If gratitude was a virtue valued by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it would have much to thank the Gandhi family for even in contrary scenarios.
Let us go to the year 1984: the BJP’s two out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha versus the Congress’s Rajiv Gandhi and its 414 seats, which remains unbeaten. It was hard for any political party to rise from the ashes of these dimensions.
Revival of the opponent
However, the BJP did so, with great help from the woolly ‘secularism’ of Rajiv Gandhi. In one fell swoop of two ‘secular’ steps, he paved the way for the BJP’s revival: by perpetrating a monstrous amendment of the Constitution to overturn the most sensible judgment of the Supreme Court granting maintenance to a hapless Shah Bano, hoping to win the voluble conservative Muslim clergy to his side instead of abiding by the rising liberal voices within the community, and two, by having the locks on the Babri Masjid opened and permitting shilanyas of the Ram temple, thus giving space to the assertion of loud Hindu voices, hoping to win them over too with this concession.
Both steps helped the BJP to emerge from the shadows: the first by providing social acceptance to its charge of minority appeasement against the Congress, and the second by demonstrating that even a government with an unprecedented electoral mandate can be brought to its knees by loud noise. From then on, significantly, even as the Congress has been in power, it never had a majority of its own. More importantly, the BJP’s divisive agenda has found steady support to enable it to come centre stage.
For a drastic transformation
And then there is the history of events that occurred from 2014 onwards. The BJP’s divisive agenda, barely hidden under the veil of ‘vikas’, has showed the Congress the writing on the wall: things will never be the same again. And for its survival, a drastic transformation is required — a transformation starting at the base and going to the top, and an imagination way beyond what it was familiar with in its long history. An imagination that counters the BJP’s platform of ‘vikas’ at the top and widespread but localised communal violence at the ground level. A genuine restructuring of the inner working of the Congress is needed to give voice to its supporters at the base and right up to the top, and a narrative that goes beyond issuing statements of concern at price rise and for some of its leaders to be paying visits to temples on the eve of every election and a side visit to a dargah on the way.
The one faint sign of an alternate Congress agenda came up a month or two before the 2019 general election, when it coined its ‘Nyuntam Aay Yojana’, or Nyay Yojna, of providing a regular income of ₹72,000 a year to the bottom 20% of India's families in terms of wealth, but it vanished before it could even be heard by the potential beneficiaries, and has never been heard of again.
An inertness
The challenge the Congress was expected to pose to the BJP has dissipated owing to its sheer inertia at both the structural and the ideological planes. The inertia emanates from the refusal to recognise that a lot of the old grammar of politics has been overturned. Politics is no longer a leisurely activity undertaken a month or two prior to an election and preparing an appropriate manifesto; it is an agglomerate of constant activity, not least keeping your cadres forever active on several fronts and, above all, the leaders being seen leading from the front all the time and not on occasional visits after getting back home from a secret trip abroad.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not the only leader who has changed the grammar; the Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s leader M.K. Stalin, the Aam Aadmi Party’s leader Arvind Kejriwal and several others have done it too, and with great success, irrespective of the merits of each.
It is clear that the Gandhis refuse either to look at the writing on the wall (and, therefore, to let any significant change take place either in the mode of the party’s functioning) or to let any alternate agenda come to the fore so long as they remain ensconced at the top, never mind if the bottom keeps slipping away. The suggestions that were reportedly made by political strategist Prashant Kishor to the party recently contain little that the group of 23 senior Congress leaders has not been making over the past two years and more and getting a tongue lashing by the drum beaters around the top. The only significant new suggestion made by Mr. Kishor appears to be a strategic one — for the Congress to contest 350 odd seats on its own and for the rest by seeking alliances with regional parties.
The leadership has responded with its time-honoured tactic of burying all implicit criticisms — by appointing a committee to look at them. They have lain buried for over two years anyway. Indeed, they have implicitly lain buried ever since 2014 when the party should have woken up to the new realities and equipped itself to deal with them. Its ‘introspective’ sessions after every defeat should easily qualify as a term of political humour. The persistent efforts of the 23 senior party leaders to awaken the top three in the family have been ignored. Mr. Kishor’s suggestions are a case of an alarm bell ringing out, and steps have been announced to ignore these as well.
Almost status quo
While a step ordained by the party’s own constitution to democratise its inner functioning through fair and transparent elections; to put its mind to creating an agenda that stands apart from the BJP’s (now as well as for the elections), and to start a sort of full-time internal movement is clearly the need of the hour, the leadership has made it clear that that would be its last option. It has thus conceded the 2024 general election to the BJP. It is increasingly getting hard to view the Congress and the BJP as adversaries; they look more to be complementary to each other, though the complementarity is entirely one-sided.
Is there any hope that things might change? Any hope that the Gandhi family will gracefully retire and let the party reinvent itself is far too utopian. Any hope that they will undertake the requisite steps themselves is not any more likely. And the rest of the Opposition parties getting together with Congress amounts to “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” under the current scenario. Yet, the fact remains that the BJP’s electoral support does not go beyond 40%; 60% of the voters still remain on the other side.
One can see why Mr. Modi and the BJP should be grateful to the Gandhis.
Harbans Mukhia taught history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and is a commentator
