Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, March 11: The first thing the dutiful old guards in the Congress begins to do after the party’s debacle in election after election is to defend the Gandhi family. If the party gives a better performance, which lately had become almost a matter of history, all the credits go to the Gandhis, but for the party’s poor showings, the responsibility lies with the state units, the local workers and a host of other reasons but never the Gandhis.
The 2022 elections are no exception. After the party’s drubbing in all the five states including being thrown out of power in Punjab, the party’s top leaders said the Gandhi siblings had fought hard in Uttar Pradesh and other states but the local party workers could not convert the people’s support to votes.
In a bid to thwart any possible demand from the G-23 type rebels within the party for a “collective leadership at the top,” the party’s Karnataka unit chief and a very senior Congress leader DK Shivakumar said on Friday that the Congress would not survive as a united party without the Gandhi family at the helm of affairs.
“Without the Gandhi family the Congress party cannot stay united. They are key for the unity of the Congress party. It is impossible for the Congress to survive without the Gandhi family,” the party’s Karnataka unit chief said. “Priyanka Gandhi took up a very tough fight and worked hard. But we could not get the results. The thing is that the Congress has not been able to convince the voters of this country. The people of this country are not understanding. We got an opportunity to explain it to them, but have failed to do so,” Mr Shivakumar said.
Large scale desertions from the party also did not matter for the Gandhi loyalists. Brushing off the string of exits over the past few years, he said, “Those who are hungry for power can please leave. People who see personal gains are leaving Congress. The rest of us are not interested in power… We are loyal to the Congress party and the Congress ideology and will always stand with the Gandhi family.”
That is the end of it and the Congress, as it seems, would continue to move on the traditional path patiently waiting for the time when the voters in the country might again turn back to Congress to govern and in the process provide easy meat to the BJP and the prime minister Narendra Modi to attack the Congress as being a “one family party.” The Congress apparently has lost the zeal and stomach to make things happen.
To some extent, the Gandhis deserved the accolades showered on them by the old guards. The Congress was in power in just three states – Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Mizoram – when Sonia Gandhi took over as Congress president in 1998. From there, it won state after state, returning to power at the Centre in 2004. In 2014, it was in power in nine states. Today after the rout in Punjab, the Congress is worse off than it was 24 years ago — it is ruling in only two states, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
Many opposition leaders are talking of consolidation of anti-BJP and want to create a platform to unitedly challenge the BJP in the 2024 elections but want to the keep the Congress out of the group believing that the grand old party has lost its relevance in the present day politics. But as some of the leaders in the opposition camps have already pointed out, no such united front could ever be possible minus the Congress because despite shrinking day by day in terms of number of seats the party could win in Parliament or various state Assemblies, its pan India presence and share of at least 20 per cent votes in the country cannot be wished away. As some experts have pointed out, only if the opposition join hands along with the 20 per cent votes of the Congress, it could have a chance to dethrone the BJP from the helm of the national politics. Otherwise, triangular contests would continue to favour the BJP as the party has carved out for itself entirely a different angle not being tread by any other political party of consequence.
Even on Friday despite the rout of all opposition parties in the hands of the BJP in four states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, again re-issued her call for opposition unity minus the Congress.
Talking about the 2024 elections, she said, “I say that all political parties that want to fight BJP must work together. There is no point in depending on the Congress. Congress was earlier capturing the entire country through their organisation, but they are not interested anymore, and they are losing their credibility. There are so many regional political parties. All must be working together and the decision on this can definitely be taken.”
She also demolished BJP’s spectacular victory in the four states, more particularly in UP, as “machine mandate” accusing the ruling party of substituting the genuine EVMs with pre-voted EVMs at the counting centres. “All EVMs should undergo forensic tests to see if these were the same machines used by people to vote and then brought in for counting. If the BJP has won, it has not won by the popular vote. It’s not a popular mandate, it’s a machinery mandate,” she said.
She said it was not a popular mandate but a victory with the help of “election machinery and central forces and agencies. “Through the use of election machinery and central forces and agencies they (BJP) have won and few states and now they are jumping around. They play a kettle drum but they cannot make music. For music, you need a harmonium,” she said at a news briefing in Kolkata.
“If a DM (Varanasi’s Additional District Magistrate) is suspended is for removing an EVM (Electronic Voting Machine), then it is a huge thing. I feel Akhilesh [Yadav] has been made to lose. There was loot. Akhilesh should not be depressed and upset. He should go to the people and challenge this,” Banerjee said referring alleged detection of EVM-laden truck in Varanasi by the Samajwadi party workers leading to the suspension of the DM.
Besides losing the centre stage of a united opposition if it materialise and bargaining power for the lion’s share in the conglomeration, the rout in the five states has also brought the Congress on the verge of losing the status of the recognised leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. The party has already lost the post in the Lok Sabha, which is equivalent to the status of a union cabinet minister, it would come very close to losing it in the Upper House too by July when the current year’s batch of retirement ends and elections are held to fill up the vacancies. The results of the elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Manipur, and Goa dictate these changes.
All the seven seats of Punjab are getting vacant this year. Elections to the five seats have already been announced and another two will come up for polls in July. All these seats are expected to go to the new victor- the Aam Aadmi Party, which won 92 seats. Currently, three each are with the Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and one with the BJP. Besides the Congress, the SAD will be the biggest looser as for the first time the party would be without a member in the Rajya Sabha. “It is perhaps the first time that we will not have a single member in the Upper House. While I wish all the best to the AAP, the question is will they be able to keep the tall promises they have made. In cases of such sweeping mandates, the disillusionment also sets in that quickly,” Rajya Sabha member and senior Akali Dal MP Naresh Gujral said.
Uttar Pradesh sends 31 members to the Rajya Sabha. Out of these, 11 will fall vacant in July. The list of retirees includes BSP senior leader and Mayawati’s key confidante Satish Mishra. His colleague, Ashok Siddharth, also retires with Mr. Mishra – leaving sole member Shri Ramji behind leaving BSP with only one member in the Upper House.
In the coming Rajya Sabha elections to be held on March 31, the Congress is already slated to lose three seats – two from Assam and one from Himachal Pradesh. The retirees include the party’s deputy leader in the House, Anand Sharma, who was elected from Himachal Pradesh.
With Thursday’s results, additionally, it will lose the three seats in Punjab and one each from Uttarakhand and UP. The list of retirees includes former Minister Kapil Sibal, who was nominated by the party from UP and Ambika Soni, who was elected from Punjab. So in total, the Congress could lose eight seats, bringing down its current tally of 34 members to 26. As per the Rajya Sabha rules and procedures, for any party to hold the position of Leader of Opposition its strength must be at least 10 percent of the total strength. The House currently has only 237. So, for the party to hold on to the LoP post, it must have 24-25 members.
The election results may have also shattered the opposition move for a combined candidate against the BJP nominee for the presidential election due this year. The President of India is elected by an electoral college comprising 543 Lok Sabha members, 233 Rajya Sabha members, and 4,120 MLAs. The value of the vote of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members remains uniform across the States but the value of the MLAs depends on the population of the State. Therefore, the value of the vote of an Uttar Pradesh MLA is the highest in the country. The number of seats the BJP has won in the UP Assembly will nullify the value of votes the non-BJP candidate could garner from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and several other states.