Missed Call

THE DISCUSSION IN Lok Sabha on the Banking Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024, on the afternoon of December 3 took a predictably partisan turn after Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s introductory statement. Congress’ initial speaker, Deputy Leader of Opposition and Jorhat MP Gaurav Gogoi, made a passing reference to the Bill and its ambit and launched into a sharp, personalised attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, referring to the November 2016 demonetisation to say the prime minister gloated about the hardships caused to people. With Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi listening approvingly, Gogoi turned to controversies surrounding the Adani business group. The agenda for Gogoi’s speech made it abundantly clear that Congress remains wedded to its pet themes irrespective of their lack of resonance with voters.

It was hardly surprising that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) returned fire. By the time BJP’s Puri MP Sambit Patra began speaking, Rahul was no longer in the House and Congress benches had thinned. This was not altogether unexpected. Rahul aides like Alappuzha MP KC Venugopal had done their bit a short while earlier, seeking Speaker Om Birla’s permission to allow the leader to raise questions about External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s detailed statement on the India-China agreement on the disengagement of troops in Ladakh. Although he allowed Venugopal to make his point, Birla held that no intervention was permitted under House rules. Congress benches were caught unawares when Patra raked up the Nagarwala scandal of the 1970s involving a fraudulent withdrawal of a large amount of cash from the State Bank of India (SBI) and reports referring to Indira Gandhi. Newly installed as an MP, Priyanka Gandhi sat in the fourth row, but just a few days into her new role, she could hardly have figured out a quick response. Amid the slack, it was left to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) A Raja to rush to the Congress benches and register his protest over Patra’s insinuations. How were Patra’s submissions relevant to the Bill under discussion? Can a reference be made to a long-departed leader in violation of rules? Raja was now joined by other voices and Birla on the need to avoid derogatory references.

THE INCIDENT TELLS a larger tale. It required the in­tervention of Raja, a quick-witted and resourceful parlia­mentarian, to get the Congress rows on their feet. Con­gress’ sleepy response is indicative of an inner drift and lack of resonance with other opposition parties. Far from setting the agenda, Congress finds itself isolated even within the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, where its focus on the Adani controversy is openly rejected by allies. The view that repeatedly accusing the Modi govern­ment of crony capitalism is not working is supported by the re­sults of the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly elections. Even in Jharkhand, I.N.D.I.A.’s victory was driven by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and its leader Hemant Soren who kept tribal identity and welfare schemes centrestage. Yet, Congress has continued to read its gains in the Lok Sabha elections as an affirmation by voters of its claims of corporate cronyism and democratic backsliding. While it is evident that the 2024 General Election was not as ‘presidential’ as the 2014 and 2019 contests, the Congress leadership chooses to ignore the role of regional factors in the results. Labouring under the impression that Modi’s stock has fallen, Congress ended up playing to BJP’s strengths. On the other hand, learning from its mistakes, BJP paid attention to local aspirations, caste mo­bilisation, and topped up welfare schemes with generous dollops of goodies. In June 2024, a di­minished BJP was seen to have assumed office. In just six months, I.N.D.I.A. has lost its momentum and Congress, far from being the fulcrum of an anti-BJP front, is unable to present a convincing political agenda to its allies.

I.N.D.I.A. leaders have openly questioned Congress’ ability to lead the bloc. Opposition MPs say Congress has shown little interest in consulting other parties, mostly suggesting others must follow its lead

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The BJP brains trust anticipated the Adani focus of Con­gress’ parliamentary strategy. In the second week of the Winter Session, the party fielded Patra and Godda MP Nishikant Dubey to raise technical objections to Congress’ submissions in Lok Sabha, and then swiftly upped the ante, attacking Rahul Gandhi for being part of a design to malign India in cahoots with busi­nessman and political activist George Soros. In an unusual move, BJP leaders accused the ‘deep state’ in the US State Department of colluding with Soros and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global network that claims to un­cover corporate and government corruption, to destabilise India’s polity. On December 5, Patra said Rahul Gandhi was a “traitor of the highest order” and referred to the leader, Soros and OCCRP as a “dangerous triangle”. BJP then latched on to a report on the French media portal Mediapart that said the Soros-supported OCCRP has received $47 million from the US government since it was founded in 2008. “Our investigation reveals that the OCCRP was created thanks to the financial support of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Still today, Washington provides around half of the budget of the OCCRP, and has the power to veto the nomination of ‘key personnel’ in the NGO, including Drew Sullivan (founder of OCCRP),” the Mediapart report said, adding that OCCRP hid its dependence on the US government. BJP stood its ground even after the US em­bassy in New Delhi issued a statement describing accusations of deep-state actors working on an anti-Modi agenda as disappoint­ing. But the statement did not deny the funding, claiming the US supported “capacity building” of journalists. Mediapart criticised BJP for “instrumentalization” for its political agenda but did not deny its findings pertaining to the US government’s funding of the crime reporting collective.

Congress responded to the BJP attack by denying the allega­tions and saying the ruling party is putting ties with the US at risk to save the Adani Group. “Since Parliament session began, we have been trying to raise issues but there is one issue the prime minister cannot tolerate and when that issue is raised, he loses self-control,” Congress leader Pawan Khera told the media. The worry for Congress is that it finds little support from other Opposi­tion parties and Rahul’s meeting with Birla to seek the expunge­ment of remarks against him and an agreement to restore the func­tioning of Parliament is indicative of this. The accusations levelled by BJP against Congress and its leaders carry a sting besides muddling the crony capitalism allegations. The open accusations against the US ‘deep state’—seen to comprise politicised elements in the State Department, think-tanks and academia—appear carefully calibrated and might factor in an assessment of the incoming Trump administration’s antipathy towards ‘subversive’ officials. Donald Trump and his supporters have often railed against the ‘deep state’ themselves. As Trump takes office, BJP is unlikely to directly name the US government but its queries about the US government’s links with OCCRP are not at odds with Trump’s desire to discipline politicised officials.

I.N.D.I.A. leaders have openly questioned Congress’ ability to lead the Opposition grouping, with Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee mak­ing a pitch for the role and finding support from Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) Lalu Prasad, and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) veteran Sharad Pawar. Only DMK appears to retain sympathy and support for Congress and its role as the national Opposition. The 99 seats Congress won in Lok Sabha could well have pro­vided the base to place it at the centre of the non-BJP space, but the party failed to build on the advantage. Opposition MPs say Congress has shown little interest in consulting other parties before or during the current session, mostly suggesting others must follow its lead. Though obscured by the party’s public articulation that follows its leader’s directions, the internal weaknesses of Congress are a matter of serious concern. The meetings of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) are devoid of substantive discussion, with suggestions that the party work harder to raise issues like unemployment and inflation not finding favour. The November 29 CWC meeting accused the Election Commission (EC) of partisan function­ing and said the electoral process was severely compromised. Reports suggested Haryana senior leaders Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Selja Kumari and Randeep Singh Surjewala stayed silent although the working committee was meeting for the first time after the Haryana and Maharashtra results. The pre-scripted exercise was shorn of any stock-taking and electoral analysis.

Congress’ sleepy response is indicative of a lack of resonance with its allies. Far from setting the agenda, Congress is isolated even within I.N.D.I.A., where its focus on the Adani row is rejected by allies

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The hard lesson for Congress is that being ‘not BJP’ is not enough. This needs to be spelt out in concrete steps that define its political positioning on hot-button issues like Hindu claims to places of worship and cultural identity, Muslim mobilisa­tion, caste aspirations, welfarism, and national security. At pres­ent, the party is failing on all fronts. It is adrift of an upsurge of Hindu sentiment, choosing to blame the government and judiciary for the rising number of temple-mosque disputes with no clarity on its own thinking. The party’s ‘democracy’ projects fail to move opinion beyond a set of ideological warriors opposed to BJP. The call for a caste census does not sit easily with Congress’ moorings as a centre-left party. It has moved so far to the left on cultural issues that it has forgotten the impor­tance of retaining the centre. It has opened itself to the charge of being aligned with Islamists and its criti­cism of the Modi government on security concerns like China lack nuance, providing room for BJP to claim that Congress is unmindful of the national interest. In the Haryana and Maha­rashtra elections, Congress banked on the support of a dominant caste but found itself outflanked by BJP which forged a coun­ter-consolidation of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), forwards, and a chunk of the Dalit and tribal vote. With BJP blunting the hurtful criticism that it seeks to undercut reservations through enhanced direct cash transfers, Congress lost a key prop that eroded the ruling party’s support in the Lok Sabha polls. The consolidation of OBCs in favour of BJP is completely at odds with Rahul Gandhi’s pitch for a caste census that aims to prise these sections away from the saffron fold. Congress needs to ponder the failure of its populist ‘guarantees’ in state elections where issues are regional and local. Oddly enough, the emergence of regional factors depleted BJP’s tally in the national elections and worked the other way in state polls.

CONGRESS’ EMBRACE OF fringe politics can be traced to decisions like backing a protest in support of Afzal Guru, convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack, by a minor leftist group at Jawaharlal Nehru University in February 2016. The protest and a subsequent showdown with BJP-aligned student union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) drew the support of the mainstream Left but Rahul Gandhi’s visit to the campus was a first for Congress. The association saw BJP targeting Congress for being a fringe party supporting ideolo­gies that see India as a collection of ‘nationalities’ and glorifying convicted terrorists. To date, Congress has struggled to shake off the accusation of siding with the ‘tukde-tukde’ gang, Left factions seeking the dismemberment of the Indian Union. Congress’ electoral successes in states like Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Telangana have been the result of incumbency affecting the governing dispensations, aided in some instances by infighting in the BJP camp. Congress might not actually have needed popu­list promises that are proving to be a fiscal burden. Although political parties and leaders regularly defy doomsday predic­tions, depending on anti-incumbency to win elections can be a fraught proposition. For one, BJP has demonstrated a capac­ity to introspect and recover lost ground. More importantly, Con­gress needs to present an idea that can stand up to the massive Hindu consolidation BJP has achieved by attracting large social groups to its Hindutva-plus agenda. The party’s success under Chief Min­ister Yogi Adityanath in winning seven of nine Assembly bypolls in Uttar Pradesh (UP) shows how the evocative, and dire, “Batenge to katenge (Divided we will be felled)” slogan reverberates with voters. No section of voters will ignore bread-and-butter issues but cul­tural identity and communal fault lines are emotive arguments that have traction with the mass mind. BJP effectively turned Muslim mobilisation against it in Maharashtra on its head by getting Hindu communities to close ranks. Its adroit outreach to local preachers, Bhajan singers and sects like Warkaris who draw their inspiration from the Bhakti movement, encompassed an influential section of Marathi society. When Modi wore Warkari attire at an event near Pune in June 2022, he knew what he was doing. The association may not have delivered in the Lok Sabha elections, but BJP made it an important focus of its efforts a few months later with more pleasing results.

The hard lesson for Congress is that being ‘not BJP’ is not enough. This needs to be spelt out in steps that define its political positioning on hot-button issues. Presently, the party is failing on all fronts

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The possibility of Congress emerging as a central, rallying force in the opposition space is proving illusory, at least on cur­rent reckoning. TMC is claiming credit for the Opposition’s latest move seeking the removal of Rajya Sabha Chairperson Jagdeep Dhankhar on grounds of alleged partisanship. Congress is being seen to tailgate regional parties. The one-upmanship shows up a lack of conviction or cohesion in the Opposition bloc. Regional parties like TMC and DMK have been more re­silient in arresting BJP’s progress although local resistance has crumbled in states like Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. There is a fragility to Congress that may escape the casual eye but it can be the precursor of a lasting marginalisation in the public imagina­tion. The scales of public opinion, as in any popular contest, are impacted by the perception of who holds the winning hand. If the conclusion is that Congress is unlikely to prevail, BJP is the beneficiary, with fence-sitters, disgruntled voters and even likely Opposition supporters viewing the former as unviable. Congress might indeed retain traction with weaker sections of society—the proceeds of development remain uneven—but it will still be seen as a poor option. After all, what is the point in voting for a losing cause?

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Rajeev Deshpande

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