The methodology adopted in the next 18 months will be crucial for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress. It will determine their success in the 2024 general elections
Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, understood to be the de facto president of his party, made a hectic rendezvous in the heat and dust with the farmers of Punjab and to some extent with those in Haryana on the farm Acts. Some observers once again termed his latest avatar as “version 2.0 or 3.0”, depending on how they saw the political graph and career of the Gandhi scion.
The visits got good traction in both the States, particularly in Punjab, as the Congress is not only the ruling party there, it is in a position to organise the machinery for protest marches and public meetings. Plus there is resentment against the laws across the State and among all parties, except for the BJP, which initiated the Acts.
The two political protests in a row — first in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in support of the Dalit woman who was gang-raped by upper caste men, followed by the one in the food bowl of the country, Punjab and Haryana — catapulted him into the public eye. And he did seize the first mover advantage on both these issues. At least now he is being viewed as some sort of a “fighter” rather than a “shirker.” Also, since these visits are not related to elections but concern specific issues, the images and footprints of both Hathras and Punjab would remain imprinted on the public consciousness for a while. The image of Rahul being roughed up by cops, consoling the victim’s father in Hathras and riding a tractor in Punjab would help his cause immensely in the medium to long run.
But there is a rider. Rahul has shown consistently that he adopts a strategy and abandons it completely and goes for a long political vacation. Hathras and Punjab —the cause of a Dalit girl and farmers, besides other issues of the subaltern — need to be sustained and adopted in the long term political strategy of the Congress and should not remain a photo opportunity alone. Adopted for a while and then abandoned, something which had become Rahul’s signature for long, the news-grabbing moments gave his opposition repeated opportunity to project him as a politician aloof from the grind, not suited for the heat and dust or the combative brand of grassroots politics. This image can be altered only when there is consistency in his political approach followed by an action plan for each and every issue which concerns the people at large. You cannot be a part-time agitationist and also a part-time tourist vacationing in a foreign country when face to face with an extremely combative adversary who is better planned and always a step ahead.
Remember the temple-hopping spree of Rahul and his attempt to sport a Janeu by proclaiming himself as a Dattatreya Brahmin in the run-up to the last Lok Sabha polls? No one, not even Rahul himself, knows what happened to those half-hearted attempts to play the majority religion card and the efficacy of the strategy itself. No one has even asked him if he had gone to a temple after those photo ops and does he wear a Janeu now. Perhaps after getting a thorough drubbing in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress strategists who advised him and he himself realised that this was not going to cut any ice with the voters and abandoned the discourse.
Long ago, when the UPA was in power and Rahul was calling the shots, he used to occasionally visit Dalit hamlets in parts of UP and used to spend the evenings and nights there, trying to understand what the downtrodden faced. Once, in 2009, he even took the visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband along with him to spend a night in such a household, which became a media sensation worldwide. But this practice, too, was abandoned summarily, suggesting a lack of consistency and strategy in the political methodology adopted. No one has heard if he ever spent a night in a rural household after the Congress-led UPA was ousted from power in the 2014 general elections.
Remember, the Hathras visit came nine years after his much publicised visit to Bhatta Parsaul village in Greater Noida area during a farmers’ agitation, when they were protesting against alleged forcible land acquisition. He was pillion riding a motorcycle then and had entered the village in solidarity with the agitating farmers and sat on a dharna with them. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was ruling the State then with Mayawati as Chief Minister and Rahul was detained for a few hours. Of course, the Congress-led Government at the Centre subsequently passed the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, which raised the compensation given to farmers manifold.
Bhatta-Parsaul was a success story of sorts, which led to the passage of a Bill, considered extremely friendly to farmers if any Government/private agency wanted to acquire the land. But Rahul failed to publicise this success story. Perhaps not realising its significance, he and his party let go of an opportunity which could have helped both politically. On the contrary, the Congress became defensive when its political opponents targeted it over the Bill, saying it hampered easy land acquisition and prevented industrialists from setting up new units and giving employment.
Rahul has been put through tough scrutiny all these years, more so in the post-2014 era when the Congress lost to the BJP lock, stock and barrel and the decline continued like a free fall. In 2017, as Congress president, Rahul did a magnificent job for his party by trying to halt the BJP juggernaut in its strongest base for decades — Gujarat. The party lost but did put up a spirited fight against the political giants — Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then BJP president Amit Shah — both from the same State. The performance of the underdog (Congress) was hailed and it was billed as a new beginning, a new dawn for Congress. This performance was followed by Karnataka where the incumbent Congress government did reasonably well and prevented the BJP from claiming power. Victories in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan added to Rahul’s stature and the possibilities of a Congress revival became real. But come May 2019 and all advantage was lost. The party simply could not build the momentum or keep the pressure and lost out on issues to tackle its opponent, driven as it was by aggressive nationalism and Hindutva. It simply had no answer to the blitzkrieg launched by the BJP in 2019 and surrendered meekly without even putting up a semblance of a fight.
The question now is when the momentum seems to have slightly become favourable with Hathras and the farmers’ issues, will the party, particularly Rahul, be able to sustain it in the medium to long term? That will be a challenge and also provide answers to the political discourse in the run-up to a series of Assembly elections in the next one-and-a-half years.
Many Congress leaders privately say that the practice of starting a campaign or a narrative and then abandoning it midway has to come to an end. A narrative, once adopted and made a part of political strategy, has to continue and given an incubation time. Only then can one build momentum and swing tides of opinion. Partymen need to be consistent and have to hit the streets every two to three weeks to get traction and occupy the opposition space, not wake up every three years.
The Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, scheduled for February and March 2022, are less than one-and-a-half years away. A State where BJP is firmly entrenched under Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister, the Congress is still considered to be a rank outsider at this juncture despite Hathras and despite the absence of Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP from the politics of agitation. Can Congress fill the vacuum here? Can it spring a surprise? Will the Rahul-Priyanka duo be able to project themselves as some sort of an alternative and replace the caste narrative of SP and BSP? Will they come out with a game-changer? Do they have it in them? This is what Congress leaders and workers alike are asking. For many within the party and outside, the revival of the organisation in UP is the key for success in the 2024 general elections. The road to Delhi goes through UP was an old saying but this holds true even at this juncture where a great churning of the political process is taking place.
(The writer is Senior Resident Editor, The Pioneer, Chandigarh)