s most populous state. They believe that the state would benefit if a national party were in power, both, in Lucknow and in Delhi. They have seen the gains accruing to UP when the Congress was in power till the late 1980s and subsequently when Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over. Many of those who reminisce about the good old days are bureaucrats who have seen the enormous influence UP wielded on national affairs. During the Congress raj in the pre-1990s, the Congress would send about 40 to 50 MPs to Parliament and many of them would become senior ministers in the government. Prime ministers, too, would also be from here. Besides, the Nehrus and the Gandhis, VP Singh, HN Bahuguna, KC Pant, Vir Bahadur Singh, ND Tewari were all a force to reckon with in Delhi. BJP, too, carried this tradition. Their top leader Atal Behari Vajpayee represented Lucknow and gave considerable space to his state in his government when he was the prime minister. Now that the BJP seems to have lost the plot, these bureaucrats wonder why the Congress does not try recapturing UP. “They will be wiped out in the next polls if they do not try winning back the Hindi heartland,” claims an anguished bureaucrat. “Instead of trying to do well in Pondicherry and small north Indian states like Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, why don’t they target a state like UP that has a population larger than Pakistan’s. Surely, it would take the same amount of money and effort,” argues this well-informed official.

But does Congress have what it takes to come to power in UP? They neither have their traditional vote banks nor inspiring leadership. The bulk of the Congress voters has been shanghaied away by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati. Now they have neither voters nor politics. But there is a way out if Sonia Gandhi follows a piece of advice that has the imprimatur of experienced leaders like former prime minister VP Singh. She should ask her son, Rahul Gandhi, to win back the state for the party. Congress Party needs to project Rahul as the next chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when the elections to the assembly take place in February 2007. If that happens then it could “overturn the existing caste-based chess board”. Many of those who want UP to develop faster and feel that the state could rise above casteism could vote for change. If the Congress leadership and Rahul cannot bite the bullet then it could be curtains for the Congress in the next elections, reservation quotas notwithstanding.