After the devastation the party suffered in the just-concluded Assembly election, a strong feeling has come up within the Congress in Kerala that a resurrection from the present state is almost impossible in near future.
Many Congress leaders, who do not want their identities to be revealed for obvious reasons, are worried that the Congress may not be able to survive in its present form and status for long. Also, it will need a long time to attain once again the strength to be a challenge to the CPI(M)-led left and the BJP-led NDA which has emerged as a big force in Kerala with the polls, they admit.
Most of these leaders are blaming the party’s top State leadership — former CM Oommen Chandy, PCC president VM Sudheeran and former Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala — for the situation. According to them, these leaders’ inability to properly read the political reality of the State had led to the big poll defeat.
“Victory and defeat are quite normal in elections but this is devastation,” said a former PCC general secretary. “A very bad strategy formation and inefficient poll management of the Congress have caused irreparable losses not just to us but also to our allies, especially the Muslim league. It is now a question of survival of the entire (Congress-led) UDF,” he said.
In the Assembly election held on May 16, the lDF, which was in Opposition, grabbed power by winning 91 of the total 140 seats and reducing the UDF, which was in power, to just 47 seats. The Congress was reduced to a mere 22 seats. The BJP-led NDA opened account in the State by winning one seat and raising its vote-share from 6.03 per cent in 2011 to 15.01 per cent.
According to poll analysts and even Congress leaders, the top leadership of the Congress party had committed the blunder of over-investing in the theory that the left was going to suffer an outflow of its majority community votes into the BJP. But it did not happen this way in the election and Congress became the actual victim of the BJP’s growth, they say.
“I am not ashamed to admit now that our leadership had played a game of soft and indirect Hindutwa in the election. When the left was concentrating on winning the confidence of the secular Hindus and capitalising on the alleged anti-BJP feeling among the minorities, we were dreaming of getting an easy walkover,” said another Congress leader, a former Chandy-loyalist.
Many Congress leaders believe that it will be nearly impossible for the party to win back the “secular” votes – from both the minority and majority communities – that had flowed into the left’s kitty and the majority community votes that had been taken away by the BJP. Also, there has been no evidence to suggest that it can win the confidence of new voters, they point out.
A sincere analysis of the party’s situation in the State would show that it has already lost its mass base and its capacity to win elections has been reduced to certain seats where capacity for victory is just a matter of the personal influence of the particular leader contesting from there. “There are no other sure seats for Congress in Kerala,” said the former Chandy-loyalist.
Congressmen now say that it is none other than Chandy, seen so far as the most efficient Congress leader perhaps in the whole nation, who has led the party to its present situation. He is now being accused of acting like a megalomaniac, cutting every other leader to size and protecting the corrupt, eventually ensuring a huge electoral humiliation for the UDF.
Congressmen are also worried that the party does not have a strong and imaginative leadership in the national level which can provide the required inspiration and strategy to the Kerala unit to come out of the crisis it has fallen into. “We haven’t seen any sign of the central leadership’s intention to interfere in the affairs here,” said the former Chandy-loyalist.
“The Congress here has all the way been saying that the left has become irrelevant globally and locally and that the BJP can never be a big force in Kerala. But even Congressmen are now saying that it is their party that has lost relevance in the face of the BJP’s growth and the left’s bid to resist it,” said Ajay Kumar, a director of a Kochi-based political think tank.