The following is an excerpt from Sanjay Jha’s forthcoming book 2024: India in a Free Fall. Published by Harper Collins India, the book is scheduled to be released on February 20.
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Myth 1: The Congress is too big to become extinct.
Statistics don’t lie. Two Lok Sabha routs, losing forty of the previous fifty-one state assembly elections, tells a gloomy tale. The party, founded by A.O. Hume in 1885, needed to look at the French presidential elections of April 2022 for a serious wake-up call. The two titanic parties who repeatedly formed the Parisian government, the Socialists and the Republicans, have nearly vanished amidst the Emmanuel Macron phenomenon (his party, Renaissance, is just six years old). Marine Le Pen, a right-wing ultranationalist is the dominant voice of the disgruntled Opposition.
2024: India in Free Fall by Sanjay Jha. Publisher: Harper Collins.
The Congress faces not just a strong BJP but a resurgent AAP in the national sweepstakes. The regional parties have virtually obliterated the Congress in several states like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Bihar, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, etc. But the party still had the wherewithal to make a comeback. It needed a big idea. It needed a booster shot. And yet, ironically enough, anyone who wrote off the grand old party did so at great risk.
Myth 2: The BJP will lose on anti-incumbency
The idea above has been Congress’s boogeyman and has revealed its myopic underestimation of its rivals’ doggedness. Firstly, the BJP is a ruthlessly efficient machine whose immoral, yet pugnacious attitude permeated through its organisational core. It had overcome several headwinds with aggressive campaigning, using an adroit mix of falsehoods, social polarisation and exaggerated successes sold over WhatsApp.
For example, on the WHO estimates of Covid deaths in India being allegedly the world’s highest at 47 lakh people, the BJP flattened the Congress instead, accusing it of being part of a Western global conspiracy to malign India. It was absolutely ridiculous, but the Congress response was typically tepid. Secondly, anti-incumbency works more in two-party Western democracies like the US or UK, where there is always a visible and viable alternative, tried and trusted, on the national mainstream. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Jr had great runs that were abruptly terminated, because there was one clear option available. But in a multi-party, first-past-the-post system, there are multiple beneficiaries of anti-incumbency through a splitting of votes, which neutralises the losses of the front runner Congress is waiting for Godot if it expects the BJP to just crumble.
Myth 3: The Congress is India’s default operating system.
In his Jaipur address in 2013, Rahul Gandhi made a forthright disclosure: “We don’t know how we win elections, but we do.” Everyone guffawed, but they had misunderstood what was a loaded confession. Rahul had correctly identified Congress’s messy organisational functioning, a chaotic muddle despite electoral winnings, but unfortunately, he did not fix it. The problem was in the execution bug. Just like how Rajiv Gandhi hit the nail on the head in 1985 at the Congress centenary celebrations when he said that 85% of one rupee was being appropriated by greedy middlemen, with only the balance 15% reaching the ultimate beneficiary. Rajiv too did not or could not rigorously execute a robust counter-plan. It would end up becoming an albatross round the Congress’s neck, a perfect example of how the path to hell is paved with good intentions. The Congress is a victim of the false belief that it is the natural party of governance. India has of late begun experimenting with different kinds of software. Winning elections, managing the political brand and retaining public trust requires a solid operating plan in the 5G Age.
The Udaipur Declaration was important; it was an opportunity for renewal. The decision to rebut criticism of dynastic stranglehold by announcing a ‘one family one ticket’ rule and the inclusion of ‘one person one post’ augured well for the party’s future. The Udaipur meet was a step forward in the right direction. But if the Congress believed that the status of the principal leadership of the Opposition that it occupied would be its sole prerogative, it was being presumptuous. There were others, more ambitious and adrenaline-pumping, who were eyeing the vacant space that the Congress had conceded generously.
In political colloquialism, whenever there is a striking departure of a senior leader (such as Sunil Jakhar in Punjab) or a mass exodus (as in Meghalaya MLAs of Congress joining Trinamool Congress), the cliché uttered is ‘the rats are deserting a sinking ship’. It is partially true, the capsizing Titanic part of it. But calling them rodents may be an exaggeration. In India, ideological fidelity is an oxymoron; it has become purely transactional.
The Right in India is defined not by its love for free markets and less government, but by its religious doctrine of extreme Hindutva, national security, restorative nostalgia and nativism. The Left, for its voluble sympathy for Maoist rebels, anti-Americanism, antediluvian communist de-growth model and minority protection. That leaves the centre, which had become India’s default option under the Congress’s inclusive political umbrella since Pandit Nehru became the prime minister, although it was always Left-leaning. But with the rise of multiple regional parties, each doing a copycat manifesto pledging commitment to secularism, socialism and social justice, it has become a crowded square.
Taking full advantage of this ideological amorphousness was TMC’s Mamata Banerjee. Her target: the severely depleted Congress party. The reason why many Congress leaders (L. Faleiro, Sushmita Dev, Kirti Azad, etc.) were merrily dancing to Didi’s drumbeat was because joining TMC was not causing a bitter heartburn unlike Congress, which was playing footsie with its ‘communal nemesis’, the BJP. Joining TMC was akin to leaving Facebook for WhatsApp; one was still part of the Metaverse. Banerjee was hoping that the latter’s market valuation would soon tip over that of the mothership itself. Her comment in Mumbai that “there is no UPA” (after meeting Sharad Pawar and Sanjay Raut) was a sardonic assault on the Congress. TMC was creating an alternative arrangement. It wanted to lead it.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Photo: X/@MamataOfficial
When Pawan Varma, former Rajya Sabha MP, called me and said he wanted to have a private chat, I kind of figured out what he had in mind. Varma, who is an astute debater and a Stephanian wordsmith, did no pussyfooting; “Join the TMC,” he said. The Congress has become spiritless, limp, old fogey, was what he told me. TMC, under Mamata had the roar of a hungry tiger. TMC would be the new INC; a combative, strategic, streetfighter party that could defeat the BJP. The Goa assembly results would establish that paradigm. Verma, when he speaks in his deep baritone voice, making a persuasive argument which he considers ironclad, can even convince a lion to befriend a goat. I heard him out and promised to call him back.
While it was understandable that Congress targeted the BJP relentlessly given their historical rivalry, it made the cardinal mistake of underestimating its knavish allies or ex-Congressmen. It had ignored its own political history. The Jana Sangh/BJP’s meteoric rise began after the Congress was first damaged by non-BJP regional formations: The Janata Party in 1977 (Jayaprakash Narayan), V.P. Singh in 1989, and the rise of Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) following the Mandal agitations. The Mandal agitation damaged Congress’s traditional support base. A bruised Congress then ceded substantial space to an industrious BJP which stepped up on aggressive majoritarianism using the Ram Mandir agitation and the Shah Bano judgement to further cripple the slumbering centrist party.
For the larger RSS family, the Sangh parivar, the Shah Bano controversy came at an opportune time. Already facing heat from Muslim conservatives, the Rajiv Gandhi government now faced heat from Hindutva groups as well. The increasingly militant Hindutva groups got a shot in the arm in February when the district court in Faizabad ordered the disputed site to be unlocked and allowed the public to pray at the spot. This seemingly small concession was to prove expensive in the future.
TMC’s new outreach, which was curated by Prashant Kishor, was the biggest challenge Congress faced because of a serious internal erosion since 1989.TMC had an ambitious destination: to become the second largest political party (propelling Didi to become prime minister in a hung Parliament situation). Discerning observers would have noticed that it had already checkmated the BJP by doing a reverse migration of leaders back to the TMC after their hurricane sweep in the assembly elections of 2022. At stake is 42 Lok Sabha (LS) seats in Bengal; the Congress has 52 LS seats pan-India. If the TMC swept Bengal and the Congress stagnated or dipped, anything was possible. The Economist (it has endorsed Congress in practically every general election) said, “The next general election is about three years away. It is not too late for Congress to become a big-tent national party capable of representing all Indians, as its founders intended.”
Kishor may have made one fatal miscalculation in his Operation Mamata: his assumption that the Congress would just wither away, succumbing meekly to his grandiose designs. He had on the contrary awakened the sleepy, somnolent giant. Two developments gave a hint of an unusually combative Congress. Firstly, the Congress promptly reassembled its traditional allies like DMK, National Conference and CPI(M), in a quick bid to nip the TMC enterprise in the bud. Most importantly, joining them were also both NCP and Shiv Sena, who had momentarily buoyed TMC hearts. Realpolitik is never linear. Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s decision to not invite TMC even as a perfunctory gesture for a dinner meeting at her home was a declaration of war. Secondly, Rahul Gandhi threw a curveball at the BJP, by belatedly biting the bullet on the Hinduism vs Hindutva debate. It is the elephant in the room that the Congress has imprudently dodged with disastrous results for too long. It showed a rare pragmatic risk-taking by the young Gandhi scion. Judging by initial reactions from the Sangh Parivar, the BJP appeared threatened, at least temporarily. Rahul was still the only Opposition leader who made the BJP squirm.
Although the assembly elections of early 2022 in UP, Punjab, Goa, Manipur and Uttarakhand led to further decimation of the Congress, it did not mean that TMC would find replacing the grand old party as main Opposition voice, a slam-dunk operation. On the contrary, Kishor had inadvertently rekindled the Congress. The TMC’s Goa experiment was a complete fiasco, and with that brief flirtation with a pan-India power pitch, it abandoned its national aspirations, sticking to the more familiar Northeastern states. The BJP benefitted from the split votes. The Congress lost again, but the party’s ability to still hold on to 24% of the votes and get 11 seats in the 40 seats state assembly left no one in doubt as to who the real Congress was, warts and all had woken up at last.
I did not call PawanVerma back. I don’t think he expected me to.
Sanjay Jha is a former national spokesperson of the Indian National Congress party. He also worked as a banker and an internet entrepreneur.