Congress’ Hard Left Turn

THE LEFT EXERCISES an influence on academia, media, law and civil society disproportionate to its strength in Parliament. It is increasingly pulling the Congress into a tight embrace.

In the forthcoming West Bengal Assembly election, Congress and the Left are sharing seats in an effort to convert a potentially quadrilateral contest into a triangular one.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) form the two main poles of the election in Bengal. If Congress and the Left fought separately, the four-cornered contest would cannibalise TMC’s vote share, giving BJP a winning edge.

The overriding objective of all parties—TMC, Congress and the Left—is to deny BJP the slightest advantage in upending decades of violent Left and TMC misgovernance.

To ensure that outcome, the Left-Congress combine has cut a deal with Islamic cleric Abbas Siddiqui’s newly formed Indian Secular Front (ISF). That prevents Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) from playing spoiler as it did in the Bihar Assembly polls. If Owaisi and Siddiqui had instead forged an alliance, the AIMIM-ISF combine would have vacuumed away enough Muslim votes to hurt TMC and help BJP.

Bengal’s 29 per cent Muslim electorate will now see little value in wasting their votes on Owaisi’s party which has limited resonance in the state. The Left-Congress-ISF alliance shows how Congress has shifted not only leftwards under Rahul Gandhi but increasingly towards Islamist groups.

For a while in 2017, during the Gujarat Assembly elections, a temple-hopping Rahul had played cat and mouse with soft Hindutva. It didn’t work. After the 2019 Lok Sabha drubbing Congress suffered, Rahul Gandhi changed tactics. The Left-Congress-ISF alliance in West Bengal is in fact the culmination of a process that began with Rahul Gandhi’s decision to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from two constituencies.

Amethi had been a Gandhi pocket borough for decades, nurtured with benign neglect by Rahul Gandhi since his entry into electoral politics in 2004. By choosing Wayanad in Kerala as his second seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi unwittingly telegraphed two messages: one, that he feared losing to BJP’s feisty Smriti Irani in Amethi; and two, that a safe second seat had to have a large minority electorate. (The minority population in Wayanad is 58 per cent, comprising 45 per cent Muslims and 13 per cent Christians.)

Rahul Gandhi duly lost in Amethi and won in Wayanad. It was the first time a Gandhi dynast had been defeated in a family fief since Indira Gandhi’s post-Emergency loss in Rae Bareli (to bête noire Raj Narain) in the 1977 Lok Sabha polls.

In Assam too, Rahul Gandhi has put his faith in fundamentalist cleric Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) for the crucial 2021 Assembly election. Significantly, apart from the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir, the three Indian states with the highest minority population are Kerala, Assam and West Bengal. All three will hold Assembly elections this summer along with Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

Will Rahul Gandhi’s hard left turn and embrace of minority fundamentalist parties harm or help Congress in the 2024 General Election? Clearly, a strategy that aims at targeting a 15 per cent Muslim electorate nationally along with a small Left-leaning Hindu demographic slice risks alienating moderate Hindus who till recently had looked askance at what they perceived as BJP’s majoritarianism. Not any more.

It took a 40-year-old former Indian Airlines pilot Rajiv Gandhi to move India decisively away from mother Indira Gandhi’s poverty-enhancing socialism. Is Rahul unwinding father Rajiv’s pro-business legacy?

The answer lies in Congress’ post-Independence history. Congress long enjoyed a quasi-colonial existence after 1947. The British were evicted but not their institutions, manners, prejudices, favouritism, greed and elitism. Nehru liked the description of him as Indian in dress and English in manner. He could be effete with the British, especially the Mountbattens, and was susceptible to flattery.

The colonial Indian Civil Service (ICS) became the Indian Administrative Service (IAS)—a steel frame now long rusted. Minorities were appeased, not empowered. Private industry was shackled even as the rest of Asia raced ahead. Governance was paternalistic rather than efficient. The poor were patronised with slogans like “Garibi Hatao”. Instead of liberalising the economy, Indira Gandhi’s socialist government, through the 1960s and 1970s, straitjacketed it.

Rahul Gandhi’s hard left turn could be Congress’ biggest electoral misstep since Indira Gandhi’s ill-fated dalliance with socialist povertarianism.

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