The Art of Winning a Defeat

CAN YOU WIN a defeat? Possibly. If your sights are set low, you can always rejoice after missing the bull’s eye by some distance. This is not advocacy for the cockeyed. It is a recognition of the artful management of expectations, always good politics in that gloomy space called the waiting room. Congress has developed expertise in this art. Statistics tend to be a little less helpful.

The last election which brought Congress to power was in 2009 when it won 206 seats with 28.55 per cent of the vote, while BJP slumped to 116 seats and 18.80 per cent. Fifteen years later, BJP has 240 seats with 36.56 per cent of the vote and Congress has 99 MPs with 21.19 per cent. That should shift the perspective. In 2024, Congress did better out of allies than the allies did out of Congress because the latter had less to offer. If it took 10 years for Congress to rise from 44 seats to 99, then the party should reach 200 seats in Lok Sabha by 2034 at the present rate of progression. Semantics apart, the question before Congress is whether its brand has yet recovered. It cannot become the natural alternative to BJP as long as it is marginal in the 180- odd seats along the belt from Delhi Yamuna to Diamond Harbour and the Sagar island in Bengal where the Ganga meets the sea; and vuln`erable in a big-ticket state like Maharashtra and middle India where it faltered again.

The past can be useful. The first instance of Congress slippage occurred in the 1967 elections when it diminished to a slim majority against a non-existent Opposition. In 1971 Indira Gandhi led Congress to a spectacular recovery in a premature General Election by reinventing her party through a split in 1969 that ripped apart the status quo. Her heirs do not fully appreciate the significance of 1969.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Opposition parties used to ask for votes on the sterile plank that they were not Congress. Congress now asks for votes on the equally fragile plank that it is not BJP. This is a painkiller, not a remedy. A serious political objective needs a compelling positive programme that defines a better future for the electorate and the nation through a policy framework. This is more difficult than holding press conferences.

EVEN MIRACLES CAN wither in the winter of time.

One of the outstanding miracles of Indian democracy has been the sudden rise and sustained achievement of Naveen Patnaik, intellectually more a child of the liberal West than the rustic hardships of his state, Odisha. His father Biju Patnaik’s legendary life helped, but no inheritance lasts more than one term in the tough playing fields of our electoral system. I knew and admired the charismatic Biju Patnaik and have never really met the son, but will assert that history will accord Naveen an equally luminous chapter. Naveen Patnaik’s era is an indelible part of Odisha’s long march to modernity.

For a quarter century Naveen Patnaik sped along a one-way autobahn, eliminating competing traffic with unsuspected finesse, eventually to discover that fatigue and crawl exhaust just as easily as speed. It is entirely apposite that his splendid success over two decades in power has been complemented by the grace with which Naveen Patnaik has said au revoir. No fuss, no moans, no complaints, no pettiness, no entitlement, no bile against the victor. If I can take the liberty of paraphrasing what he might be thinking: Democracy brought me to power; democracy has told me to take a rest.

If anyone deserves a Bharat Ratna in 2025 it is Naveen Patnaik.

NORMALLY, THE KNIVES come out after the results. In Britain, which has always claimed the honour of being the mother democracy, the slashing and slaying has begun much before the Conservatives end up in the morgue. Their current leader Rishi Sunak knifed his mentor Boris Johnson on the way to power with a twist that belied his self-promoted image of a do-gooder who had sacrificed a lucrative private-sector career to serve the British people. That did not last long in the arc lights of reality. Sunak entered 10 Downing Street with the slight swagger of an intelligent lottery winner, convinced by events that the right conjunction of stars had found the correct place for his genius. He lost the plot completely when he abruptly left the commemoration of D-Day on June 6, oblivious of what it meant to his country: it marked the onset of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 which destroyed Hitler, saved Britain from subjugation and the world from vicious fascism. This prime minister of Britain has never understood the British. He looks naïve and bewildered, an amateur mewling in the big league, now visibly nursing an inner grievance against the multitudes who refuse to vote for his selfless talent.

His bête noire, that bruised leopard of professionals Boris Johnson, has just taught Sunak a lesson in whipcraft. On Monday, Sunak admitted, with gritted teeth, that Johnson could “make a difference” to Tory fortunes if he campaigned. Boris waited for the reluctant appeal to flood the news, and then announced that he was off on a holiday.

It can only happen in London.

Guess what is Sunak’s theme on the hustings? He is no longer asking for victory. All he says is: Don’t give Labour an overwhelming victory. Just a whelming majority, then.

HOW MANY NUCLEAR bombs do you need to blow up the world? One would do.

By the time they convened the United Nations Security Council to discuss the crisis, half the world’s nuclear arsenal would have been triggered by that self-destructive combination of dread and hate. Such thoughts have been prompted by a new count done by the world’s principal think-tank on multinational suicide, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Russia has 4,380 nuclear warheads, America 3,708, China 500 (up from 410 in early 2023), France 290, Britain 225, India 172, Pakistan 170, Israel 90, and North Korea 50. One is tempted, without prejudice, to discount the British quota. In January this year a Trident fired by the Royal Navy supposed to cross 6,000km into the Atlantic plopped a few yards away into the sea during a test. Don’t ask what would have happened if this failure had been a semi-failure, and hit an African country en route. The defence minister during the test, Grant Shapps, described the test as “most reliable”. Quite fascinating. There is no record of what the British defence minister in 2016 said when the previous Trident test flopped in equal ignominy.

Two thousand years ago the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca made a sensible suggestion: “End your life whenever you want to. Just make sure you attach a good ending.” Seneca, thou shouldst have been alive at this hour.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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