Congress has no one but itself and its leaders to blame if, as some pollsters predict, it hurtles down into the abyss with less than 100 seats.

By Saroj Nagi

New Delhi: If the predictions made by exit polls are borne out by the counting of votes on 16 May, the unkindest cut to be delivered to the 128-year old Congress may not be its crushing electoral defeat---it can take that in its stride---but Narendra Modi’s ability to whip up a working or even a clear majority for the BJP-NDA in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

This is a scenario that the Congress dreads the most.

This is because such a scenario also carries with it a five-fold message that has set the alarm bells ringing in the Congress. One, that the saffron outfit has gained the confidence and the credibility to displace the Grand Old Party as the fulcrum of politics and has whisked away its plank of stability, governance and development. Two, that while the Congress’s social base and geographic appeal has shrunk, the BJP has managed to recover lost ground in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, reworked its social engineering and found a foothold even in states where it has little or no presence, including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal or Odisha. Three, the growing trend of voters delivering a clear and decisive mandate in state elections could get replicated at the national level thereby kickstarting the beginning of the end of the era of forcible coalitions.

Four, a BJP victory would mean that the saffron party has usurped the Congress’s decade long dream of scripting such a scenario for itself when it jettisoned its "ekla chalo" (go it alone) policy and hammered out alliances to form its first coalition government at the Centre towards the larger objective of coming to power on its own and restoring to the Congress the primacy that once belonged to it. Finally. if the BJP pulls off a decisive victory, the Congress has no option but to go for an intense introspection and a radical makeover if it has to start the painful process of clawing its way back to power and into people’s hearts and mind---and that could take some years unless there is a miracle.

Not surprisingly, even the most battle-scarred of Congressmen would now be fervently praying that the exit polls are proved wrong on 16 May and the BJP either falls far short of a majority and has to struggle to get allies or there is room for a third front government or the Congress is saved from the ignominy of slipping below the 114 mark.

But the Congress has no one but itself and its leaders to blame if, as some pollsters predict, it hurtles down into the abyss with less than 100 seats---which would be substantially lower than the 114 seats it had got in 1999.

Congress' self goals

Yet, for the first five years after the UPA came to power in 2004, it seemed as if the Congress might succeed in its mission of recovering its lost glory of governing the country on its own. The party, which was ahead of the BJP by only eight seats in 2004, had widened this gap by winning 206 seats on its own in 2009 while the saffron outfit slipped from 138 to 116. Other constituents and supporting parties helped the Congress cross the half way mark of 272 easily on both occasions.

While the party proved cynics wrong by running its coalition successfully in UPA-I, notwithstanding the Left’s decision to withdraw support over the contentious Indo-US civil nuclear deal, UPA-2 was an unmitigated disaster from the beginning, with the controversies swirling around it gathering a momentum of their own which neither Prime Minister Manmohan Singh nor Congress president Sonia Gandhi nor party vice-president Rahul Gandhi could stem over the next five years. Indeed, the party was shooting far too many self goals for comfort, with the government and the Congress often not on the same page be it on foreign policy, economic management, people’s issues or dealing with allies and the opposition, among other things.

The first of the self goals for instance was scored by the prime minister himself less than two months after he took charge. Perhaps still flushed with the success of withstanding the crisis of the Left withdrawing support over the Indo-US civil nuclear deal in UPA-1, on 16 July, he allowed a reference to Baluchistan to creep into the controversial Indo-Pak joint statement issued at the SAARC summit at Sharm el Shaikh in Egypt and delinked action on terrorism from the composite dialogue process with Islamabad. It raised the hackles of the opposition and embarrassed the Congress party which refused to endorse the joint statement but had to carefully nuance its support to the prime minister when the issue was brought to Parliament.

The move to amend the Right to Information Act, 2005 also showed up the fissures between the party and government on the one hand and between Sonia and Singh on the other. While the Congress initially opposed the Central Information Commission’s order of June 2013 declaring political parties to be public authorities which should be covered under the transparency law, Sonia and Rahul later changed their stand and called for wider consultations thereby responding to the public outcry, the objections from smaller parties and the resistance from RTI activists like Aruna Roy—a former member of the Sonia-led National Advisory Council.

If Sonia maintained the decorum of camouflaging her differences with the prime minister, Rahul made no such effort when he publicly trashed as "complete nonsense" the ordinance that sought to provide a protective shield to convicted lawmakers and had been cleared by the Union Cabinet and earlier by the core committee of which his mother and the prime minister were a part. His intervention sealed the fate of the contentious legislation, eroded the Prime Minister’s already depleting authority, insulted the allies who were part of the decision making process and projected himself as the boss of the Congress party---all with his mother’s blessings even though she was part of the committee that had given its nod.

Issues of governance

If the party-government fissures showed up on such crucial issues, what broke UPA-2's back was ---as is well known by now---its inability to check prices, inflation and corruption in high places in the government. The Radia tapes raised questions about the wheeling dealing behind cabinet formation. The CAG and other reports brought out the scams and scandals relating to Adarsh housing scam, Commonwealth Games and allocation of 2G spectrum and coal blocks (which even reached the Prime Minister’s doorstep) took a heavy toll of Singh’s persona and the Congress' image which Sonia had refurbished by giving a pro-poor tilt to the party in 2004 with the slogan of "Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath."

Even before UPA-2 entered into the final lap of its tenure, the party had started floundering, having lost the support of the middle classes and the youths because of Singh’s fading appeal and Rahul’s inability to connect with the young population. The government’s face-off with Anna Hazare over the Jan Lokpal bill and Rahul’s failure to identify himself with the anger of the youths who were supporting the Gandhian or protesting against the Delhi gangrape cost the party heavy.

Party in the doldrums

Sonia too needs to share part of the blame for the party’s sorry state of affairs. Unlike UPA-I which was steered by the Common Minimum Programme, UPA-2 proceeded with the argument that it needed to complete the agenda set in motion by its earlier edition. There was no coordination committee to take allies into confidence. The core committee provided the bridgehead between the party leadership and the government. But for the rest, there was a huge lacunae.

The meetings of the Congress Working Committee, which deliberated on key issues, were few and far between and reduced to tokenism. The chief minister’s conclaves, which used to be regular feature when the party was in opposition and not so frequent during UPA-1, were virtually dispensed with even though the organisation was facing an existential crisis in key states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal which together account for 201 of the 543 elective seats in the Lok Sabha.

The party not only remained moribund in these states but the situation worsened over the years. That Rahul's victory of 22 seats in the national elections in UP in 2009 was pyhrric was proved by his dismal performance in the 2012 assembly elections when he could get only 28 candidates elected. In 2012, it got just one seat more than the BJP in Uttarakhand and its victory in Himachal Pradesh was attributed not to the party but to Virbhandra Singh's towering persona in the state. Later it also won Karnataka because of the division of votes between the BJP and its rebel leader BS Yeddyurappa, who is now back into the saffron fold.

Rahul had led the Congress' campaign in these elections. But despite his inability to inspire party workers or voters on earlier occasions, Sonia shut her eyes to his failures and stage-managed his elevation as vice-president and political heir while the ordinary Congressman yearned for a more charismatic leadership, in their case, Priyanka Vadra.

The story of organisational failure and Rahul’s poor voter connect was repeated in the 2013 state elections in Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where the party was wiped out and faced the spectre of these states turning out to be another UP or Bihar. While incumbent BJP governments retained their states, the Congress was booted out in Rajasthan and in Delhi Arvind Kejriwal's newbie Aam Aadmi Party not only dislodged Sheila Dikshit and her government but also made heavy inroads in the Congress' vote bank among the minorities and the poor jhuggi jhopri dwellers.

Speaking out of turn

Given the state of affairs in the party and the government, it wasn't long before individual members started speaking out of turn.

As Singh's graph plummeted there was loud whispers for a change of guard at the Centre, instigated reportedly by those close to 10 Janpath, a euphemism for Sonia. That the change of guard could only mean Rahul’s installation to the key post was an open secret but the man himself fought shy of taking any responsibility that would deprive him of playing the outsider within his own dispensation in order to distance himself from the allegations flung at the Congress and the Congress-led UPA. All this coincided with Sonia’s (undisclosed) illness.

Though the Congress president has been handing over key responsibilities to him, this pushed Rahul centre-stage. But the absence of a central authority invested in Sonia took a toll of the party, with Rahul’s penchant of giving primacy to youngsters and certain leaders creating subterranean tensions with the old guard which might accerberate in the coming days.

Few can forget senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh’s highly personal attack on Home Minister P Chidambaram in 2010. Known for his proximity to Rahul, Singh slammed Chidambaram over his "intellectual arrogance" and disconnect with reality in handling the Naxal issue---a view endorsed by another cabinet colleague Mani Shankar Aiyar. Nor can one forget reports of the growing distrust between Chidambaram and then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee reflected in reports that the latter had tried to implicate his colleague in the 2G spectrum allocation controversy and the strange case of "bugging" when chewing gum was found plastered in 16 places in Mukherjee’s office.

The veteran politician had written to the PM to order a secret inquiry into the security breach that took place in 2010. The tension between the two continued to simmer even after Mukherjee became President when Chidambaram as finance minister blamed his predecessor’s policy decisions for the slowing down of the economy. Sonia had to depute a senior Congress leader to placate the President.

There were also reports of growing tensions between the prime minister and Mukherjee on issues ranging from the finance ministry’s note on the 2G controversy to the latter’s handing of the finance ministry amid rising popular anger over slipping economic growth and rising prices and inflation; between the government and its then army chief VK Singh (over his age) and a series of clashes between other cabinet colleagues.

The government’s relations with the opposition in Parliament also nosedived preventing the endorsement of key decisions and legislations including half a dozen anti-corruption bills, the Indo-Bangladesh land boundary agreement, the Higher Education and Research bill that would have subsumed the UGC, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council of Teacher Education, the Judicial Appointments Commission bill and the 120 th Constitution Amendment bill to replace the collegium system of appointment of judges. The sharing of Teesta Waters has been hanging fire. As many as 68 bills that were pending in the Lok Sabha will now lapse Lower House.

The onset of elections has created its own problems for the Congress, with leaders freely voicing their views on sensitive issues. In the absence of any formal consultations or a clear line, leaders, for instance, been voicing their views on whether or not the party should pursue the idea of a third front government to keep Modi out of power, fully aware that Rahul is against the idea that in any case hinges on who gets how many seats. Digs at Modi being a chaiwallah have boomeranged on the party.

Even Rahul, who started off by advising his leaders to focus only on the Congress achievements fell into the trap of launching an vituperative anti-Modi, anti-BJP campaign in a bid perhaps to mobilise the minority vote for the party. Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and other leaders like Kapil Sibal had to backtrack on their statement that a judge would be appointed to head the commission to probe Modi’s "snoopgate"after two allies objected to it and the lady in question and her father petitioned the Supreme Court that the matter should not be pursued.

Sonia gets into the act again

But the fear of exit polls proving to be right has started gnawing the Congress which had to fight not only the Modi led aggressive campaign but also its negativities of 10 years of incumbency, price rise, inflation, allegations of corruption against the Manmohan Singh government and a paralysis in decision making at the Centre. To top it, Rahul, who spearheaded the party’s campaign, failed to galvanise or inspire the despairing cadres who were looking for an inspiring and charismatic leader to extricate them from the mess they found themselves in.

Slowly, the older institutional mechanisms through which the party operated fell by the way side, leaving the second ranking rudderless and free to speak as they wish. The election war room at 15 Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Road became non-functional as Rahul and Priyanka took charge of the election campaign. The election coordination committee, headed by Rahul, has hardly ever met since the elections got under way. Because of the polls, the core committee did not meet for over two months. The subcommittee on working out alliances did not give its report presumably because no one was willing to join hands with the Congress. General secretaries like Madhusudan Mistry, Gurudas Kamat, Ambika Soni and CP Joshi were fielded as candidates and could not oversee the party’s affairs of states they were in charge of. A cursory discussion that took place was when spokespersons were briefed ahead of the party’s regular press conference.

Even as TV channels were getting ready to air the findings on Monday, Sonia got into the act to shore up the party’s flanks and ensure that Rahul was not targeted and the Gandhi brand remained intact with the workers, even if some leaders desert in the coming days. She conferred with senior party leaders, including general secretaries, informally on Monday to serve the dual purpose of taking stock of the situation and signalling collective responsibility whatever may be the outcome of the Lok Sabha election. Likewise, a series of meetings are being held, including that of the core group, which hadn’t met for over two months in view of elections, and a farewell dinner is being organised for the Prime Minister who came in as the mascot of the middle class and is going out in the hope that history would be kinder to him than the contemporary media or the opposition in Parliament. An introspection committee and a chintan shivir could also be on the cards once the results are announced.

Will Sonia be able to reverse the Congress’s decline that may be underscored by the exit polls? Her undisclosed illness tends to sap her energy, her age hampers her enthusiasm and her blind and maternal instincts where Rahul is concerned comes in the way. But unless she assumes a central role in the manner that she did in 2004, the Congress may be in for a long haul.

There is obviously substance in poet YB Yeats warning: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."