Boost for PM Modi grows, blow for Rahul Gandhi

The Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh results provide no reason for Rahul Gandhi, the newly-minted Congress President, to celebrate. The BJP has managed to retain Gujarat and added Himachal to its kitty. The Congress footprint has shrunk further. Of the two major States with the Congress, Karnataka is to elect a new Assembly early next year and it is anyone’s guess whether it, too, will not slip out of the party’s hands. The BJP boast of making India Congress-Mukt does no longer sound hollow. Therefore, the challenge for Rahul to re-invent himself and his party is all the greater.

The energetic campaign by Gandhi in Gujarat had created the impression that the party might, after all, do well in a State which had voted five times on the trot for the BJP and which was now beset by agrarian problems, GST-linked woes of the numerically strong trading community. Fuelling further, the anti-BJP sentiment was the freelance agitations by the newly-emerging caste leaders. By co-opting the leaders of the Patels, OBCs and Dalits on his side, Rahul had hoped to form a formidable caste-block to challenge the well-worn BJP machinery. A lackluster performance by the State government led by a faceless chief minister, too, were factors in Congress’s favour.

Also, the higher media profile acquired by Rahul following his well-orchestrated US trip, and his willingness to dirty his hands in the rough and tumble of electioneering were supposed to boost the Congress prospects. The fact that Rahul was willing to stoop low, what with dozens of trips to temples and declarations of his being a thread-wearing Hindu and a Shiv Bhakt, were all meant to woo the Gujarat voter. Indeed, the timing of his formal elevation as the Congress chief, too, ought to have been a positive factor. However, as the results on Monday confirmed all these exertions of Rahul fell well short of the winning half-way mark. Yes, the party managed to improve on its 2012 tally, but not by much. Any fair assessment of the results will grant that some of the accretion in the Congress vote this time was essentially due to the anti-BJP rallies of Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mevani and Alpesh Thakur, who presented themselves as leaders of their respective castes.

In other words, Rahul’s contribution to the Congress tally remains open to question, which leads us to the central point about the Congress under Rahul trying to ape the BJP. This blatant turn towards soft Hindutva by the Congress Party was bound to come a cropper as the people preferred the original Hindutva party.  On its part, the BJP will be wrong to read in the Gujarat outcome an endorsement of its performance at the Centre or the State. There is a growing disenchantment against the party for its failure to fulfill various election promises. The economic conditions of ordinary people have not improved perceptively enough for the voters to be enthused about the BJP. If the party has still managed to win in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, it is essentially because in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the country has its tallest leader whose vote-winning capacity is unsurpassed. Modi single-handedly won Gujarat for the BJP, though Himachal Pradesh was ripe for change anyway.

Unfortunately, the Monday verdict is unlikely to inject a measure of sanity into our fraught political discourse. Defeat would not cause an honest stock-taking, instead, it would make the Opposition more strident, more obstructionist, more confrontationist. Rahul has an opportunity to present a reasoned, cooperative face of the Congress. This will earn him respect, and the Congress some relevance, but disruption and obstruction in Parliament will not help the party’s cause. Also, it is nothing less than a national tragedy that we seem to be lurching from one election to another without a pause. This diverts national attention from the more urgent task of nation-building, of development, of fixing the plumbing of a broken system.

It may be impractical to club the State and national election in a single time-frame of, say, four-to-six weeks but the problem of elections-without-a-break needs to be grappled with through an all-party consensus. After Karnataka, the next round in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan intervenes before we have the general election in 2019. It is a serious issue and needs the attention of the political class. Meanwhile, the Modi Sarkar, instead of gloating about the wins in Gujarat and Himachal, should rev up the economic engine, work for social harmony and justice and ensure that the fringe claiming proximity to the Sangh parivar does not indulge in loony acts. His stature will grow further if he is able to work for sab ka saath, sab ka vikas.