I.N.D.I.A. in Crisis?

Amitava Mukherjee

(The author is a senior journalist and commentator.)

Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal chief minister, has raised a very pertinent point. She has called for a change in the leadership of the INDIA conglomeration. In a word, it means the removal of Congress from the position of the leader of the bloc. Mamata has clearly hinted that those (read the Congress) who now lead the INDIA have failed to do their job properly. Under the circumstances, she has expressed her desire to assume the leadership. Predictably, it has raised consternation within the Congress, whose leaders are worried that this would mean a loss of face not only for the party but for its de facto leader, Rahul Gandhi. But let me tell my readers one thing very clearly: Mamata Banerjee is right, and there is no cogent reason to assume that the Congress is the only and the indispensable leader of the conglomeration.

Doubting Thomases will hurl several posers: Isn’t the Congress the oldest and the largest party in the group? Hasn’t it captured 99 seats in the last parliamentary election? Can any other party in the group come anywhere near it in terms of the number of seats in the Lok Sabha? At first blush, each of these questions might look like having some weight. Deeper probes will, however, reveal that they have very weak legs to stand upon.

Firstly, being the oldest carries very little meaning. One may be far advanced in age but at the same time short of wisdom and intelligence. Gone are the days of Jawaharlal Nehru when Congress had a thing called ideology. Moreover, Nehru was a democrat, and he championed the idea of federalism, which reaped rich benefits from the presence of towering state-level leaders like Gopinath Bordoloi in Assam, Sri Krishna Sinha in Bihar, and B.C. Roy in West Bengal. There is an ill-informed canard against Nehru that he wanted to foist his daughter as the next Prime Minister after him. It is not true. Nehru wanted Jayaprakash Narayan to succeed him. JP refused. Had he agreed to Nehru’s wishes, then India would not have faced the indignity of June 25, 1975.

Can anybody compare the present-day Congress with the one it had been in the 1950s or even in the early part of the 1960s? The answer will be an emphatic no. From the time of Indira Gandhi, Congress started losing even a veneer of ideology. So enhancement of its number of seats in the present Lok Sabha does not mean much, as the party does not have any ideological mooring these days. Moreover, it is still far, far behind the BJP so far as numbers of Lok Sabha seats are concerned. Congress leaders must keep in mind that without cooperation from regional allies, it might not have been able to reach any respectable mark.

What is the future of the INDIA bloc? Undeniably, it has been suffering from both identity and leadership crises. Rahul Gandhi is still a non-performer in spite of his Bharat Yodo Yatras. Sharad Pawar is over the hills. Akhilesh Yadav does not have the national-level weight. Similar is the case with M.K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu. So, who else is there, except Mamata Banerjee, if the flagging fortune of the INDIA bloc is to be jacked up after its humiliating defeat in assembly elections of Haryana and Maharashtra?

History will show that Mamata has reasons to be allergic to the Congress. She was once forced out of the grand old party, and that had provided the background behind the birth of the Trinamool Congress. Moreover, she is loath to accept Rahul Gandhi as a leader in any political formation where her Trinamool Congress is a participant. In West Bengal, she has successfully pushed out Congress to a status of nonexistence. In private, she has been harping for quite some time that under the leadership of the Congress, the INDIA bloc will never be able to successfully challenge the BJP.

Here Mamata is absolutely right. That the Congress could almost double the number of its Lok Sabha seats in the last parliamentary election was more due to the wilful inaction of the RSS in some crucial states like Uttar Pradesh than to any creditable record of its own that the Congress could present before the electorate. The picture changed entirely before the state assembly elections of Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, where RSS deployed its cadres with full force. In Maharashtra alone, the RSS is reported to have held nearly 30,000 small group meetings. The national media is erroneously ascribing the success of the Mahayuti conglomeration in Maharashtra to some popular welfare programs like the Ladki Bahin Yojana. On the contrary, it was the RSS that carried its own message to far-flung parts of Maharashtra, and this ensured the Mahayuti’s electoral success.

One may agree with the RSS’ philosophy, or one may not. But no one can deny that, unlike the Congress, it always evaluates its programs, learns, corrects itself according to its belief, and acts accordingly. Most of the Congress bigwigs have now become Twitter politicians. Example: Jairam Ramesh. They do not go to the toiling masses. Sitting in plush comforts, they tweet, meant for middle and upper middle classes. On the other hand, you won’t find the RSS leaders relying on Twitters. Still, they are largely old-fashioned. This has given them the advantage of one-to-one contact with the common people.

Mamata Banerjee does not agree with the RSS philosophy. She has no need to do so, as her own political machinery has given her a solid footing in West Bengal. But there is one thing in common between the RSS and Mamata. It is the ability to connect directly with the common people. This is the only thing that the INDIA bloc needs direly now. Even during the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, Congress could get 60 percent or more of Lok Sabha seats by getting merely between 40 to 45 percent of popular votes. Even if the Congress’ vote share fell below 50 percent, people used to believe Congress in those days. Do the people of our country have trust and faith in the Congress in the same manner nowadays? Perhaps not.

Anyone who wants to measure up to the BJP-led NDA will have to bring back this trust to his/her side. Can Mamata Banerjee do this? This is the million-dollar question.