Politics | Congress cannot afford to remain in limbo

Anand Kochukudy

More than a month after Rahul Gandhi expressed his wish to quit as the President of the Indian National Congress (INC), India’s grand old party is still grappling with the question — if not Gandhi, then who?

While Gandhi remains adamant in his decision to relinquish the position, senior leaders within the party are still hoping against hope to persuade him to rethink. The result is a state of inertia, with the party seemingly on autopilot mode.

With state elections due in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand in the next three to four months and Delhi to follow early next year, it would appear suicidal for the Congress to remain in this vanquished mode any longer.

While Gandhi’s desire to step away taking responsibility for leading his party to a debacle in the general elections is commendable, it is incumbent on him to hand over the reins of the party to a person capable of running it. As Gandhi’s firm resolve to quit dawns on the leaders of the Congress, they must prevail upon him to not keep things hanging in the air and let the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) run away with states in the bargain.

It is important to analyse things as it stands today. Rahul Gandhi took over the reins of the party in December 2017 in the climactic stages of the Gujarat assembly polls. Gujarat was a case of being so near, yet so far, and the Congress simultaneously lost heavily in Himachal Pradesh, where the party was in power. After the elections to three Northeastern states—Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland — held in early 2018, the Congress was reduced to being in power in two-and-a-half states. It seemed the Congress was nowhere in the picture with less than a year to go for the general elections.

Yet, the Congress made a strong comeback that winter winning the assembly elections in the heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. That was when it finally seemed that the Congress was likely to give a fight to the BJP in the general elections. It was not to be.

It is important to note that the Congress lost badly in states where it had won the assembly polls less than six months ago. The takeaway here is that people are voting distinctively differently in the assembly and the Lok Sabha elections.

While they were voting for the cult of personality in the Lok Sabha elections, local issues dictated the outcome of the assembly polls. For instance, if it was the unpopularity of the Vasundhara Raje Scindia government in Rajasthan that dictated the outcome, it was presumably the voter fatigue and a yearning for change that brought the Congress back to power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh among other reasons.

Even a state such as Telangana, which saw K Chandrasekhar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) winning by a thumping margin in the winter of 2018, saw a surge for both the Congress and the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.

All the more reason then for the Congress to shake off its demoralising loss and come up with a strategy to wrest Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand back, where it still has a good chance of coming back to power.

In Haryana, for instance, while Modi remains overwhelmingly popular, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar isn’t. Despite factional feuds and inner-party wrangling, the Congress remains the primary opposition party in Haryana after the implosion of the Indian National Lok Dal. Similarly, in Maharashtra, if the Congress can manage to raise the issues of rural distress back into the focus, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine remains a formidable force to square off against the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. So is Jharkhand, where the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) remains the alliance leader.

The Congress finds itself today exactly in the position of the opposition parties of the 1960s and the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi looked invincible — till she undid herself by declaring Emergency. Back then, the major opposition parties — the Swatantra Party, the Socialist party, the Bhartiya Lok Dal, the Bhartiya Jana Sangh and the Congress (Organisation) — tried every trick in the book, even cobbling up a Grand Alliance in 1971, to dislodge Indira Gandhi, to no avail.

In the short term, the Congress has to find a way to survive and hopefully expect an all-powerful Narendra Modi to make mistakes — while remaining strong contenders in states, even trying to win them. Of course, that cannot be a long-term strategy.

For now, if Congress loses any more time trying to coax a reluctant Rahul Gandhi to change his mind, it will only ensure the rout of the party in these states and further demoralise the party.

The names doing the rounds to replace Gandhi may not be all too encouraging but it would still be a much better option to have someone takeover than keep the issue hanging in the air forever. Whether it is nominating veteran loyalists such as Mallikarjun Kharge, Sushil Kumar Shinde or Ashok Gehlot, or a younger option in Jyotiraditya Scindia or an outlier such as Shashi Tharoor, Rahul Gandhi has to put his foot down and get on with it than let the party down any further. A still better option is to step aside and let the AICC delegates elect a new President — but it might be a tad too late for that now.

Anand Kochukudy is a political commentator and editor, The Kochi Post. Views are personal.