Of a flawed past and tense future for Congress
Given the range of strange statements that Congress leaders have been making ahead of the lok Sabha election, it is difficult to understand what sort of message the party is trying to convey in these crucial months. Weeks after senior leader Mani Shankar Aiyar categorically stated that the Congress would not be able to form the next Government, comes the remark by senior functionary Janardhan Dwivedi that the party ought not to have formed the Government in 2009. In sum, what the Congress did in 2009 was wrong, and what it is doing now (which will lead to its defeat) is also wrong. Mr Dwivedi's remarks and those of Mr Aiyar as well could have been easily written off had they not come from leaders who are not only senior — Mr Dwivedi is an All India Congress Committee general secretary and Mr Aiyar a former Cabinet Minister — but are also considered close to 10, Janpath. Mr Dwivedi apparently believes that the Congress had erred in forming the Government in 2009 because it had to eventually work according to the whims and fancies of the supporting parties. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had used the ‘alliance compulsion’ excuse earlier to explain many wrong decisions his Government had to take. But the country has had coalition regimes before — and in the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the NDA it led performed smoothly enough. There was never the public perception that the BJP was making compromises because of pressures from its allies which harmed the country. Mr Dwivedi's opinion is also possibly based on the premise that, had the Congress sat in the Opposition in 2009, despite being not just the single largest party but also having got a mandate of the people bigger than what it had in the 2004 poll, the political outfits that would have assumed the mantle would have messed things up and prepared the ground for the grand old party to return with a bigger electoral win — at least big enough for it to rule solo. Given the situation in 2009 and thereafter, to believe that the Congress would have received a simple majority on its own, is to live in cloud cuckoo land.
It is precisely this delusion which is at the heart of Mr Aiyar's belief as well. The seasoned politician thinks that by serving out on the opposition benches for a year or two and patiently waiting for a possible coalition of largely regional parties at the helm to disintegrate on its own, the Congress can return with a bang. He too, like Mr Dwivedi, could be drawing upon the examples of the Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Deve Gowda and the IK Gujral Governments. These regimes had collapsed after the Congress withdrew support. But the situation is vastly different today. The Congress is thoroughly discredited, the BJP is on the upswing and the so-called Third Front remains a chimera. It may no longer be a matter of choice for the Congress to sit in the opposition after the election — it will be a compulsion.