NEW
DELHI - Questions are being raised over Rahul
Gandhi's fledgling political career, even as the
prime ministerial candidate for India's 2014
elections took responsibility for the Congress
Party's defeat in polls across five states where
voters voiced staggering disenchantment with the
country's oldest political force.
The
sweeping anti-Congress wave pushed the party to
last place in a four-cornered fight in Uttar
Pradesh, the party's heartland, snatched away Goa
and gave Punjab back to the Akali Dal - the first
time a state government there has bucked
incumbency in more than 40 years. Even in
Uttarakhand, the Congress victory was tenuous as
India's oldest party struggled to unseat the
fractious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government
there by the tiniest margin of one seat. (The
right-wing BJP bagged 31 seats, against 32 for
Congress in the 70-member assembly.) Victory in
tiny Manipur brought
Congress little consolation.
In such a
dispiriting scenario, the party is fending off
embarrassing questions over the effectiveness of
Rahul Gandhi, its 42-year-old scion of the
Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and a political star whose
relentless campaigning in Uttar Pradesh failed to
resonate with the masses in India's most populous
state. After promising a spectacular performance,
Gandhi's abysmal tally of 28 seats in the state
after addressing 218 election rallies in 48 days
can hardly be flaunted as electoral "success",
analysts point out.
"People were
indifferent to the Gandhi family magic. This is
not the complete rejection of dynasty, but voters
proved that the magic of Rahul Gandhi can work
only if it is backed by a strong organisation,"
analyst Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury told Inter
Press Service.
If anything, it's a
dramatic downward spiral from the lead the party
established in 96 assembly segments in 2009. It
had then grabbed 21 Lok Sabha constituencies in
Uttar Pradesh, surprising pollsters and surpassing
its own expectations. This time, Congress managed
to take only two of the 10 assembly segments in
the constituencies of Amethi, represented by
Gandhi, and Rae Bareli, represented by his mother,
Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA), the ruling coalition
of center-left parties. By contrast, in 2007,
Congress had romped home victorious with seven of
the 10 Assembly segments.
The humbled son
said that the defeat in Uttar Pradesh, which sends
80 members to the 545-seat Lok Sabha or lower
house was a good lesson for him. ''I led from the
front in UP and the blame is entirely mine,'' he
said. Gandhi emphasized his party's need to
"strengthen its organizational structure" in Uttar
Pradesh, where it limped in last in the race
between itself, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP),
Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP.
Rahul
Gandhi is the son of Rajiv Gandhi and grandson of
Indira Gandhi, both prime ministers who died at
the hands of assassins. Congress leaders annointed
Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's widow, to lead the party
after he was killed in 1991.
Political
pundits say Gandhi will require much more than a
simple acknowledgment of his party's failure to
catapult himself into the prime minister's office.
Even as fawning Congress leaders tried to create a
buffer zone for him, blaming the party's defeat on
organizational lapses and lack of grassroots
mobilization, the writing on the wall was ominous.
It is clear that both Congress and Rahul Gandhi
will need to urgently introspect and re-engineer
their campaigns for 2014.
Will the tawdry
showing jolt Congress into action so that it can
regain its bearing? Or will this exercise serve as
yet another chapter in Rahul Gandhi's never ending
political education? After all, ballot boxes among
the 200 million people of Uttar Pradesh often
determine who will inherit the throne in New
Delhi. And on this basis alone, the verdict has
been unambiguous from all the five states, three
of which have unequivocally given a thumbs down to
the Congress.
The party’s failure to
leverage the strong anti-incumbency sentiment
against the corrupt Mayawati government was a sore
point with critics. Congress was unable to seize
the moment, or the anti-incumbency vote, say
experts, because it lacked a coherent local-level
leadership. Though Gandhi took personal charge of
the campaign in Uttar Pradesh, reiterating his
personal commitment to the people's welfare in
every speech, he failed to see the big picture.
That the electorate - angry with Mayawati's tardy
administration - was not looking not for
`benevolence' but solid governance and strong
representation. Gandhi, on the contrary, scarcely
moved out of his comfort zone to engage
successfully with the aam aadmi (common
man), his party's mascot.
In a way,
therefore, the countdown to 2014 may have just
begun. Gandhi has accepted defeat gracefully and
is willing to do a thorough introspection. As a
senior Congress functionary put it, "Rahul is a
good leader and a sincere worker but he needs to
extricate himself from the power brokers and
sycophants in the party masquerading as 'leaders'
to gain the confidence of the people."
Analysts are unambiguous in their verdict
that if Gandhi is serious about his prime
ministerial ambitions, he will have to be grounded
in the grievances of the state where he is
contesting and make his party a regional force
first. Also, to taste victory, he will need to
contest as an "insider" rather than as an
empathetic outsider bestowing largesse on people.
"Rahul Gandhi's magic failed because of
his disconnect with the masses. The illiterate
people of Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the most
backward states of India, could not relate to
Rahul's sophistication and high ideology,'' Alka
Pande, a political commentator from Uttar Pradesh,
was quoted as saying by IPS.
As columnist
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in Indian Express, "the
voters … are choosing empowerment over patronage,
the future over the past, performance over
rhetoric, sincerity over cynicism, rootedness over
disembodied charm, measured realism over flights
of fantasy. They are carefully assessing
alternatives through the prism of local
circumstances. Identities still matter, but voters
are no longer prisoners of those identities."
There's no denying that Congress was not
seeking a victory for the party in Uttar Pradesh.
It wanted a triumph for Rahul Gandhi so that he
could be anointed king at the center in 2014. Had
the party wrested Uttar Pradesh, it would have
bestowed electoral credibility upon Gandhi,
facilitating his take over of the party and
government's reins whenever he wanted.
In
that sense, the Uttar Pradesh election was a
litmus test for Gandhi who was keen to cement his
own authority, and that of the government, on the
wave of an electoral victory. But the elections
upended his apple cart and now both need a
makeover.
What will be the ramifications
of this Congress rout at the center? Enormous, say
pundits. Firstly, the party will face a stiff
opposition to all its policies (particularly those
related to foreign direct investment). Secondly,
anti-Congressism will become more pronounced
making tasks like formulation of the Union Budget
(coming up later this month) arduous ones.
Already, the ruling UPA dispensation is buffeted
by a policy paralysis and is facing a remarkable
erosion of authority. Its credibility has taken a
beating; its capacity for negotiating with
regional parties has been undermined. So its ride
to the 2014 polls can best be described in one
word: tumultuous.
But hopefully, the party
will have the good sense to identify its Achilles'
heel and its lackluster performance will be put
under the scanner by its leaders. For what's at
stake is not only the party's future in the Hindi
heartland of UP but also the political fortunes of
the formidable Gandhis in the world's largest
democracy.
Neeta Lal is a widely
published writer/commentator who contributes to
many reputed national and international print and
Internet publications.
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