BJP is taking on the character of the Congress of yesteryears

By Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Two apocryphal stories require retelling for whatever they are worth, before attempting to assess reasons for the Congress to leave its goalpost untended while going all over the field and to understand why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using the same tactics which it criticised when in opposition. In 1998-99 when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was often in the grip of internal conflict, a senior leader fulminated against the party’s spin doctors who coined the phrase “party with a difference”. Irritation resonated in every syllable he uttered: “Why do you overplay this? We can at best be another Congress with a saffron tinge.”

Several years prior to this exchange, then “wonder boy” of the BJP, KN Govindacharya was bemused when a scribe, after hearing his claims on how the party was growing, asked a blunt question. “So,” the journalist queried, “you will replace the Congress?” “Arrey baba, not replace, we shall be the next Congress!” Everyone in the room cracked up.

The Niti, Niyat & Niyati The other tale is a Congress story because this coin has two sides. Two currently little-to-do leaders concluded their discussion on the party’s current plight with a wisecrack: “Our party has no niti (policy) or niyat (intention) and is blind to its niyati (destiny).” Since destiny, in their viewpoint, is Priyanka Gandhi as the eventual party leader, it is not relevant for the moment. But the absence of policy and lack of intention to keep its house in order, leaving vulnerable spots unprotected, is at the root of the crisis the party faces in Uttarakhand now and in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam earlier. Unless corrective steps are taken and the leadership gives shape to a road map for political resurrection, the story will be repeated elsewhere.

Regimes in India have always behaved like this. Since this government is driven more by the prime minister’s characteristic to decimate his opposition, and not by the necessities of governance, it has used every step that it criticised previous government for: excessive use of ordinances, repeated misuse of Article 356, crushing of internal and external debate and undermining of constitutional institutions and practices. When Narendra Modi first pledged to usher in Congressmukt Bharat, most people assumed that he had coined another of his catchy slogans.

Later, the catchphrase evolved into a metaphor for Modi’s objective of removing anything remotely Nehruvian — demonstrating the progression of the strategy from the political ground to the administrative terrain. Now it appears that the desire to completely smash the Congress to smithereens continues as a political offensive. In the process, Modi is ending up being neither what he had promised to be, nor what the Congress was in the pre-Indira years.

The more one sees the two main parties in India, the greater is the conviction that the BJP and post-Nehru Congress mirror each other. The electoral rout of the Grand Old Party in 2014 was similar to the BJP’s shock defeat in 2004 in the sense that both defeats triggered the biggest crisis for the party.

Just as the BJP was clueless about the steps it should take to stage a revival, the Congress has little idea about what needs to be done to pose a serious electoral challenge to the BJP. It is true that post-foreign jaunt Rahul Gandhi is smarter with his words. His depiction of Modi heading a “suit-boot ki sarkar” resonated last year and his recent accusation of this government being “fair and lovely” evoked more than a smile or two. But politics is not all about trending on Twitter. At best, this creates high-decibel surround-sound but it must be backed by mass programmes.

Modi used both fields to push the Congress to the margins of politics. But the Congress leadership has not only failed in starting mass agitations which rattle the government but has also faltered in defending its already shrivelled political territory.

Dishing Out the Dirty Tricks For decades, the Congress did not shy away from running governments in smaller states — especially those in the Northeast — on an outsourced-business model. Because central leadership and state leaders had a patron-client relationship, the bonding was non-programmatic and instead based on mutual needs. The central leadership saw these state units as repositories of resources to run the party and fund electoral campaigns, while the state leaders expected allocation of official resources that could be siphoned off.

Warning signals were not heeded when post-2014 the Congress stopped being in a position to allocate central resources. For several months dissent in the state unit in Arunachal Pradesh had become endemic but neither the Congress president nor vice-president had time for dissidents.

The Congress ignored the fact that when Vajpayee was prime minister, Arunachal was the first state that came under the BJP’s sway. The Congress unit in Assam too saw a vertical split because of inaction of the central leadership. The troubles in Uttarakhand are of a similar nature. The Congress unit in Assam too saw a vertical split because of the inaction of central leadership. The troubles in Uttarakhand are of a similar nature.

The Modi-fied BJP received a final push in its electoral campaign only after the organisational machinery was beefed up and seamlessly integrated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh network. The Congress has to put its house in order if it wishes to recover.

The Congress accuses the BJP of shutting all doors on dialogue. Barring those in the coterie, most party leaders and cadre feel the same. To expect the BJP not to unleash its Dirty Tricks department and poach on Congress territory is being foolhardy. After all, the BJP is already the next Congress.

(The writer has most recently authored Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984)