The Congress' failed Trio and Temple template

The Gujarat elections proved to be much more engaging and competitive than expected, at least in the sense that the messaging and campaigning machinery of the BJP did not overwhelm all others. Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor, Jignesh Mewani and surprisingly even Rahul Gandhi presented a tough fight to BJP electioneering. Moreover, this was probably the first time that the Gujarat model of development has been challenged and gained wider traction among its usual audience of scholars and academics. What was different this time was that people on the ground such as farmers, Dalits, and allegedly even one of the BJP’s main bases, the traders and small businessmen have expressed dissatisfaction and questioned to some extent if the Gujarat model has actually delivered what it says it has. To some extent, the largely urban victories the BJP has managed should be a reason for pause for Amit Shah and Co., who would do well to work to recapture these seats the next time, or more crucially, in 2019. In retrospect, rural agrarian distress is a systemic, nationwide problem India is facing, and even if the BJP cannot be blamed single-handedly for this, it certainly has won on the promises of changing this scenario.

Recently, I have been part of an exciting new initiative, the Citizens for Public Leadership (CPL) Fellowship, and our first lectures, with Prof. Steve Jarding, a senior scholar and veteran manager of election campaigns and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Milan Vaishnav, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Sadanand Dhume, a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute have given the Fellows a phenomenal insight into the way India’s political machinery works, including its campaign motifs, the use of crime, muscle and identity, and finally, the nature and implications of the current stranglehold the BJP seems to have over electoral politics in India. The content of these lectures has been extremely useful in making more sense of political developments, and I shall be putting some of it into context for this article.

Ever since their 2014 victory, the BJP has run a tight show, maintained discipline in their cadres, stayed strictly on the message they want to portray rather than diverting according to what the opposition says, and most importantly, avoided ‘scams’, at least to the extent that they have not yet been revealed. Sometimes, like in the ongoing Jay Shah case, the BJP has resorted to using brute force to intimidate anyone who might attempt to draw attention. Dr. Jarding, a veteran scholar and professional who has directed campaigns across more than 28 countries and who ran Akhilesh Yadav’s campaign in UP earlier this year, reiterated what the BJP has done; it has constantly attacked the character and credibility of the Congress and the opposition, but especially the Congress, and this attack has diminished in public eyes, even the leader with possibly the highest probity among them, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Even PM Modi’s recent attack on M.S. Aiyar and his Pakistan jibes have not earned widespread criticism apart from his usual critics in the opposition, senior media and academic personalities, who are, in any case, “pseudo-seculars” and earn a lot more unsavory words from legions of Modi fans. Most importantly, to apply a principle Prof. Jarding iterated, getting across the message of the “corrupt Congress” and its “corrupt allies” to such an extent with relentless repetition and efficacy is something the BJP has done well. One of the PM’s habits of disavowing open media conferences is concerning for many. Through this mechanism, he effectively says and talks about and addresses only what he wants.

On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi’s recent avatar is definitely a breath of fresh air, but it remains to be seen if it can be sustained or if it was simply to pave his way for becoming the Congress President without internal opposition from the Congress’ old guard, who do not think too much of him as they did of Sonia. Rahul however, has managed to create a tenuous alliance with the new triumvirate of Mewani, Patel and Thakor. However, the alliance would have been extremely strained even if the Congress had won. They would need to deal with an inevitable face-off between Patel and Thakor, for Patel is fighting to include Patels in the OBC quota, and Thakor is vehemently opposing it. Tampering with quotas in any way will be a task which will be much more difficult than expected, and many governments have in a way heaved a sigh of relief that the courts are quashing any existing changes in quota demands, as the Congress-NCP combine in Maharashtra did for Marathas and Muslims before the elections, knowing full well that the courts would deem it illegal, which they did. Even in the future, the Congress will need to make an extremely valiant effort to keep these two groups together, and even then there is no guarantee that the BJP will not manage to outfox it.

Now that the BJP has won, it will most likely try to mollify the Patels with tactics other than reservation or promise to study the issue. One problem they will need to deal with is Hardik, who reared his head back in Gujarat at a bad time for the BJP after being effectively sidelined after his 2015 agitation. The BJP will seek to erode his credibility during the next five years, and hope to keep Mewani and Alpesh Thakor in line, since their communities are scattered electorally and are scarcely likely to come together to form a strong united force. Mewani actually is one leader who has the ability to raise real issues with coherently and to present them intelligently to an audience. Actually, the BJP would actually not be at a loss if it were to listen to him. Violence and incidents against Dalits and Muslims are wholly unacceptable in any way or form, and Mewani's campaign is probably the one driven more from legitimate concerns than the political mobilization of Thakor and Patel.

None of these three have demonstrated their ability to sustainably challenge a wily enemy like the BJP. The BJP cannot be defeated solely by bluster, and unless scams rock the coming years of its tenure and it self-destructs like UPA II, it will take united, relentless efforts to drain the current credibility that the BJP has created despite rural distress and lacklustre economic indicators. Patel’s wild allegations of EVM tampering against a publicly well-regarded institution like the EC shows his immaturity, and even senior academicians and politicians have treated these allegations with caution or even serious skepticism in the absence of concrete evidence.

In his lecture, Sadanand Dhume noted that the idea of Nehruvian secularism needed an overhaul. This is clear since the BJP is consolidating the Hindu vote to a much greater extent than it was able to do before, and is able to pass off someone like Yogi Adityanath as the CM of a major state. Even the Congress has realized that caste-based calculations are no longer working in the face of this consolidation. Nor do any current Congress or opposition leaders have the towering credibility of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel or Shastri, who had the moral rectitude and genuine intention to be truly secular without blatantly using identities to gain votes.

However, even intelligent and respected members of the intellectual opposition of the BJP such as Rajmohan Gandhi and Ramachandra Guha have clung to desperate tactics like clinging to the Patel-Thakor-Mewani trio as serious contenders to the BJP, despite the fact that there is very little evidence as of now that any of them can carry even a pan-Gujarat alliance on their shoulders and wield it to combat the BJP. Rajmohan Gandhi even credits Rahul with ‘spirit and stamina’ on the basis of one unsuccessful election campaign. Narendra Modi’s tactics of using the Muslim and Pakistan card is hardly surprising, since it is a quick, surefire recipe to fire up the Hindu vote in a last minute campaign rally in Gujarat, where Hindu-Muslim relationships are more strained than a lot of other parts of India and where Muslims are sadly much more marginalized in the electoral scenario. Modi knows this reality full well (would recommend Ashutosh Varshney’s book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life for those needing details on Hindu-Muslim relations in Gujarat). On the other hand, the opposition’s desperation to cling to whatever they get is something alarming for India in general. A few months ago, for Ramachandra Guha, that beacon was Nitish Kumar, and now it is the so-called young brigade of Gujarat for Rajmohan Gandhi. This is not to say that they cannot develop into formidable leaders, but they are certainly not a formidable force now as a serious national level challenger to the BJP, which is what the country really needs.

What India desperately needs is a stronger political opposition. The intellectual opposition has many luminaries such as Christophe Jaffrelot, Jean Dreze, Ramchandra Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and many others, who are doing a phenomenal job of criticizing government policies academically. While Arvind Kejriwal attempted matching the PM’s rhetoric on Twitter and social media, he is not the consummate politician and nor does he have the machinery to take on the BJP’s barrage of attacks. He has rightfully shifted focus back on governance and seems to have devised some good policies, and whether Delhiites have liked it will be seen in the next election. If he gets a margin similar to what he got the last time, Kejriwal will be a much more credible, even if not formidable rallying point for the opposition than these three can be.

However, the Congress, as one of the major parties left in India which can hope to reinvigorate itself at a national level, needs some serious shifting of focus to match the BJP. Currently, they do not have the public credibility to tarnish Modi with any criticism. They should know that their brand of secularism has been thoroughly rejected, and that their image of being scam tainted makes them ineligible to criticize the economy in the eyes of voters.With its total control at the Centre, a slowly rising tally in the RS and widening control over many critical state governments, the BJP has left little wiggling room for the Congress politically, or even in the court of public opinion.

Unfortunately, the Congress has been extremely complacent in realizing that its use of identities has been vastly outmoded by the BJP’s revamped, potent combo-pack of Hindu consolidation plus development. Rahul Gandhi and the Congress have caught onto the BJP’s temple politics only now, but will need to chart their course in the future with something much more powerful, something with which they can effectively counter the BJP. In Prof. Jarding’s words, it will need to puncture the BJP's narrative, for it is scarcely being able to build its own. The Congress will need to create a narrative digestible to voters and erase its elite and anti-Hindu image in the eyes of voters. For that, it will need a fresh set of faces, reinvent the images of its leaders, maybe diminish the prominence of a few which are not useful anymore, and add to that a phenomenal campaign strategy for 2019 which they should begin implementing as soon as possible. Only then, can it hope to counter Amit Shah and Modi's machinery. In the current form, a rainbow coalition of the Congress where it relies on a Delhi-heavy leadership and campaign strategy and kowtows to mostly caste-based regional leaders is not acceptable to most Indians. Amid all their alliances, only a few of their regional allies now hold any national influence.

Even those who do not hate the BJP but believe that it needs a serious, cogent opposition to counter it do not like the Congress in its current form. Supporting coalitions like the now defunct Mahagathbandhan, where Lalu was ridiculously easy prey to attacks and too ambitious for his own good, or the hastily cobbled Gujarat youth trio is not the way to go. The opposition will need to rebuild itself from the ground up and build a more rational, balanced form of secularism and a sellable economic narrative, or else, it risks ceding whatever little space it has to the BJP. The academic, intellectual opposition for the BJP is well taken care of by mostly balanced and level-headed scholars, what the opposition needs now is to translate that intellectual opposition into an effective political force. As Sadanand Dhume has noted in his post-result tweets, the Congress cannot consider its 'resurgence' in Gujarat as a template, it needs much more work and needs to bite the bullet to make the drastic changes it has avoided until now. 

Modi and Shah will definitely conduct a detailed investigation of their diminished performance in Gujarat even if they put up a happy face now. Heads will roll and state leaders will at least receive a dressing down if not be punished. The Congress needs to do much more than believing that they have made a good beginning in Gujarat by increasing its number of seats. Its 'success' is a combination of the BJP's failures to manage anger against the GST and farmers' discontent and some of its own campaigning. The BJP, despite being in a commanding position, will take the cue that rural discontent and the economy need a face-lift, even if it is temporary and for now, geared to work until 2019. If they manage to do that while the Congress remains content on following the Gujarat template, Rahul Gandhi may indeed have a lot of free time on his hands as the Congress president, and may even find that the last four states his party governs have been indeed rendered Congress-mukt before 2024!