ON 19 January 2007, the day the Congress withdrew its support to the Samajwadi Party-led coalition in Lucknow, there was an air of heightened expectancy at the party headquarters on 24, Akbar Road in New Delhi. Quite forgetting that its 16 legislators hardly posed a threat to the Uttar Pradesh dispensation, the Congress’s self-professed theorists/strategists constructed various scenarios whose end objective was clear: Mulayam Singh Yadav should go before the state elections were announced.

The first construction was that along with the 14 legislators of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RLD) – who withdrew from the Samajwadi Party-led government shortly before the Congress did – the Congress needed just another 12 to reduce the SP to a minority on the floor of the assembly when Yadav sought a vote of confidence. The Congress banked on the support of the 14 independents, led by Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya, to accomplish the ‘coup’.

Two, it imagined the chief minister would get the numbers in the assembly but promptly recommend dissolution and continue as a caretaker chief minister. But there were ‘enough’ and more grounds for the Governor to use his discretion, dismiss the government and allow Delhi to rule until the elections.

Third and the bleakest scenario for the Congress was that the chief minister would pass the floor test and serve out the rest of the term, leaving it with no choice but to lump it.

On 25 January, after Yadav won his confidence vote, the Congress’s buoyancy gave way to a barely audible sense of relief over the fact that it had managed to hold its flock together and not allow ‘cross-voting’, all because of what a senior central functionary looking into UP described as a ‘well-thought out’ strategy. What was this strategy? To walk out of the assembly instead of voting against the government. He admitted that had the Congress MLAs cast their votes like those of the BJP and the RLD, they may have defied the party’s whip and plumped for the Samajwadi Party.

With a little over two months to go before the assembly elections, a disqualification was not thought of as a terrible risk. ‘Not when you know that you stand a better chance of winning from either the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party than the Congress. Disqualification is a small price to pay,’ admitted a former member of Parliament of the party from UP.

 

In hindsight, it emerged that the Congress had no ‘strategy’ up its sleeve because the Governor, T.V. Rajeshwar, allegedly messed up its ‘game-plan’. Until the other day, Rajeshwar was hailed as the only ‘real’ opposition to Yadav because, tossing the charge of partisanship aside, he went on the offensive against the state government at every available opportunity. Except the one the Congress so eagerly waited for.

Some of its UP members grumbled and said that Rajeshwar ought not have agreed to Yadav’s decision to convene the assembly in January but waited until the time when the Supreme Court would pronounce its ruling on the disqualification of the 37 BSP legislators who in 2003 defied their party whip, split from the parent party and formed a separate outfit even though they did not constitute one-third of the BSP’s legislative strength on the day that Yadav took his vote of confidence. They invited instant disqualification under the amended anti-defection law but the Speaker overlooked this glaring fact and accepted their votes as legal. Shortly thereafter, some more MLAs of the BSP broke ranks and made up for the requisite one-third strength.

 

The case, challenging the legality of their votes, is being heard by the apex court. The Congress’s calculation was that if the court gave an adverse verdict against the Yadav government before he sought a floor test, it would automatically go. ‘We would then not have to agonise over what to do, walk out, vote against him or whatever. The court would have taken care of that but the Governor seemed to be in a hurry,’ rued a Congress MLA of UP.

Cynicism? Weariness? Pragmatism? This admission is a combination of the three sentiments and together they reflect the state in which the Congress today finds itself in the very state which afforded it the privilege and luxury of ruling India with an absolute majority for decades.

That the Congress was done out of business in UP because of the new social and power dynamics unleashed by the emergence and growth of communal politics and the evolution of a political consciousness among the economically and socially better-off backward castes and Dalits or what is termed in political jargon as the ‘Ram mandir-Mandal’ phase, has been gone into great detail by journalists, political scientists and sociologists.

If there was a common feature between the Congress and the BJP, it was that both chose to call themselves as ‘mainstream’ parties. Having covered both closely, I never quite figured out what this ascription meant. If I understood the definition correctly, the word ‘mainstream’ was a means to set themselves apart from what they pejoratively called the ‘regional’ and ‘casteist’ parties, overlooking the reality that the BJP led the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Congress, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) depend largely on their crutches.

On a philosophical level, ‘mainstream’ was taken to mean the development and espousal of a worldview on important sectors of the country such as the economy, foreign relations, education, health, gender empowerment and minorities’ rights that was supposed to be the product of painstaking discussions and debates and an overall ‘consensus’. The Congress and the BJP arrogated the right to hold a worldview to themselves and not to the so-called smaller parties because they supposedly transcended the confines of geography and social bases and had an all-encompassing presence. If the ‘minions’ had a view, it was on issues relating to caste or communities. The only other party that could hope to share the political high table with the Congress and the BJP was the CPI(M).

 

However in UP, of the two ‘mainstream’ parties, the BJP did better because while swimming in the mainstream, it also subsumed the ripples and the currents set off by the new social forces and stayed afloat. The Congress allowed itself to be sucked by the eddies and swirls of backward caste/Dalit politics and communalism, never gaining the strength to swim against the pressures.

To put it differently, if communalism was the high-point of the BJP brand of politics, it was also quick to perceive the challenges inbuilt into Mandalism and answered some of those by promoting a phalanx of leaders from the backward castes like Kalyan Singh, Vinay Katiyar and Om Prakash Singh. The Congress was stunned and out of sync and remains so until today.

An example from the recent municipal elections might illustrate the Congress’s outlook. There was jubilation at the fact that it won three of the 11 seats for the mayor’s post and 25 of the 417 for that of the chairperson of the nagar panchayats, despite being a poor second to the BJP in the case of the first and a third to the independents, and Samajwadi and the BJP in the second. Its happiness emanated more from the circumstance that a majority of the winners, including the three mayors, were from the upper castes.

 

A second-ranking central functionary spoke delightedly of how he fought tooth-and-nail to get the leaders to select his candidate, a Brahmin, for the nagar panchayat chairman’s post from Mathura because he claimed he was beseeched with calls from the upper caste professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, government employees) for the Congress to ‘wake up and take note of the upper caste sentiments.’ He apparently persuaded the reluctant leaders to go for his nominee, despite opposition from the local MLA, a Kayastha, who rooted for a fellow Kayastha. ‘Upper caste is equal to Brahmins,’ he proudly declared and added that his candidate’s victory ‘vindicated’ the belief that for the heartland’s Brahmins, the Congress was the ‘natural’ choice. If the Brahmins returned to it, the Congress’s other traditional constituents would automatically follow suit.

The word from some UP Congressmen who have worked closely with the Amethi MP, Rahul Gandhi, was that he was open to experiments with ‘social engineering’. They said he wanted the Congress to snap out of a mindset, entrenched in the political conviction that it must ‘somehow’ revive the old Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim axis and forget about the backward castes.

Although Gandhi has kept a low-profile in Parliament – the two interventions he made in the Lok Sabha since 2004 were events on the Congress’s calendar – and confined his public appearances to meetings in Amethi and Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s constituency, he is supposed to take a close interest in the UP elections. Much of the preparations so far are in the form of elaborate data bases uploaded on his lap-top of the constituency-wise results of the last three assembly and parliamentary elections and the caste composition of the constituencies. He diligently trawls the data to find out the Congress’s victory and defeat margins and extrapolate from the statistics and the caste breakups as to what went right or wrong.

 

That’s as far as the theoretical inputs go. Gandhi is apparently fully cognizant of the Congress’s neta propensity to use a position of power to network in his area of operation, create linkages of patronage and leverage the ensuing clout to personal advantage and not necessarily that of the party. It seems he is determined to uproot such entrenched power structures. A beginning of sorts was made when, on his initiative and that of Sonia Gandhi, UP was divided into eight election zones and one state functionary, who was either an incumbent or an ex-MP or MLA, was assigned each zone which interestingly, is far removed from his political constituency. The rationale was that the zonal minder would take a neutral view of factional problems and not favour one group or the other, primarily when it came to short-listing the names of candidates and appointing persons who would look after the polling booths.

Gandhi’s next decision was to ask the state Congress president, Salman Khurshid and the eight zonal minders to themselves contest the elections. They include heavyweights and lightweights: Sanjay Singh, R.P.N. Singh, Rashid Alvi, Raj Bahadur, Nirmal Khatri, Ram Poojan Patel, Rita Bahuguna Joshi and Rajeshpati Tripathi. The Congress glimpses a sliver of hope for its survival in the selection of the individuals because Gandhi, said sources, has taken a step forward to end the Brahmin preponderance. Barring Bahuguna, Joshi and Tripathi, the rest are non-Brahmins. R.P.N. Singh and Patel are Kurmis, Sanjay Singh is a Rajput, Khatri is a Vaish, Bahadur is a Dalit-Jatav and Alvi, a Muslim.

 

The point is: what does such a broad-based representation mean in terms of catching votes? ‘Very little or nothing,’ remarked an ex-Lok Sabha MP. Gandhi’s spectrum of individuals, he said, had not one who could match the charisma of Mayawati, the political skills and acumen of Mulayam Singh Yadav, or the sectional appeal of Rajnath Singh and Kalyan Singh. Sanjay Singh returned to the Congress in 2004 after he saw no future for himself in the BJP. R.P.N. Singh, a legislator from Padrauna, is unknown outside of his constituency in eastern UP. Alvi, a former BSP MP, was over the moon when the Congress ‘rewarded’ him with a Rajya Sabha seat from Andhra as a result of which he is virtually a persona non grata even in his home town of Amroha. Bahadur, a former lieutenant of the late Kanshi Ram, quit the BSP when the reins of power passed into Mayawati’s hands. Khatri has lost the last several elections from Faizabad with huge margins although as the grandson of the Socialist legend, Acharya Narendra Dev, he is not short on political pedigree. Patel had traversed the political course through the various incarnations of the Lok Dal and the Janata Dal to lead a sedentary life in the Congress while Joshi and Tripathi – offsprings of the illustrious Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Kamlapati Tripathi families – mean little to the present-day Brahmin voters, nurtured on a diet of Hindutva and anti-Mandalism.

Understandably, barring Khurshid, R.P.N. Singh and Tripathi, none of the others wants to have a shot at the elections. For example, Khatri’s reasoning was, ‘A little over two years ago (in May 2004), I came fourth in Faizabad and barely saved my deposit. What message will the workers get if a loser is made to fight again?’

 

An objective assessment was that while there was no dearth of ‘leaders’ (netas) in the Congress, in UP’s contemporary politics, dominated by sharp sectional interests, there was nobody who could claim to command the following of one or more social grouping in the way that Mulayam Singh Yadav had the Yadavs eating out of his hands or Mayawati had the undisputed following of the Jatavs. The temporarily battered Kalyan Singh never lost his Lodh-Rajput votes. However much of a political weather-wane Ajit Singh was perceived to be, barring once in 1999, the Jats of western UP never ditched their chora (son). Even a relatively obscure politician like Sonelal Patel was able to rally the Kurmis of east UP around his Apna Dal.

This is the reason why notwithstanding the media hype and hooplah over the Gandhis, few in the UP Congress sincerely believe that their ‘spell’ would hold outside of Rae Bareli and Amethi. ‘On every count, their leadership will be faulted. If you are talking about the family magic, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son, Akhilesh Yadav (a Lok Sabha MP from Kannauj) will draw the Yadav and perhaps the other backward caste votes. Let’s be honest. The voters of Amethi and Rae Bareli have a selfish interest in electing the Gandhi family members because they know they bring in the goodies from Delhi. But what do voters in other parts of UP gain from voting the Gandhi family? Nothing,’ said a UP leader.

 

This is the reason why the Congress’s argument of seeking votes on the plank that a ‘friendly’ dispensation in Delhi would facilitate things for a ‘like-minded’ government in Lucknow may not cut ice with the voters. First, nobody seriously expects the Congress to cross the three-digit mark. The party’s own target is a ‘humble’ 50-plus that its strategists believe would put it in the reckoning if the elections throw up a wonderfully hung assembly. Second, if Mulayam Singh Yadav were to return to power, even Congressmen concede that he would create problems for the Centre by re-opening the spectre of a ‘third front’. He has already drawn the contours of one with the help of the AIADMK and the Telugu Desam Party. The CPI(M) still remains supportive and notwithstanding his covert dalliances with the BJP, it believes the Samajwadi Party is the heartland’s ‘secular’ hope. Yadav is convinced that it’s vital to have the CPI(M) on his side because it could act as a buffer against the Congress’s ‘designs’ against him.

If the Congress’s relations with the Samajwadi Party have plummeted to a nadir, how does the party view the BSP? The party’s political analysts concede that the BSP has always been more of a serious threat to the Congress than the Samajwadi precisely because it sought to rebuild the same axis which held the Congress in power for decades: the Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim axis. The party also recalled how when in 1998, the late P.V. Narasimha Rao made overtures to Kanshi Ram for an alliance in the assembly polls, the late supremo unilaterally announced at a press conference that he would give a little over a hundred seats to the Congress and contest the rest himself. The Congress swallowed the ignominy because it was too late to retrace its steps.

Once bitten twice shy? Hardly. The Congress still views the BSP as its best bet for a post-poll understanding provided it has the numbers to offer. It knows Mayawati is a tough bargainer, will not allow her allies to run roughshod over her, and is forever ready to give her allies the wrong end of the stick. But these circumstances may be a ‘small’ price to gain a share in power after 17 years.

 

Bereft of credible election issues, effective candidates, a winning caste equation and with no charismatic state leaders, the Congress’s only hope is that even if it does badly in the impending elections, it has a ‘chance’ of revival in the next one. What is the basis of the optimism? Come 2011, Rahul Gandhi would have metamorphosed into a hardened politico, wise to the wiles of heartland politics. ‘Also by then people would have got fed-up of caste and communal politics and will yearn for the natural party of governance,’ said a Member of Parliament, only half convinced. His is a refrain one has heard from the UP Congress in the run-up to every election since 1989.

In the existing political ambience, one will treat it as wishful thinking, unrelated to the harsh and fluctuating ground realities.