Its recent defeat in four major Assembly elections and the support of some of its leaders to the Run for Unity project shows that the ruling party at the Centre has lost popular and political support.
With the BJP’s triumphant march in the recent Assembly elections, the erosion of the Congress’s will to continue to govern at the Centre was obvious in the abandoning of the Winter Session of Parliament midway. Day after day, the proceedings could not be held, not because the main Opposition created any hurdles, but, because Congress MPs and their allies themselves continually disrupted Parliament.
For all the pep talk from the Congress president and the Prime Minister to party MPs telling them not to lose heart after the electoral rout, the insistence of many Congress MPs to move a no-confidence motion against their own Government shows how the so-called Congress high command is losing control over the rank and file.
As if to underline the dissonance in the Congress, the Government it leads in Hyderabad raised the flag of rebellion, with Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy vowing to fight the Union Government’s decision to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh “till my last breath”.
The revolt against Ms Sonia Gandhi’s leadership is showing elsewhere too as her attempts to pin a communal tag on the Sardar Patel memorial has been rejected. The open support given by the ruling UDF chief whip PC George in Kerala to the Run for Unity marathon speaks volumes. Mr George belongs to the Kerala Congress (Mani), an important partner in the State’s Congress-led UDF Government. He inaugurated the marathon in the Christian-dominated Kottayam city in central Kerala and also distributed T-shirts that carried the image of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
When criticised for his involvement in the marathon, he explained that honouring Sardar Patel was a national event and that re-invited, he would participate again. Even his party leader and Kerala Finance Minister KM Mani refused to condemn his participation. The Congress has not officially reacted.
As usual, the Congress leadership is seeking to counter growing disenchantment over its minority-placation programme by re-introducing a Bill (to prevent communal violence) that is heavily loaded against the country’s majority Hindu community.
The Bill essentially claims that in any instance of communal violence, Hindus would be ipso facto considered guilty. This blatant discrimination against the majority community has raised concerns countrywide. The Bill is considered a surrender to the conservative and divisive elements among the Muslim leadership.
The defeat of the Congress in the four major electoral battles held recently is so comprehensive and complete that the party is now preparing to do something it had long been denying — project a prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 general election.
The All India Congress Committee session has been called in mid-January 2014 to crown party vice president Rahul Gandhi as the candidate for the top job. The political calculation is clear. Mr Gandhi’s youth will be projected to a large section of young voters who are now in the majority, in the hope that it will counter what has been described as the ‘Modi wave’. This gamble too is destined to fail.
Old Congress ally DMK, whose Kanimozhi-Raja combination is allegedly behind the massive 2G scam, has decided to have no truck with the Congress for the general election. This is shows in which direction the wind is blowing. With the AIADMK also having clarified its intentions on similar lines, the Congress is left with the support of the neither of the two major political forces in Tamil Nadu.
In Andhra Pradesh, coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema are dominated by YSR Congress. The Congress-led alliance in Kerala is facing a Hindu backlash and a loss of Christian confidence over the Gadgil-Kasturirangan report on the Western Ghats issue. Karnataka is the only hope for the party in the south.
Electoral arithmetic, however, shows that the Congress’s win in Karnataka in the last Assembly election was largely a product of votes that the BJP lost after former Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa moved out of the party and set up his own political outfit. With Mr Yeddyurappa now seeking to return to the BJP, the Congress will lose the advantage of split BJp support base. Therefore, it will not be a cakewalk for the party in Karnataka either.
The goodwill that Mr Modi has generated by commissioning Sardar Patel’s Statue of Unity is telling. It shows the persistent and permeating popular anger against the Congress’s 60-year-old dominance over national politics and its abject surrender to a single family.
There is not a single national monument dedicated to the Sardar anywhere in the country, whereas several Government buildings, projects and programmes have been named after the members of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The effort to display the Nehru-Gandhi name is so strong that an international airport that was supposed to be named after Andhra Pradesh’s great leader, two-time Chief Minister and film star NT Rama Rao, was ultimately named after Rajiv Gandhi.
The national anger is being expressed in other ways also. There is a widespread feeling that even our smaller neighbours are finding us too weak and we are not asserting the power that ought to come from a large and ancient country like India. A realisation of this public perception is the reason why the External Affairs Ministry has showed some spine in retaliating against US diplomats in India for Washington, DC’s shameful treatment of an Indian diplomat in New York.
This realisation also seems to have alerted the Manmohan Singh-led Government to reject Pakistan’s insistence on a high-level bilateral dialogue. This is in sharp contrast to Mr Singh’s history of bending over backwards to accommodate Islamabad’s demands even as Pakistani soldiers targeted Indian security personnel across the Line of Control.
However, all this muscle flexing on the part of the UPA is too little and too late and will not make any tangible difference in the public perception that the regime is weak and suffers from policy paralysis. Obviously, an impression created over a decade cannot be changed overnight.
This waking up at the last minute is unlikely to get the party back at the top of the popularity charts, as the Congress’s prince charming is still trailing far behind Mr Modi in almost every survey that has been published. The nation is all set to pack off the Congress in the summer of 2014, irrespective of whether the party names Mr Gandhi as its prime ministerial candidate.
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