Prem Shankar Jha, who is 84 years old, thinks Rahul's long 'Unite India' (Bharat Jodo) walk will help Congress make ''a more equitable alliance' with Opposition parties. The problem is that Congress is projecting Rahul as a messianic figure who has been battling the BJP all on his own for these many years and who, thanks to the power of Lurve & Peas, will finally emerge from his Yellow Submarine to purge the land of the Blue Meanies as represented by the evil BJP .
The new President of Congress, Mallikarjun Kharge has made this clear. He says- '“If anyone will bring a non-BJP government in Centre, it will be the Congress under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi.” Kharge is also busy pissing off other non BJP Chief Ministers like K Chandrasekhar Rao who is visiting other states and meeting leaders with a view of building an anti-BJP alliance. 'Look after your own house first,” Kharge said. “With your actions, you are weakening the party [Congress] which is alive from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and is ready to fight the BJP.'
This means that Modi's strategy of focusing his fire on 'Pappu' (as Rahul is unflatteringly called) is justified. Congress still plans to put that moon-calf in the Prime Minister's chair. It has no genuine interest in working with other parties. It will use them to get what it wants and then pull the rug from under their feet as it did back in the Nineties. It seems that what 'Bharat Jodo' will achieve is the break-up of any possible broad anti-BJP alliance for 2024. Congress's hubris means that other parties have a greater interest to crush Congress and cannibalize its voters rather than enable it to replace the BJP once again and reestablish its hegemony. Why? Congress is a cult- a dynastic one. It is a Faith which will use and then crush anyone and everyone because the Dynasty incarnates God almighty- a Deity more jealous than Jehovah. By contrast, you can always defeat the BJP by being better at governance or 'last mile delivery'.
Jha, who thinks he believes in Democracy but who actually is of the Dynastic Faith, writes, with typical fatuity, in Siddharth Varadarajan's disgraced the Wire,
When Rahul Gandhi began his Bharat Jodo Yatra many, including this writer, wondered why he had decided to walk from the southernmost state of India to its northernmost and not from its westernmost to easternmost.
The merism for India is Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Anyway, Congress has been wiped out in the East.
This was because, with the exception of Karnataka, till Madhya Pradesh, none of the states that he planned to walk through had a Congress party left that was worth the name.
But Rahul is elected from Kerala while Stalin, in TN, is an ally. Karnataka is crucial. All in all, the route isn't too bad. What is disastrous is the renewed insistence that Rahul is Ind's Messiah.
By contrast, had he decided to walk from west to east, beginning with Gujarat he would have traversed seven major states in which the Bharatiya Janata Party is in serious contention with a rival of greater or near-equal strength. In five of these, the Congress party is in power or has sizeable cadre strength, and four of those states are facing Vidhan Sabha elections between now and the end of 2023.
But there is no East-West merism for India. There is only Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
Gujarat is the first among them.
But previous Congress pad yatra walks from Gujarat to Delhi flopped. It may be that Congress has got the caste equation right with good KHAM candidates. Rahul's visit may upset the apple-cart. If you are going for a protest vote, don't bring in a reminder of the incompetence you represent.
In each of these states, the Congress has a strong cadre base that can, with only a little extra push, upend a BJP that has not delivered on a single major economic promise it has made in the past nine years.
No. Congress's 'cadre base' is a mushroom farm kept in the dark and shat upon from time to time by the high command. The big problem with this yatra is that the local cadre neither wants to nor is able to follow up on issues raised with Rahul by activists who approach him along the route. This has always been the problem with Rahul's campaigns. In the past he'd helicopter from venue to venue and his speeches would be well received. But there was no follow up. Booth management was neglected. Indira would notice if a 'grass-roots' leader was concentrating on actual grass roots work as opposed to sycophancy. That's how Bahaguna got his start. Kharge and Gehlot were of that ilk. But, under Rahul, only the sycophants mattered. The Congress vote has collapsed. This is what will happen yet again unless caste based vote-banks are successfully mobilized on the basis of pure protest, not a messianic faith in the moon-calf.
So why, one wondered had Rahul chosen to go south to north, instead of west to east?Today, two months later, his reasons no longer matter because two recent events have the potential to change the political calculus of victory and defeat in the coming 18 months.The first is the Congress’ successful completion of Mallikarjun Kharge’s election as its president.
This represented a failure not a success. Kharge was supposed to rope in Gehlot. He failed and was punished for his failure by having to pick up that poisoned chalice himself. Thus, while Rahul is projected as a Messiah, Kharge will have to carry the can for the Party losing Rajasthan and failing to hold together in Karnataka.
The second is the warmth with which Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has been received in the south of the country.
Because he was rejected by the North. The stand-still enshrined in the 87th Amendment runs out in 4 years. The South could lose seats to the North because of demographic shifts. Congress, as a former National Party, could play a role in fighting this by turning into the opposite of what it was in the Nineteen Thirties. It will represent non-Brahmin Southerners and Muslims and regional dynasties. Dalits, however, stand to gain representation so, at least in the North, they will stand with the BJP.
Kharge’s election is a landmark because he is only the second non-Nehru-Gandhi president of the Congress since Indira Gandhi split the original party in 1969.
But it is already obvious that Kharge will have less influence than Kesri.
His elevation has brought three new elements into the political calculus of the country’s future that were not there before. The first is that it has laid to rest the suspicion that the Gandhis were determined to keep the reigns of power in their hands at any cost, and resurrected the belief that Sonia Gandhi had only been doing so because she believed that keeping a member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s family at its head was the only way to keep the party from breaking up as it had almost done before she took over the Congress Presidency in 1999.
This is nonsense. It is obvious that 80 year old Kharge, who lost his seat in the Lok Sabha 3 years ago, will have no power. His job is to take responsibility for future debacles while Rahul is resurrected as a Messianic figure.
Rahul reinforced this when he came to Delhi to witness Kharge’s takeover as Congress president, by refusing to meet any of the Congress chief ministers
there are only two- Gehlot and Baghel. Sonia is angry with Gehlot while Baghel faces a rival in TS Singh Deo. Last year, Deo was saying Rahul supported his claim to the Chief Minister's post while Baghel was supposedly Priyanka's pick. Let Kharge deal with that can of worms.
who had sought a meeting with him and refusing to take part in the selection of candidates for the Gujarat assembly election. That, he made clear, was now Kharge’s business.
Because Congress expects to be wiped out in Gujarat.
His and his mother’s unflinching resolve not to give short shrift to this still strong belief within the party cannot have failed to strike a deep chord within all Indians, but within Hindus in particular, because it resonates with two of the most powerful leitmotifs of the Arya Dharma. These are tyaaga – sacrifice – and sanyaas – renunciation.
Which means actually becoming a monk living in the forest or the mountains. Shirking is not sanyaas. Being unemployable is not tyaaga.
Rahul Gandhi and his mother have shown themselves to be capable of both in the wider interest of their country and their civilisation.
No they haven't. They could have quit politics and gone into business or devoted themselves to charity.
The full impact of their renunciation will take time to sink into the people, but it has already begun to weaken the foundations of the BJP’s main appeal to the people: that the Gandhis are foreign by blood, are not Hindus, and do not even belong to the Hindu sanskriti (civilisational culture).
But, voters rejected that shite in 2004. They only care about governance. Rahul wouldn't step up to the plate and become a Minister and then Prime Minister. He devoted himself to building up the Party with the result that the Party turned to shit. Congress should concentrate on picking C.M candidates with a proven track record. Rahul can run track, but he has never held down a job in Government. At 52, it is too late for him to change his ways. This would not be a problem if he, like Sonia, had nominated a CEO to do the job for him. Who is Rahul's Manmohan? We don't know. He doesn't know. No such beast exists.
The second new element is that the unexpectedly warm reception that Rahul Gandhi has received in the three states that he has visited in his Bharat Jodo Yatra so far.
Money has been spent to choreograph the thing. The question is whether there is any money left to help revitalize the local cadres.
To understand the warmth of his reception it is necessary to look beyond the short, grudging news clips that television channels , and mainline newspapers are giving it, and revisit a TV interview he gave to GSTV, and India Today before the Gujarat elections in 2017. That interview reveals not only the immense effort he had made to understand the problems being faced by Gujarat’s unemployed youth, its farmers and its womenfolk,
what 'immense effort' is required to understand problems arising from not having any fucking money?
but also his innate warmth and considerateness towards others, including his interviewer on the programme.
So, he is a nice guy. But he is also a guy who refused to take Ministerial office so as to actually fix any type of problem. The man is a shirker, not a worker.
None of this was coming through, indeed could come through, when he was giving stilted, prepared, speeches to large gatherings from the safe distance of a dais that was at least 10 metres from his nearest listeners. But during the Yatra people have been seeing, and interacting, with him at close quarters. So they are feeling the impact of his sincerity and innate decency, for the first time. A different image of him and his party is therefore beginning to unfold. This change of perception is apparent even in the brief commentaries of the hard-bitten reporters who have been covering the yatra at different places along the route.
At 52, the boy has developed the common touch. But pressing flesh and kissing babies is a skill politicians acquire in their twenties- unless they have some great administrative capacity or other expertise or achievement to boast of. Rahul didn't work in the NGO sector after College. He was a corporate type- but no wunderkind. When he entered Indian politics, he was supposed to be a technocrat using data sets and management theory. That shit didn't fly.
There is a third new element too – Kharge’s election has cleared the way to the formation of an alliance among opposition parties that the Gandhi loyalists in the party had spared no pains to prevent without a prior assurance that it would be led not only by the Congress, but by the Gandhis in particular.
Gehlot's election may have had that effect provided he kept his post as CM. He is a Hindi speaker and a plausible alternative to Modi in 2024. The other opposition parties, lacking a candidate of their own, might have got behind him. But Kharge is 80 and never got to be CM. His only job is to carry the can for Congress defeats.
Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s withdrawal from leadership signals a formal withdrawal from the pyramidal, leader-centred party structure that had emerged within the Congress after Indira Gandhi split it in 1969.
But every Congressman- including Gehlot- is saying the opposite. Rahul remains the King.
It has therefore re-opened the way for a return, in different form, to the consensus based decision-making among powerful regional leaders, that had been the mode of decision-making in the party throughout its seven decade fight for India’s independence and till the death of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
But Nehru approved the Kamaraj plan which was designed to cut powerful leaders down to size. All that Kamaraj succeeded in doing was splitting his party and committing political hara kiri.
This has opened the way for the creation of a different, looser coalition that will be based not around personalities and charisma, but around shared political and economic concerns, and the need to stem the creeping destruction of India’s ethno-religious plurality that has been Modi’s goal virtually from the day he came to power.
Cats who marry dogs will be a vital part of this looser coalition. Meanwhile others will win elections based on expectations regarding their ability to improve governance.
Just how quickly Prime Minister Modi has understood the threat that this change of perceptions poses is reflected by his most recent diatribe against ‘Lutyens Delhi’ at the annual state home ministers’ meeting in Faridabad.
He is preaching to the converted. Congress has two Chief Ministers. Both are wary of the Congress High Command's whims and fancies. One immediate result was Gehlot & Modi's love-fest at Manghar Dham, which has been declared a National Monument. The Times of India reported
Gehlot was supposed to be Congress President. Just a couple of weeks later he and Modi are best buddies.
Jha next tries to pretend, that too when writing for the Wire!, that Indians respect the 'Fourth Estate'- or rather the subsidized smear sheets which Jha has been reduced to writing for.
In it he turned his guns against ‘not only those Naxals who hold a gun but also those who wield a pen and mislead the youth by exploiting their emotions’. To his party’s determination to tame the Muslim minority through police action;
criminals are tamed by police action. Does Jha think all Muslims are criminals? Perhaps.
to tame the political opposition through misuse of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act;
because the shitty type of political opposition Jha approves off can only get by on money laundering subventions from our enemies abroad.
and to destroy civil rights activism through fabricated charges of sedition and subversion against its leaders,
Jha had no problem with fabricated charges against Hindu nuns or female Medical doctors holding Ministerial rank.
Modi has now added the threat of jailing intellectuals and journalists who criticise his government in writing, under one cooked up pretext or another.
The whole world is laughing at the Wire. Siddharth Varadarajan cooked his own goose. He has himself admitted that the Wire fabricated material. Now he is shifting blame onto a 'team-member'. Maybe this will keep him out of jail. But the Wire's reputation is shot.
But in politics every action gives birth to a reaction.
Modi's actions are sensible. Rahul's are not. The reaction to Modi is that he gets votes. The reactions to Rahul's is that people say 'what a brave little moon-calf it is, to be sure!'. That loses Congress votes.
Modi’s increasingly brazen assault on all four of the pillars of Indian democracy,
which were Sonia, Rahul, Priyanka and Ahmed Patel. Then Patel died. Kharge can't replace him. Sad.
has brought it home to all opposition parties that they will have to swim together if their members do not wish to perish singly.
They'll have to keep clear of a Titanic sinking under the weight of Rahul's Messianism.
This awareness, and the desire to form a common platform, had been growing for some time but had been stalled by the Congress’ insistence that it had to be the leader because it is the only party with a strong presence on the ground in all the states of the country where the BJP is now the dominant party.
This is precisely the delusion that Bharat Jodo has caused Kharge to double down on. But there's a wide difference between our sympathy for Forrest Gump jogging across the country and our desire to see him in the White House.
Kharge’s election has removed this obstacle.
Jha was once a mighty beast in the jungle of the Indian press. But he was always this stupid.
His long association with Sharad Pawar virtually ensures that the Congress, Pawar’s National Congress Party and the Shiv Sena will fight the BJP together in Maharashtra in the next Vidhan Sabha election.
Oh dear. Nobody told Jha about Eknath Shinde. Why didn't Wire's editor change this paragraph so Jha wouldn't look entirely senile? The answer is that the Wire doesn't bother to read the shite it, itself, publishes.
Should this happen it is difficult to see how the BJP can avoid a rout in the next Vidhan Sabha elections. Unfortunately those will come after the next Lok Sabha elections where another BJP win could easily have sealed the fate of democracy in India.
The fate of Congress- maybe- but Congress is dynastic, not democratic.
But there is another immediate opportunity to strike a blow to the BJP’s supremacy and it is only weeks away, in the Vidhan Sabha elections in Gujarat.
But the money for it has been wasted on Bharat Jodo.
Somewhat inexplicably, after his September 3 visit, Rahul Gandhi has so far refused to visit Gujarat at all. This inexplicable abandonment of a powerful Congress party organisation gave the state BJP chief the opportunity to tell the people that Rahul Gandhi has “no place in his heart” for Gujarat. This may be the reason why opinion polls are predicting an easy win for the BJP. But that will only happen if the discouragement of the Congress in the state by its own central leaders continues.
Rahul isn't going to go walkabout in either poll-bound Gujarat or Himachal. Why? One answer is that local leaders fear he will lose the party votes. The true answer is that if the yatra is ongoing when election results come in and, as expected, Congress does badly, then Rahul will get the blame. There would have been no point to putting in Kharge as flak-catcher.
One way to revive the party’s elan would be to make an informal alliance with the Aam Aadmi party which has been making steady, albeit limited inroads into mainly the disillusioned Congress vote in the cities of the state.
Kejriwal would pump and dump Kharge within the space of an afternoon. It would be enough for him to supplant Congress in Gujarat to maintain 'big mo' momentum. On the other hand, Kejriwal's foray into Gujarat may be a feint. It may be Himachal that is the true apple of his eye.
In the October 2021 municipal elections it had secured an average of nearly 14% of the urban vote, with a maximum of 28.47% in Surat and 21.77% in Gandhinagar, at the centre of the BJP lion’s den. Surat, Rajkot and Gandhinagar account for 11.3 million of Gujarat’s population of 63 million. If Gandhinagar can be taken as a proxy for Ahmedabad, it comes to 17 million, i.e. 28% of Gujarat’s population. That could be the share of AAP’s vote in December, and most of it would have come from disillusioned Congress party voters.
Kejriwal wants to pick up BJP votes. That's what will give him credibility. The AAP model is streamline 'deliverables'. Modi must up his game.
An AAP-Congress alliance in Gujarat would
destroy Kejriwal's credibility. His shtick is that BJP and Congress are collaborating to keep him out.
therefore be a win-win for both parties, because it would not cause abstentions or a backlash vote in Congress for the BJP as has happened in UP and some other states. So it would virtually guarantee the defeat of the BJP in December.
Was Jha always this stupid? The answer, sadly, is yes.
Were the BJP to lose Gujarat it could cut Prime Minister Modi’s political legs at the knee. This could strengthen the disquiet in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh over Modi’s blatant provocation of communal tension, that the RSS sarsanghchalak, Mohan Bhagwat has been voicing with growing stridency in the past more than two years. It would thus achieve in a single stroke what months of patient campaigning may not achieve – which is the cutting down of Modi to size within the Sangh Parivar, if not the outright defeat of the party in the 2024 elections.
No. If the BJP loses its majority, it will be because of the Morbi bridge collapse. If Modi doesn't act quickly against the guilty- or negligent- parties, no amount of 'revdi' freebies will prevent a 5 percent shift in at least a quarter of constituencies.
If Kharge wishes to explore this possibility, it is he who must take the initiative in approaching Aam Aadmi Party, despite the latter being much the junior party.
Kharge's committing to Rahul has tied his hands. He can't approach anybody. All he can do is stick his tongue deeper up Rahul's crack. Kejriwal said, in a TV interview in 2019, that Rahul had scuppered his suggestions for an Opposition alliance.
Chief Minister Kejriwal had approached the Congress three times before the 2017 Gujarat elections, offering not only to team up with the Congress but even to put up candidates chosen jointly by the two parties in the constituencies left to AAP. But he did not even receive the courtesy of an answer.
It is 2019 that is important.
One result was that the Congress lost to the BJP in 18 constituencies with margins of 5,000 or fewer votes. In nine of these the margin of loss was fewer than 2,000 votes. Today, after another five years of disillusionment with a government that seems to cater only to the wishes of rich industrialists, the thirst for change is even greater. Gujarat may be ripe for change, but might vote for the BJP again for want of an alternative. The rise in the AAP’s popularity is a yardstick of this desire for change but Kejriwal and the leaders of AAP in Gujarat will not court such humiliation again, so the offer will have to come, this time, from the Congress.
Utterly mad! Congress may do comparatively well in the upcoming polls because Rahul is out of the picture. Local leaders may be able to have an impact more particularly because the BJP can poach them at a later date. In other words, their incentive to do well is to up the price the BJP will pay for them. But their voters understand this as well. A protest vote for a guy who will crossover soon enough may give the fellow an incentive to keep at least some of his promises.
Jha, poor fellow, thinks Congress is a political party which is interested in turning money into votes so as to make more money. This is no longer true. Congress is about turning money into a cult of Rahul, the mooncalf-Messiah, without leaving any cash for catching votes. This means that more and more MLAs, but soon, C.Ms too, will go over to BJP. Meanwhile Nitish and Mamta and Stalin and YSR and Naveen Patnaik will he holding talks. But who can they settle on as a PM candidate? Is Kejriwal vain enough to fall into the trap of putting himself forward? KCR, maybe. He has nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, Jha will continue to pledge Faith to a Dynasty in the false belief that Dynasty is the Indian word for Democracy. Jaa Jaa Jha re bewafa! What type of love do you have? Being besotted with Rahul does not mean you love the Republic. It means you are either senile or a wide-eyed school girl all of eight years old. That rules me out. My mental age is 6 though I'm turning 60. I have less than ten years to live because as my Mum said when I got married, death would overtake me by her curse before I commenced on 69. Sad.
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