Hope revives for Congress, but Assembly polls may push it into coma again

New Delhi: The dark clouds that have been hanging over the Congress are now edged with a silver lining. Bludgeoned virtually to death in the 2013 assembly and 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the results of the recent bypolls in Uttarakhand, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat and a host of other states has given the Congress hope that all is not lost yet and it can painfully claw its way back into the reckoning.

The 16 September outcome is the first bit of good news that has come the party’s way in the last one year or so, specially in Rajasthan where it won three of the four by-elections and in Gujarat where it wrested three seats from the BJP - winning one of these after 30 years and the other two after 17 years. In all, the party wrested seven of the 33 assembly seats where by-elections were held.

Unlike earlier occasions when Congress leaders would jostle with each other to attribute every victory, no matter how small or marginal, to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi, this time there is strangely no such spectacle.

This is possibly because the wounds inflicted by the near wipe-out in the Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh assemblies and the 2014 Lok Sabha - where the party has just 44 seats — is so deep and recent that it would have been nothing short of humiliating and ridiculing the national leadership to openly attribute these local victories to them when they had failed in the bigger and larger elections.

Reprieve for Rahul?

Indeed, post debacle, the Congress has been caught in the vortex of a crisis from which it has yet to emerge. Local leaders began to target Rahul, blaming his style of functioning, coterie politics, uninspiring leadership and disconnect with workers and voters for the serial defeats and sought a triad of Priyanka Vadra-Sonia-Rahul in that order to revive the party.

The by-poll victories - particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan in September and in Bihar in August when it piggybacked on the RJD and the JD-U to push back the BJP - has helped to deflect attention from Rahul whom Sonia has been trying to shield from sniper attacks by not convening a brainstorming session to introspect on the reasons for the electoral debacles and grapple with some home truths.

It has also lent substance to Sonia’s pep talk to her workers and leaders in the last four months that they should not get disheartened by the Lok Sabha results of 16 May but go out and reconnect with the masses to reclaim the party’s lost glory.

To that extent, the results have served Sonia and Rahul well. For the time being at least.

Congress remains in a limbo

But can the same be said about the Congress?

Indeed, there are now apprehensions that after the bypoll results, the Congress leadership may not think it necessary to introspect on the party’s humiliating defeats in the 2013 assembly and the 2014 parliamentary elections. Already, it has been nine months since the assembly polls and four months since the Lok Sabha results and Sonia has shown no urgency to brainstorm on the reverses suffered by the 129-year old.

And yet the existential crisis, obvious to all, has been demanding immediate attention.

The imperatives of taking some urgent corrective measures have been there for all to see. But since this has not happened so far, the party is going into the Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections on October 15 by desperately clutching and clinging to the straws thrown up by the September 16 bypoll results. The Congress faces an uphill task both in Haryana where it has been in power for 10 years as well as in Maharashtra where it has been ruling for 15 years along with its alliance partner, the NCP.

But instead of toning up the organisation to meet the unresolved problems and face the challenges that lie ahead, the Congress has interpreted the bypoll results to mean that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s wave, magic and charisma have been waning, the electorate has seen through the BJP’s “false promises” and rejected its communal politics, and the people have chosen to retain other options wherever one is available. It noted that the BJP could retain only 21 of the 42 seats it had held out of the 54 byelections that have taken place since the Lok Sabha elections.

Long haul ahead

Such interpretation is addressed as much to the BJP as it is to infuse some life and hope among despondent and despairing Congress workers to fight the battles that lie ahead of them.

“The bypolls results have stemmed the continuing demoralisation in the ranks. But one cannot say that there has been a turnaround. A turnaround and a revival are still a long way off,” said a senior Congress leader.

Spokesman Anand Sharma admitted that “it is a long road ahead of us to rebuild the organisation and we will succeed.”

Asked why the party was not holding an introspective session to deal with its shortcomings, Sharma claimed that “introspection is not a one day process. Introspection and reflection is a continuous process” and the 129 year old party has been introspecting and reflecting at various levels. “We recognise the ground realities and we will accordingly work with determination to ensure that we connect with the people and convey the correct message at the same time opposing and exposing the BJP and the RSS,” he claimed.

What Sharma said may partly be true. But so far the Congress has not displayed any serious move to address the crisis that has been building up and crying for attention, specially in the last five years when the charges of corruption, inability to check price rise and failure to govern saw angry voters throwing out the Congress-led UPA government in the 2014 elections.

Indeed, the fortunes of the party have been nose-diving over the years. Its political and social base of uppercastes, scheduled castes and minorities has been raided by other parties ranging from the BJP to the BSP and the SP, RJD and other regional forces so that there has only been a rump for several years now in as many as half a dozen states including UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat which account for 248 Lok Sabha seats in a House with an elective strength of 543 seats.

After she joined active politics in 1997-98, Sonia initially went all out to repair the damage by holding extensive Congress Working Committee meetings, Congress chief ministers’s conclaves, chintan shivirs and AICC sessions. She abandoned the party’s “go it alone” policy in favour of alliances and brought the party to power in 2004 as the head of its first coalition government at the Centre. Alongwith Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi, she circumvented the caste divides by reaching out to the poor, the middle classes and the youths which brought the coalition to power again in 2009.

Thereafter it was a different story altogether and the crisis she helped the party tide over returned to haunt the party again. The re-election of the combine in 2009 coincided with a greater role for Rahul in the party and power politics so that instead of a Congress president-PM duality at the Centre, a third political element was added. The emotional content, evidenced with Sonia’s blind faith in her son to deliver, wreaked havoc on the party and left it floundering.

The results of the recent bypolls have provided a temporary breather to the party gasping for breath. In the absence of any reparative drive, the outcome of Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections could once again push the party into a coma.