Congress needs a pilot in the cockpit

Congress General Secretary and UP in-charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during a roadshow in Varanasi on March 3 (Image: PTI)

Election results can be like a T-20 cricket match. It can have a heady beginning, followed by a sobering phase in the middle, before it enters a thrilling finale in the slog overs, sometimes even resulting in a tantalising tie and a Super Over.

But on March 10 morning as the election results for the five states of Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh began flashing on TV screens, after just a fleeting hiccup and some predictable speculation of a photo-finish, the whole drama fizzled out. The winners took away a bountiful in a clean sweep. The losers were left licking their gaping wounds.

Let us straightaway acknowledge the big newsmakers of the day; they were the Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For the Congress, it was another debilitating loss, another devastating low, in a bewildering continuum of electoral disasters. More on that later.

Uttar Pradesh was supposed to be the cliff-hanger, with an unusually sprightly Akhilesh Yadav, threatening to torpedo the Yogi Adityanath-led government. Exit polls were not as sanguine though prompting Yadav to insinuate that the BJP was playing underworld politics by hacking into Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

What happened, however, was what pundits almost apocalyptically describe as a tsunami. Before long, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got into a frenzied escalation on the score sheet with the Samajwadi Party (SP) trailing comfortably behind after a brief flirtation in the race with its arch-rivals. After that the avalanche was unstoppable.

For the BJP to return to the hot seat in Lucknow (274 seats with a 42 percent vote-share) is an extraordinary accomplishment if you look at the seemingly insurmountable impediments along their way. This includes the awful mishandling of COVID-19, the Lakhimpur-Kheri farmer controversy involving a senior minister in the Union Cabinet, surging inflation, migrant travel mismanagement which caused a humanitarian catastrophe, the absence of regular salaried jobs, encounter killings led by a brutal institutional mechanism, and periodic violations of constitutional democracy, compelling the Supreme Court to step in and admonish the government.

On the flip side, the BJP had a blistering tailwind too in terms of its apparent success in curbing retail crime, giving birth to ‘Bulldozer Baba’, who railroaded trouble-makers like criminal syndicates, local mafia, and Anti-Romeo squads, which were targeted to fix the alleged Love Jihad culprits that was in synchronicity with the BJP handbook. Also, BJP’s hand-outs in terms of free food-grains, LPG cylinders for women, low-cost housing loan assistance, minimum income for farmers, etc. was touted as its ‘last-mile welfare model’ that worked magically with the poor and the needy.

The SP at 124 seats (32 percent vote-share) was ultimately far by a whopping distance. UP’s most intriguing political conundrum is the vaporisation of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) which stands at just one seat (and 13 percent vote-share). It is clear that the non-Jatav Dalits have also deserted her, resulting in perhaps the end of the founder Kanshi Ram’s altruistic dreams of social equality. The BJP has been the biggest beneficiary of this voter exodus.

The Congress, despite a vigorous campaign by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra with a women-centric focus, has achieved an abysmal low. For the grand old party, this is its moment of truth. An extinction in the battlefield of Lucknow could be symptomatic of a complete meltdown. There is no excuse for a 2.5 percent vote-share after contesting nearly 400 seats. That wretched number says only one thing: complete rejection. This could ricochet across India, a singular message that the Congress is no longer symbolic of hope, and change. The BJP is unchallenged. Modi is the emperor of the land he sees. For democracy, these are warning bells.

Punjab is a manifestation of the Congress’ political hubris, leadership befuddlement, and organisational paralysis. A crucial state (the Congress has eight MP’s from Punjab out of 52 Lok Sabha seats) that was considered literally in the bag was blown away by a bizarre game of musical chairs, and subjecting its incumbent Chief Minister (the 80-year-old Captain Amarinder Singh who had withstood the BJP-Modi wave in 2017 to give the Congress, bruised and battered, a spectacular comeback) to an unbecoming public mortification. It was obscene, and indecent.

The people of Punjab clearly disapproved, knocking the Congress down in an ignominious rout. AAP could be Congress’ nemesis in the future, emboldened by its remarkable resurgence (92 of the 117 seats with a 42 percent vote-share). Uttarakhand, Goa, and Manipur folded into the BJP’s arms with insouciant ease; the Congress barely posing a serious quantum of threat.

Is 2024 done and dusted as the BJP would obviously like us to believe? The answer is no, albeit the saffron party has a huge head-start. After all, there is a reason why people say a week is a long time in politics. But as the spring elections show, the Congress needs a new face immediately. It needs a different pilot in the cockpit (pun intended). A man in Jaipur is whom 10 Janpath needs to dial.