The Digvijaya Story

Starting with the PM’s media advisor and the NAC, Delhi still doesn’t get India.

For the brief period of one day, someone in this government spoke the truth. The Congress, the PM’s media advisor Harish Khare said, is “by nature, chaal, charitra, essentially a status quoist party. It does not believe in any conviction. (Its) only conviction is to win elections. That is its only conviction”. The very next day, Khare, reflecting the nature of the Congress, seemed to change his own convictions: “I have always believed and argued that the Congress party is the nation’s most enduring source of stability.”

Lost in this entertaining but meaningless drama was the far more interesting exchange between Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh and Khare that led to these observations in the first place.  Digvijaya, speaking at a book launch in Delhi, said that as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh (MP) for ten years, he had followed the “politics of conviction”, as opposed to the “politics of consensus”. Khare, on the other hand, said that Digvijaya’s initiatives on land redistribution to Dalits and Scheduled Tribes did not succeed in MP “because the party was not with him”—it only “tolerated his politics of conviction” and therefore “he did not have the political space.”

One thing the two of them seemed to have agreed on is that Digvijaya gave the politics of conviction a chance in MP and it failed for larger reasons that he could not quite control. This belief is what has given Digvijaya a central role in the discourse about tribals, Dalits and the dispossessed, which has lately occupied such space among the liberals of Delhi, ranging from activists, members of the National Advisory Council to the ranks of Rahul Gandhi’s aides. But is it true?

In 2003, after two spells as Chief Minister, Digvijaya Singh was annihilated at the polls. Recently, an old acquaintance from MP, a journalist, met me in Delhi and said that the one thing most Congressmen in MP are agreed upon is that they don’t want Digvijaya Singh campaigning for them. Seven years after his electoral defeat, he remains as unpopular in MP as he is popular in Delhi. This is evident to anyone who cares to actually go travel in MP.

The problem lay with Digvijaya’s abdication of governance while paying lip service to progressive ideas, much in the same way that we see repeated at the national level today.  The NAC is working on legislation after legislation that serves exactly the piecemeal approach we should avoid—because it only addresses small slices of the rural poor. As the rest of the Government is focusing on areas that do not fall under the NAC’s domain, we are increasingly seeing the Government failing to provide delivery to exactly those who need it most. Call it the Digvijaya paradigm if you will, because this is exactly what happened in MP.

Digvijaya’s Bhopal declaration of 1998 set the tone for Dalit and tribal empowerment; he spoke eloquently as he does now on tribals and their right to forest produce. Yet, in one of the poorest states of India, with a large Dalit and tribal population, he was decisively defeated, and in fact the defeat was severest in the tribal regions.

He lost because he forgot about electricity and roads. These are exactly the subjects the NAC does not talk about today because, in its blindness, the body continues to see these as concerns of the well-to-do. Electricity and roads are actually shorthand for rural infrastructure, a subject never addressed by the UPA since its electoral victory in 2004, except for some rhetorical backing for President Kalam’s endeavour to provide urban amenities in rural areas.

Electricity mattered so in a largely rural state because it has become central to agriculture across the country. With no electricity during the sowing season, farmers had to use the more expensive diesel for their irrigation pumps. 

As input costs went up, they resorted to saving the most essential portions of their produce. The demand for labour went down and the spiralling impact devastated the rural economy. Among the worst hit were tribals and Dalits who are intricately linked with the agricultural economy of the state.

Today, the very fact that agricultural growth continues to limp along is a warning sign.  It is not something anyone is paying heed to, but people eventually will. It took ten years for Digvijaya to decimate the Congress in MP. The party should hope that in ignoring those mistakes, the UPA does not repeat the same feat at the national level.

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