The assault on my hometown Mumbai that took place exactly six years ago doomed the Indian National Congress. But it did so in a way Ajmal Kasab, his murderous colleagues and their handlers across the border could not have intended or anticipated. It appeared the Congress had survived the assault unscathed, winning a majority in the Delhi assembly elections held soon after, and performing outstandingly in the following year’s general election.



The party increased its seat tally by 61 and its vote share by over 2% in the 2009 election, and secured a majority in Maharashtra in partnership with its UPA ally, the Nationalist Congress Party. The attack of November 26, however, had set in motion a chain of events that ensured the party’s calamitous defeat in the 2014 face-off.



It began with the Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s resignation. Having committed the crime of changing his clothes twice on the day of a terrorist attack in Delhi that September, Patil was one tragedy away from dismissal. 26/11 was that final straw. When he was replaced by P Chidambaram, analysts expressed relief we finally had a home minister who would actually do something, instead of merely mouthing platitudes and looking dapper. In actual fact, it was the first of a series of missteps in which Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi acted like chess players placing important pieces in the worst positions imaginable.



Ineffective home ministers



The Home Ministry portfolio is immensely prestigious, thanks in no small measure to the legacy of the first man to occupy that position, Sardar Patel. What people tend to forget is that Patel did most of his nation-building work before independent India had a Constitution. (Not to mention the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on his watch.) Once constitutional checks and balances were firmly in place, India’s home ministers became lame ducks. Think of Indrajit Gupta sending out a letter in 1997 to all chief ministers urging them to implement police reforms, and being ignored by every single one. LK Advani dreamt of being a second Sardar Patel, but his term as home minister will be remembered solely for the failure to keep a hijacked Indian Airlines flight grounded in Amritsar, forcing India to trade three dangerous terrorists to secure the release of its citizens held hostage in Kandahar.



P Chidambaram’s big idea as home minister, the National Counter Terrorism Centre, immediately got stuck in objections from states that it violated their autonomy. What he managed to get done was almost all counter-productive. First, he ordered a misguided war against left-wing rebels that left the Central Reserve Police Force battered and bloody. One ambush in 2010 in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, cost the CRPF 76 personnel. Second, he threw a spanner in the works of the telecom industry by objecting to Chinese investment and getting into a spat with Blackberry over data encryption. Third, he modified visa regulations, instituting a two-month “cooling off” period between visits to India, a rule that any terrorist could easily find a way around, but which punished those tourists who loved India most. Now, he refers to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act as an obnoxious law, but in his time in office he did not lift a finger to modify or abolish it, instead enhancing the powers of the paranoid surveillance state.



Wrong place, wrong man



Chidambaram had been an excellent finance minister, and left that post only reluctantly. After a brief period under Manmohan Singh, the portfolio passed to Pranab Mukherjee, who had been an exceptional external affairs minister. Mukherjee was even more disastrous in finance than Chidambaram was in home. His first budget was like a massive party charged to a credit card in the face of an empty bank account. It was spend, spend, spend, cut taxes, cut duties, with no thought to making up the shortfall in the future. When the time came to claw back some money, he chose a dreadful License Raj-era method, retrospective taxation, which spooked foreign investors like few things had done since 1992. When Mukherjee was kicked upstairs to Rashtrapati Bhavan, he left behind such a trail of destruction that Chidambaram, returning to the finance ministry, could do no more than stabilise the economy in the remaining months of parliament’s tenure. It was way too little, way too late.



Turning tragedy to farce was the man picked to replace Mukherjee as external affairs Minister, SM Krishna. Though shifted to the gubernatorial track, Krishna still loved active politics and was desperate to return to it. What he evidently did not love was anything to do with international relations. He exuded a mix of cluelessness and disinterest that grew more pronounced after Shashi Tharoor, an expert in that domain, was sacked as minister of state over a cricket-related scandal.



Internal battles



I could go on about placing pieces in wrong positions, (Jairam Ramesh at the environment ministry comes to mind) but the chess metaphor breaks down at this point because the pieces began turning on each other. Jairam Ramesh castigated Chidambaram, Chidambaram’s Home Secretary GK Pillai undercut Krishna, Kamal Nath fought Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Praful Patel battled Jairam Ramesh, Chidambaram took on Nandan Nilekani, Digvijay Singh fulminated against Chidambaram, and the biggest battle of all, never out in the open but clear to anybody following politics, was a massive standoff between finance and home, Mukherjee and Chidambaram, each a proxy, so the rumour went, for some of India’s biggest business houses.



Many of the factors that turned United Progressive Alliance II into a disaster, such as corruption, rising prices and a lack of leadership, have been thoroughly scrutinised by the press. But little attention has been given to the central government’s response to 26/11. It seemed a step in the right direction, but proved a massive error, and triggered a series of further blunders that ultimately destroyed any hopes the Congress had of retaining power.



