After the Fall

The scale of the defeat of the Congress in Karnataka may not be apparent to all at first glance. Number crunchers can explain it away by the numerical equivalent of smoke and mirrors. But to do so would be misleading.

The party that never lost an election in the state till as late as 1983 has come in at second spot for the second time in a row. More than that save for the Old Mysore and the Hyderabad Karnataka regions, where it put up a creditable performance, all other regions of the vast province have fallen to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Congress had also to contend with a deep-rooted Janata Dal (Secular) which held its own in 20 seats in the southern districts that once made up the princely state of Mysore. Even so, the defeat is a serious one.

It is a statistician's delight to revel in detail, but this is to miss the wood for the trees. The Congress lost 20 seats by less than 2000 votes. Or for instance, the fact that it still has the largest vote share. What matters is that the BJP, with nearly 35 per cent of the votes is just a whisker behind the once invincible Congress.

The larger picture is more sobering and worrying than the numbers can ever reveal. The Congress was never quite in the race. It brought back a highly experienced former chief Minister SM Krishna but only at the eleventh hour and with no real role in ticket distribution. It had astutely roped in Siddaramaiah when he left Deve Gowda's family run party but failed to project him as a state wide leader. It was unable to placate old or new leaders and fell between two stools.

More seriously, there is no clear evidence that the minorities who make up some 14 per cent consolidated behind the Congress. It was also unable to blunt the appeal of the BJP in the rural areas. The latter promised free power and cheap rice and reaped a rich harvest of votes. In BS Yeddyurappa it also found a leader who blended Hindutva credentials with a farming community back ground.

The larger picture is clearer. The BJP fights like there is no tomorrow. The Congress simply goes through the motions. Despite a stable government at the Centre and a slew of programmes that can sell well to a huge number, it is unable to strike the right note.
The issue is not simply one of choice of personnel or of manifestos. The natural base of the party since the late 60's has been the have-nots, a loosely defined group that includes the poor, farmers and the self employed. To win them over, it has come up with a series of programmes. The loan wavier should benefit over 40 million cultivators; the rural jobs programme now covers the whole country. The Forest Rights Act, now being made operational in the states will give land title to Adivasis. But to convert these into electoral dividend, the party has to get its act together.

It cannot do so without a fresh sense of mission. Here, the General Secretary and the Congress president have to break free of the small ring of advisers who mostly consist of political leaders with no mass base or grassroots presence. If the party continues to run its campaigns like once in five year carnival, it will end up in second slot or worse. Its not so much the eleventh hour as ten minutes to midnight.

The writer teaches History at Delhi University