BJP gains as Congress nosedives in Odisha

Bhubaneswar: The pollster has now said what others have been saying for a while. The political map of Odisha is about to be redrawn after this election with the Congress, for the first time ever in the electoral history of the state, set to be relegated to the third position in the political sweepstakes. More ominously, it is yielding its place to the BJP which did not have a member in the state Assembly till 1985 and only one in the Lok Sabha till as late as 1998 when it entered into an alliance with a newly launched Biju Janata Dal (BJD).

The latest round of Lokniti-CSDS Election Tracker projections suggest that the Congress has managed to do the seemingly unthinkable by losing an incredible five percent of its vote share, all of it to the BJP, since the last tracker exercise in January. With its share of the popular vote having come down from 31 to 26 percent, the projections suggest that the party could end up with a maximum of just four – two less than it currently holds - out of the 21 Lok Sabha seats up for grabs in the state. Though the Election Tracker does not have projections for the Assembly elections being held simultaneously with the parliamentary elections, it is difficult to see how the performance of the party can be drastically different in the state polls.

The findings merely buttress what has been in ample evidence in the recent past: the party’s free fall. More senior leaders of the Congress have quit the party in the last three months than perhaps in the last two decades. The crowning disgrace of course came when Bhupinder Singh, the Leader of the Opposition and a lifelong Congressman, resigned from the party and joined the ruling BJD last month.

Things have never been this bad for the Congress in Odisha. Even in 1990, its worst-ever electoral performance in recent memory, its position as the principal opposition party in the state was never under threat - even with just 10 MLAs in a House of 147.

Odisha has all along been a two-horse race with the Congress winning more often than not. At various points in the political history of the state, its opponent has either been rightist formations like the Swatantra Party, a breakaway faction of the Congress like the Utkal Congress formed by the late Biju Patnaik or an offshoot of the old socialist block – Janata Party, Lok Dal and finally Janata Dal.

That had been the pattern till the Biju Janata Dal – and with it, Naveen Patnaik – appeared on the political horizon of Odisha. Till then, the Congress had never been away from power for more than five years. Even after being decimated by a rampaging Biju Patnaik in the 1990 Assembly elections (when the Janata Dal won an unprecedented 123 seats, which still remains a record), the Congress managed to bounce back to power within five years winning 80 seats and reducing the Janata Dal to a mere 46.

But the advent of Naveen changed all that. Gifted with an uncanny ability for realpolitik, something that his visionary father sorely lacked, Naveen was quick to realise that there was no way the Congress can be tamed without shedding the secular pretensions and forging an alliance with the BJP, which had emerged as a force to reckon with by the late 1990s when he came on the scene.

The alliance kept the Congress out of power for two consecutive terms for the first time ever. By the time Naveen broke off with the BJP unilaterally, on the eve of the 2009 elections, Congressmen in the state had lost the will to fight. With the wily old fox JB Patnaik having fallen from favour after Sonia Gandhi took over the party and no other leader of his stature or political acumen in sight, the party unit in the state had become rudderless and faction-ridden.

It is the third successive five-year spell away from power which really started the Congress’ downslide. Long used to power, Congressmen did not see a hope in hell of ending the voters’ seemingly never ending honeymoon with Naveen Patnaik. For a brief while, there was a resurgence of sorts with the combative Jagdish Tytler as the AICC general secretary in charge of Odisha and Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Niranjan Patnaik working in perfect tandem.

But all that changed with the decision of the high command to replace the duo with the uninspiring combination of BK Hariprasad and Jayadev Jena. The Congress is yet to give an explanation for the change, but party leaders say it had to with Sonia passing on the baton to son Rahul and Union minister Srikant Jena suddenly becoming a key player in the new high command’s scheme of things.

The new Congress leadership, presumably under the advice of Srikant Jena, was trying to achieve essentially two things with this change: removing the last vestiges of the Patnaik clan (Niranjan is a relative of JB Patnaik) and at the same time build a caste combination that would pave the party’s road back to power. Srikant Jena, the calculation went, would bring in the OBC vote while Jayadev Jena would rope in the Dalits. With the tribals, who constitute 22 percent of the population in the state, firmly behind the Congress, this would prove to be an ‘unbeatable combination’.

That the Congress central leadership (read Rahul) bought this reasoning shows that it has lost touch with the ground realities in the state completely. Efforts to engineer a polarisation of votes along caste lines have always come a cropper in Odisha and there is nothing to suggest that things are going to change any time soon.

The Jena duo, however, is a more symptom of the larger malaise that affects the Congress in Odisha. Nothing has done more damage to the morale of the average Congressman in Odisha than the perception that the party high command has cut a deal with Naveen Patnaik. Whenever the state Congress has sought to put the Naveen Patnaik government on the mat on the mega mining scam, it has found the Congress led UPA government going out of its way to bail out Naveen. Even as it has railed against the Posco project in Paradip, it has discovered that Manmohan Singh and Naveen Patnaik on the same page on the issue. Congress leaders criticising Naveen have ended up with egg on their faces as Union Minister after Union minister has come and given a certificate of good conduct to the state government.

Three terms out of power have eaten into the vitals of the Congress in Odisha. A fourth successive defeat in the Assembly election, which looks a near certainty, would only hasten the disintegration of the party in the state.