In December, 2023, Shruti Kapila wrote in Print.in
INDIA coalition is a poisoned chalice. Congress is in open competition with regional parties
The Congress vote is being cannibalized by other Opposition parties. It could either do a pre-poll seat sharing pact such that it contested about 300 seats in the hope of crossing the 100 mark. BJP would still be the biggest party but the Opposition might be able to form a coalition government. The question was whether Congress could be united enough to reassure other Opposition parties that it would deliver on what it promised. Suppose Rahul had invited other Opposition leaders to address his 'Nyay Yatra', and suppose further that State level Congress leaders had worked amicably with their Opposition counterparts, then this strategy may have succeeded.
As the only national alternative, the Congress could choose autonomy over generosity in a coalition and go for broke. It would lay down the foundations of a bipolar India.
Congress has done this in the past and its vote has been cannibalized. Suppose Congress had an attractive Prime Ministerial candidate. Further suppose that it had the money to put up an effective fight in about 420 seats. Then, if you assume Modi makes some big blunder in the next few months, there could have been a chance of Congress forming a Government on its own.
Few predicted the decisive nature of the 2023 assembly election results. While this speaks poorly of election expertise and even political commentary, the electorate has once again proven its autonomy. Equally, social media and digital campaigns, though pervasive, ever loud, and more evenly played out between the contending parties, are unreliable indicators of emerging political trends. The fact that #Pannauti trended for nearly 48 hours on X after India’s loss in the Cricket World Cup only signifies that omens are but superstitions that can only misdirect hopes into delusions. For all that and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s magical hold over the Indian electorate, I am going to stick out like a sore thumb and stake out a different set of trends from the ones that have captured immediate analysis.
Kapila's genius is to always hit on the stupidest possible argument or recommendation.
As I’ve asked before: Is India moving toward a party-state polity or going bipolar?
Traditionally, there was one big National party facing regional parties in the States. The BJP managed to displace Congress from this role but to a large extent this was because Congress was stuck with a gun-shy Rahul.
My short answer is that India’s best chance to avoid becoming a party-state is to go bipolar.
In which case Congress should enter a 'Janata Parivar' Morcha to take on the 'Sangh Parivar'. This seemed feasible, back when we thought Gehlot would take over from Sonia and work with Nitish, Mamta, Stalin etc. to cement a 'maha-ghatbandhan'.
To this extent, the trends and news are bad for India’s many small and regional parties.
In a general election, maybe. But it is the State elections which voters really care about.
Above all, despite, or rather because of its handsome victory in Telangana, the Congress has now come under the greatest burden of political identity.
How so? Karnataka Congress is going one way. Telengana Congress is going another way. It looks as though Bengal Congress will have its own identity, which is anti Mamta but friendly to the Left, whereas Kerala Congress's main enemy will be the CPM.
It would be convenient but incorrect to see the assembly elections verdict as reflecting a North-South divide.
This divide is real enough. Seat redistribution may occur after 2026 and this is concentrating minds in the South.
For all the neat colour coding of the spatial map of India that confines the BJP to the Hindi heartland, the picture is contested, mixed, and has, in effect, opened new battlelines.
Not really. Parties have to tailor their policies to reflect the culture and values of the State in which they are fighting for Assembly seats. The General Election however is more greatly influenced by perceptions re. the Prime Ministerial candidates.
Though the Congress lost in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, the vote share remains more evenly poised than what the more consequential seat numbers tell us.
Because the actual difference between the candidates may be nominal.
With less than 10 per cent of vote share difference between the two parties in each state, the Hindi heartland is less saffronised and more divided than what that colour-coded picture conveys.
But people who don't get BJP seats cross over to any party which will accommodate them.
Moreover, despite losing decidedly in the Karnataka assembly election in May 2023, the BJP remains a strong contender for the Lok Sabha election there. The party faces a challenge in southern India but is far from being blocked or fully thwarted.
The BJP has put in some hard-work in the South but it may not seen any results in the short-term.
It’s cheap and wrong-headed of seasoned and liberal analysts to display a virulent but reverse prejudice in dismissing North India as uneducated and given to parochial and communal passions.
We did so when the Dynasty ruled thanks to its support in the cow-belt.
Significantly, the contested nature of the vote share is the strongest indication that an ideological fight is indeed afoot.
Not if you look at who got party tickets. In regional elections, personalities matter more than ideologies.
The only fighting strategy for the grand old party is to double down on inclusive politics. The small two percentage point difference in vote share between the two national parties in Rajasthan indicates as much. The Hindutva-lite campaign by the Congress in Madhya Pradesh has yielded the greatest gap in vote share — eight per cent. Fighting with ideological clarity makes a difference.
Congress has no ideology. Saying 'Savarkar was actually a British officer named Smythe' is not a political platform. It is sheer stupidity.
Regardless of whether MP is a Hindutva bastion, the pivot of change in both these states has been the realignment of Dalit votes in favour of the BJP. That this has come at the cost of India’s main Dalit party — the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) — indicates an electoral shift of aggressive incorporation for the emergent party-state of the BJP.
What matters is that women are 'labhartis' and their votes are decisive. The BJP has sent thousands of vans into the countries to sign up women to various welfare schemes. Will this strategy work? In some States, perhaps.
While it has managed to woo Dalits with greater success, the under-analysed trend is the shift in the votes of the Scheduled Tribes (STs) also to the BJP. Anointing Droupadi Murmu as the President has proven to be more than mere symbolics. This has cost the Congress party both in MP and Chhattisgarh. New political alignments are thus discernible. In short, social mobility is gathering toward national rather than regional poles and is the unmissable if not unsettling upshot of the latest results.
The BJP has been doing outreach work for some decades now and this is now paying off. However, the number of seats involved are quite small.
The ’90s are truly over
There is no going back to the formulae of the last century. Even in 2004, there was a similar set of assembly election results in favour of the BJP on the eve of the Lok Sabha poll but the Congress came to power.
Because Vajpayee looked decrepit whereas people were hopeful about the two young Gandhis.
Hoping for such a pattern to repeat in May would be foolish, as the political contest now is entirely different and altogether challenging.
The contest is now about who is best at cannibalizing the Congress vote. It was to avoid this outcome that Congress proposed an opposition alliance.
Thirty years of economic liberalisation and the BJP’s aggressive political campaigns have transformed the Indian polity and society. Census or no census, any coalition of castes will be insufficient to match the BJP behemoth. Caste remains most significant, but its political articulation and tethering are in great transition.
Women, it seems, vote on the basis of their economic, not caste, interest. That is the big gamechanger. But all Parties competing in promising them more and more.
The BJP has shown agility in incorporating otherwise inimical social groups, whether it’s tribals or Dalits. The BJP’s cadre base and its key arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been pursuing the largest swing voter base of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) for even longer — since the ’80s, under M D Deoras.
Even in the Sixties, the Jan Sangh was reaching out to dominant agricultural castes but was unable to produce charismatic leaders of its own.
Slow off that mark, the BJP took two decades to follow the RSS in appealing to the OBCs. The Congress and the opposition, in general, will need to reimagine a new and bold politics of caste.
No. Everybody wants to get in on the 'labharti' game. It is said that the BJP is ahead organizationally in many parts of the country but there are energetic leaders in other parties who are seeking to bridge the gap.
The BJP is clearly pursuing the idea of a party-state that incorporates India’s social order.
No. That didn't work for either Congress or the Communist parties. If your party is identified with the State then its image turns to shit when the State turns to shit.
To contest this, there is a need of the appropriate scale of contest that posits a new political imagination and programme on caste on the national level. A local arithmetic of caste is not only cynical but unfit for the challenge too. In short, what is needed is the grandeur and candour of a B R Ambedkar vision to remake and realise a new national politics of caste.
Ambedkar failed politically. Kanshi Ram only got his big break after Mullah Mulayam killed karsevaks.
By the same token, a Lohiaite vision, which inspired OBC-based regional parties in North India, looks small, dated, and broadly reactive.
I suppose she means that Nitish is no longer highly thought of.
If anything, the Mandal politics of the last century now appears to be saturated.
'Mandir' has won.
More than that, the regional assortment of OBC parties came at the cost of the Congress party — and the greatest national beneficiary has indeed been the BJP. To undo this, the Congress needs to recoup lost territory rather than cede more.
How? It fought over 400 seats in the last general election and only got 48 seats. Since then, its position has deteriorated. It needs to focus its resources on fewer seats while getting help from caste based parties to defeat BJP there. This could get it above a hundred seats, if everything goes well.
With a handsome win in Telangana, the Congress has reasons to rejoice. Yet, this victory poses the most crucial question for its political identity. Winning over a popular regional party, the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS), attests
to KCR having lost the plot. You can't rely on the other side getting complacent and picking bad candidates
not only to a growing bipolarity but, above all, revises the idea of alliance building. Simply put, the Congress is in open competition with regional parties.
AAM aspires to be national. Can it take seats from Congress in Punjab? Probably.
This makes the INDIA alliance a poisoned chalice, which is not only awkward but also potentially suicidal for the grand old party.
How? If Congress is competing with both the BJP and a regional party, then surely it benefits by doing a deal with the regional party so that both have a chance of taking seats from the BJP rather than seeking to cannibalize each other or act as 'spoilers'.
This is more so as regional parties, especially from the Hindi heartland, appear static, saturated, and tangled in a generational crisis of leadership and cadres.
Not really. Akhilesh and Tejashwi look pretty confident.
If India’s Muslim voters are returning to the Congress after several decades of favouring local opposition to the BJP — as in Telangana and Karnataka now — then the burden to imagine and realise a new rainbow coalition lies with the Congress party.
But Muslims are too small a minority to help Congress regain national stature. Indeed, Congress hasn't got enough seats in the lower house to be recognized as the official opposition party.
It can be argued that with only one victory this season, the Congress will now need to show humility to other parties in the INDIA alliance for the ‘do-or-die’ election in 2024. This is the dominant view of election experts today. Some anxious others say that the solidarity of opposition parties is necessitated due to the growing powers of government agencies.
The big question was whether Congress was united enough to do a deal and keep to it. The answer, it is now clear, is no.
Yet, precisely because it has retained its vote share, managed a spirited campaign with an entente if not peace between its generations and factions, the Congress looks stronger than all of its coalition partners put together.
Congress could lose 10 out of the 19 seats it has in Kerala and 5 of the 7 seats it has in Punjab. It should make some gains elsewhere. One nightmare scenario is that TMC ends up with more MPs than Congress. At that point Stalin- their most faithful ally- may ditch them.
Most importantly, the Congress has found its utterance, though hesitatingly. And this is after at least 40 years. Yes, the Congress won in 2004 and 2009, but it was primarily driven by technocratic ideas and policies back then.
It has no ideas or policies now. That's why Kapila thinks it is unbeatable.
Those strategies and policies were no match for the political transformation wrought and captured by the party-state ambitions of Modi and the BJP.
Congress was very much a 'party-state' in the Fifties. The Left Front in Bengal too functioned in that manner.
As the only national alternative, the Congress could choose autonomy over generosity in a coalition and go for broke.
If it had a PM candidate- maybe. But it doesn't. Rahul is working round the clock to make Congress unelectable.
It would lay down the foundations of a bipolar India that can militate against the growing party-state domination of the BJP. A new and bold inclusive India is unlikely to appear from a coalition of cynical desperation. It is even less likely to emerge from what appears to be an emergency back-stop of opposition parties to stave off the overweening power of government agencies. Going alone, the national alternative won’t win overnight, but nor will it confuse the opponent with a fake ally or the friend with a frenemy or worse, an enemy. A bipartisan polity is the only insurance against an ideological and emergent party-state. Even in loss, going solo is the best chance for the Congress to enhance its political identity to represent the alternative to Hindu-first India.
India is a big country like the US where both the Dems and the Republican parties are big tent affairs. One could say 'UPA vs NDA' was the Indian equivalent. But it collapsed because UPA didn't have a Prime Ministerial candidate. The same is true of 'INDIA' which appears to have fallen apart already with Mamta, Nitish and Mann withdrawing from it. Perhaps, in Bihar, allying with Nitish will backfire on the BJP. Sadly, the Congress won't benefit from this.
Staying aloof, and building from the ground up, inch by inch and victory by victory, is, after all, what the BJP did in its long decades of electoral wilderness.
It had a Prime Ministerial candidate it could point to with pride. Congress lacks any such thing. Till it gets one, it must either join a coalition or risk having its support base cannibalized.
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