Congress: The End Game
Albert Camus wrote: “What is a rebel? A man who says no”, in
a novel by the same name, back in 1953, shortly around the time Narendra Modi
was born.
When you have an essential rebel of an honest kind, who is
also the prime minister, some very interesting reactions start to take place. The
corrupt, first of all, on all sides of the fence, are very discomfited. Then,
then there are those who hate change, because it threatens to destroy the
established order that they have learned to exploit. And, of course, many
variations on these themes.
The Congress
Party and its agents and assigns, looted
a full third of the contents of the PSU
banking system, piled procurement scam
upon scam like bodies that came out of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and
shredded as much of the evidence as they possibly could, when they realised the
UPA would finally lose in 2014.
And lose drastically they did, to a man they had tried their
very best to destroy, for over a decade. And lose in such a way that their
friends on the other side of the aisle, fellow travellers in the stratosphere
of Lutyens Delhi, would not have a say in how rebellious the winner chose to
be.
No namby-pamby easily pressurised coalition came up in place
of the UPA, but a solid majority government that was impossible to shake from
its perch, for a five full years.
Narendra Modi, a provincial politician from Gujarat, with
question marks raised over his educational qualifications recently, is an
outsider to the ways of Lutyens’ Delhi, and peculiarly incorruptible by its
ways. He is an austere, god-fearing bachelor, who keeps his family at a great
distance, a teetotaller, a workaholic, a man seemingly with no need for
personal wealth.
But Modi has demonstrated a great fondness for political power,
democratically, electorally, arrived at, to use ostensibly to change the
country and right its wrongs. He says it is development he is after, even as
many of his followers are under no illusion that they want to create a ‘Hindu
Rashtra’, shorn of pseudo-secularism of the Congress kind. This because it has
amounted to Muslim and other minority vote-bank politics, plain and simple,
almost anti-Hindu in its thrust.
A new self-appointed spokesman, Subramanian Swamy, also just
inducted into the Rajya Sabha, one who claims to have Modi’s confidence, has
promised a start to the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya in 2016. Swamy
has also promised abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir in 2017.
Swamy, a distinguished economist himself, has also written
to the prime minister to terminate the
services of the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, when his present 3 year
term expires in September, or even before, stating that his skills and ideas are ‘inappropriate’ to India’s current needs. Rajan has kept
interest rates unnecessarily high, says Swamy, and this has been an impediment
to the revival of business and industry.
Swamy has also expressed a degree of unhappiness with the
functioning of the finance ministry under Arun Jaitley. There are steady
rumours of an impending cabinet reshuffle, plus a change of chief minister in
Gujarat, to prepare for their assembly elections in 2017.
The Congress high-command has always underestimated and
misread both Modi and Swamy, and now might continue to do so at its own peril.
Given the problems looming over the Gandhis via the National
Herald case, and the moves towards prosecution in the AgustaWestland issue,
they need to be worried.
But, as in most ivory towers, the Congress leadership has,
and continues to, listen to its own fantasies and confabulators. It had decided
its best strategy was to try and destroy Modi’s credibility as prime minister,
mock his 56 inch chest as it were, learning nothing from its failed attempts to
do so, when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat.
It set about doing this by calling him names, casting
aspersions on his motives, calling him a fake and a liar, and preventing Modi
from being effective in the legislature right from May 2014 till date.
To a greater extent than is acknowledged within the NDA, the
Congress realised it had been beaten, not by the BJP as they knew it, but by a
force that they had underestimated, a man alone, who ran a presidential general
election campaign to win a parliamentary election.
Modi won, and not so much the BJP, albeit with strong RSS
and Industry backing. Without Modi, it is reckoned, the BJP might have won 160
seats, and had to cobble together a coalition with partners and allies, replete
with accommodation and compromise, and as best it could.
In the failed endeavour to contain Modi, to some extent, it
was supported, not only by other elements in the opposition, but also by the soft dissidents in the BJP, who believe in the so-called ‘160 club’ doctrine.
Others, more vocal, have been firmly side-lined for challenging Modi’s
ascendancy during the long campaign in 2013-14.
Congress however, expected a repeat of the accommodative Vajpayee
regime at worst. Instead they have got what
we have now.
For these two years, since the advent of the Modi government,
Congress worked hard and successfully to prevent any major legislation like the
GST Bill and the Land Acquisition Amendment Bill from going through.
One reason is these two pieces of legislation alone have the
potential to add a percentage point or two to the GDP rate. Even as the passage of the long pending OROP
and the coming of the 7th Pay Commission may indeed set off a mini
consumer-led boom, via the armed forces and the central bureaucracy. But GST, a
single country-wide trade tax at source, in place of dozens of leaky impositions, could
do very much more, not only for growth, but also government revenue.
So it was not something the rump that Congress is reduced
to, with 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and 67/68 seats, till lately, in the Rajya
Sabha could allow, as long as it could still help it. Its dream was to claw
itself back to power at the head of an anti-NDA coalition in 2019, having
thoroughly trashed Modi’s tall claims on
governance, and everything else he stood for.
Congress has also tried to foment an internal BJP rebellion against
‘dictator’ Modi- almost anyone from the Lutyens Delhi BJP wallahs would do in
his place!
But, the personal popularity of Modi with the masses, if not
the partisan Congress/Left bred intelligentsia, or the Congress spawned media,
prevented this gaining any traction.
But now this situation is changed. Not only has its numbers
fallen in the Rajya Sabha due to retirement, but it is on the brink of losing
Assam to the BJP and its allies.
This is particularly significant, because Assam has a third
of its population who are Muslims, many wilfully allowed in from Bangladesh
over the years, to form durable Congress vote banks.
But now, probably for the first time, here comes the BJP,
able to unify the Hindu vote for once. It is likely to pull it off by winning
the state election, despite the other 33% voting en bloc for Congress and its
allies.
All will be revealed on the 19th of May. But the
larger lesson is that if the BJP can consolidate the Hindu vote in one state,
it can do so in another.
When it did so in the general election, for example in UP
and Bihar, the consideration was national, and there was indeed a strong Modi wave.
But now, Assam will
be the first in a state election when the influence of Bangladeshi immigration
unchecked, assertive rioting on the part of both native Assamese groups and the erstwhile alien
Muslims has hardened the stance of the majority community, in their own defence,
and quest for survival. Congress did nothing to hurt their vote banks, and this
is going to be the reason for its exit after three consecutive terms.
The Assam win, if it comes, might form a political strategy
prototype for future elections for the BJP, particularly in UP.
Meanwhile, Congress hardly has any states left in its
direct/coalition administration. It is widely expected to lose Kerala as well
to the Communists. It might however win in the union territory of Puducherry,
in coalition.
Its similarly scam-ridden partner DMK might help it to a win
in Tamil Nadu, but AIADMK is not quite ruled out still. And TMC will, in all
probability, retain West Bengal.
Down the road, on the way to 2019, in the remaining state
assembly elections, Punjab is threatened by the AAP, it will be difficult to
wrest Gujarat from BJP, and Congress chances of winning Uttar Pradesh are
bleak, the proposed fielding of Priyanka Gandhi
notwithstanding.
Very shortly, Congress
will lose the last vestiges of being called a national party. In parliament,
they have already lost some numbers in the Rajya Sabha to retirement, and will
lose influence with the AIADMK and TMC and the BJD, all likely to keep their
own counsel, going forward too.
Sonia Gandhi is said to be ailing, and Rahul Gandhi cannot
seem to come out of his perpetual apprenticeship in order to lead the Congress
towards 2019. Neither can win elections anymore!
Meanwhile, while other regional parties, are reviving now,
Congress continues in its precipitous decline.
The Modi government will likely pick up speed and dynamism
in its second half, and Congress won’t be able to stop it.
Without states to run, without parliamentary power to block,
and without influence over other opposition formations, Congress could well
disintegrate. It has already begun to do in states such as Arunachal and
Uttarakhand.
And lastly, it is not just Rahul Gandhi who is inept. The
entire band of political and dynastic inheritors in the Congress party and
elsewhere, Scindia, Pilot, Prasada amongst them, are far from capable of
clawing back from the edge of the abyss.
The Congress old guard on the other hand, people in their
seventies and eighties, are immensely rich and tired, much too filled with
realpolitik and cynicism to take on a crusading Narendra Modi.
Basically therefore, the Congress day is done. We are here
witnessing the throes of the end-game, and considering the pass it has come to,
not a moment too soon.
The disintegration will accelerate once Sonia Gandhi leaves
the arena. To give the 18 years
president of the Congress Party her due, there is no one worthy of replacing
her political acumen from behind the arras, certainly not from her family.
And the way things are constituted and constructed, without
the Gandhi family capable of guiding it, there is no Congress Party capable of
cohesion or survival.
For: SirfNews
(1,785 words)
May 17th 2016
Gautam Mukherjee
No comments:
Post a Comment