Cong is paying the price for arrogance in Delhi

By Bhupendra Chaubey

Another election, another defeat for the Congress! This time in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). The only silver lining for the party - it couldn’t get worse. The grand old party, that’s been in power in Delhi since 1998, would be hoping that Delhi-ites have merely given vent to their anger at the MCD level. They must be thinking, good, we now have a better chance at the assembly level, when the level of anger would have reduced.

But these could well end up being arguments offered by the party’s spin doctors. Frankly, the time has come for Congress to do a reality check.

Just look at Delhi! Most of my friends who come to the capital from other cities are all praise for how Delhi has grown as a modern city. Flyovers, better roads, air-conditioned buses and, of course, the metro. All this has happened in the past 10 years, to the city where I was born.

Who has been in power in Delhi for the last 14 years? Congress! Who has been the CM of Delhi since 1998? Sheila Dixit. Now you look at my previous two lines together and ask: if Delhi has indeed changed dramatically in terms of infrastructure, why has the party which has been in power here failed to encash it at the municipal level?

Unlike say Mumbai, Delhi is a city which suffers from a multiplicity of agencies. For instance, you have the DDA (Delhi Development Authority, which reports to the Urban Development Ministry), the MCD, which doesn’t report to the Delhi government, the Jal Board, responsible for providing water, which reports to the Delhi government, the Delhi Vidyut Board, etc. And the Delhi government has been both hurt and benefited by these agencies.

While it’s been possible for the government to pass on the blame for anything that’s gone wrong to different agencies, it has also taken full credit for whatever has worked in the city.

Loss of the municipal elections in Delhi for the Congress must now be setting off alarm bells. In 2010, for the first time, Congress lost control of the Bangalore municipality. Earlier this year, Congress failed to wrest the Mumbai municipality from the Shiv Sena-BJP combine and now it has once again lost to the BJP. Yes, it’s also true that the Congress’ performance at the level of assembly and Lok Sabha has been markedly different. In 2004, Congress won six out of seven Lok Sabha seats here. In 2009, it made a clean sweep of all seven. Sheila Dixit herself has become almost unbeatable as a chief minister.

I think something seems to have changed for the Congress now. Since 2009, when the party came back to power at the centre, it’s been struggling to deal with scams and scandals. To the urban classes, “scam” is a very dirty word. We hate it! Simply because, we feel the money that should have come to us has been pocketed by some greasy politician. So we wish to punish that politician.

But consider for a moment, what had happened in that 2009 Lok Sabha election. It was an election which was supposedly fought against the backdrop of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Rs 70,000 crore farm loan waiver scheme. It was widely believed that the Congress has the support of the aam aadmi who lives in rural areas. It was argued that people in cities don’t come to vote, so no point in pampering them.

To many within the BJP, this was the reason why they lost in 2004. But let’s check if this was really true. In 2009, nine states with below poverty line (BPL) populations that were higher than the national average (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Orissa and Tripura) did not really vote for the Congress. It got just 63 out of 247 seats at stake in these states. In the rest of the so-called affluent states, Congress did much better, winning 143.

This implies that the urban vote swung towards the Congress in 2009. So why is the Congress slipping now in urban areas?

With power, sometimes comes arrogance. That’s what happened to the Congress. If the party wants to stage a comeback, it needs its party president to take charge. It needs the Prime Minister of this country to come forward and lead by example. And if Rahul Gandhi believes that he indeed is a leader, it’s time he showed some solid leadership. Else the Congress game may well and truly be up.

As this copy is published the latest tally in the Delhi Municipal elections has BJP at 137, Congress at 74 and Others at 55.

Bhupendra Chaubey is National Bureau Chief, CNN IBN