Welcoming his sister, Priyanka Gandhi, to active politics, Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, said that the party would now fight on the front foot everywhere. Indeed, the decision to assign Priyanka east Uttar Pradesh (UP) — where the Congress is reduced to a marginal player but where success is crucial for its national revival — reveals an aggressive, hungry streak that had been missing in the party in the 2014 elections. Ms Gandhi’s entry will have short term implications in UP, making the contest there triangular, as well as long term implications for the functioning of the party.

But it is important to step back from her entry and look at a larger question: how is the Congress approaching the 2019 election? Rahul Gandhi has clearly decided that this is a battle for the Congress’ very existence. He has a clear aim: the defeat of Narendra Modi and keeping the Modi-Amit Shah combine out of power. The Congress had close to 12 crore votes in 2009. This fell to just a little over 10 crore votes in 2014 even as the BJP shot up from less than eight crore votes to over 17 crore votes. The Congress has to both regain its voters, and ensure that the BJP is reduced to its narrower core.

In this quest, Mr Gandhi has homed in on three key issues: farmer distress to tap into rural support; jobs to tap into the votes of the young; and Rafale to discredit and shatter Narendra Modi’s clean image and portray him as beholden to certain corporations. But in terms of strategy, the Congress has realised that different states will require different approaches to make the best of the peculiarities of the first past the post system. In areas where it is the primary challenger to the BJP — for instance, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Assam — the Congress has to improve its tally and play on what it refers to as the “front foot”. In states where alliances will help, the Congress has been willing to compromise, be it Karnataka, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu. And in states where it has a marginal presence, it hopes that the non-BJP regional forces will stop the saffron juggernaut, be it West Bengal or Andhra Pradesh or the smaller states of the Northeast. UP is the big exception in this entire matrix, for the Congress has been marginal but is not in any alliance. Whether the Congress president’s “front foot strategy” and Priyanka’s entry actually revives the party’s prospects is the big imponderable of the 2019 election.

First Published: Jan 24, 2019 18:42 IST