‘It has pleased Providence to give this province [UP] a chance of leading the fight for liberty.’

Jawaharlal Nehru (General Secretary, UPCC, 1921)

POLITICAL passion, once described as ‘one of the great demons of the twentieth century’,¹ has unarguably also been the principal driving force behind its creation. In the Indian context, this passion led to the transformation of a vast geographical area from an imperial dominion to a sovereign state in 1947. Focus further and observation will reveal that the Indian National Congress became a principal agent of that transformation. A still deeper analysis will show that Uttar Pradesh (formerly the United Provinces) was the laboratory in which the formulations, machinations and other ingredients of the Congress Party’s political passion were originally fermented. As recently as the late 1980s, UP and Congress contributed to a political exchange which no federal government has managed to construct with any other state in India. The Congress drew most of its senior leadership from Uttar Pradesh who in turn channelled resources towards UP and the state usually returned a high proportion of Congress MPs to the Lok Sabha.

Ruling Uttar Pradesh also meant presiding over a true ‘rainbow coalition’ as the state is one of India’s most diverse regions in terms of ethnicity. Consequently, ‘the way in which conflicts between castes and communities are played out in UP will influence the course of democratic politics in North India and alter the ways of wresting and sustaining political power at the national level.’² This paper looks at the situation of the Indian National Congress in the politics of UP. It examines the present location of the party at an ideological and organisational level and seeks to determine whether these can sustain the momentum required for first, a slowdown in decline and second, a reversal of this degeneration.

 

Since the early 1990s UP has witnessed five-way contests within which specific caste and community groups have supported separate political formations. Apart from the presence of four major political parties, INC, BSP, BJP and SP, there are a significant number of political formations in the form of the RLD, Apna Dal, Independents and other locally organised groups across the state. No other state represents such an intense (and mobilised) electoral division.

Within this dynamic, the Congress has operated, almost unalterably, as a catch-all party. The brahmin, Muslim and dalit base upon which the party built the rest of its organisational structure has also remained unchanged, though unarguably within the Congress, brahmins always received and continue to receive a share of representation disproportionate to their state-wide population. Though the practice of politics rarely functions according to precise science and representative politics even less so, nonetheless a cursory analysis of the Congress nominees for successive assembly elections in UP will demonstrate just how upper-caste heavy the Congress party has been (see Table 1).

Nevertheless, despite this overbearing reliance on upper-caste candidates for UP elections, the Congress has also offered the broadest platform to accommodate a diverse social representation more than other political formations. Though in organisational terms at least, the party has remained committed to its professed ideology of ‘casteless’ politics and even as its selection of representatives reflects an expansive social composition, this has not, in the last fifteen years, led to a proportionate voter support. The decline has been steady and from winning 43 seats and 16.78% of the vote in 1991 the party slipped to winning only 25 seats and 9.00% of the vote in 2002.³

The Four Fevers which set the Congress on a downward spiral in the heart of India can be categorised accordingly: a crises of leadership, organisational incongruity, inadequate response measures to issues the public and voter mood was passionate about, and a practice of unstable cohabitation politics with regional parties. These four factors had long term, detrimental ramifications for the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh because they worked in combination consistently for over a decade. They were not isolated causative factors that may have individually contributed to electoral defeat in different scenarios. Their combined effect was to eradicate the Congress from the very consciousness of its own traditional voter support in the growing presence of fundamentally stronger, better organised, more resilient and viable political alternatives like the BJP, BSP and SP throughout the 1990s.

 

The leadership of the UP Congress has always been rather presidential, with the PCC President incorporating a high degree of authority at the state level in combination with a high degree of accountability to the AICC leadership. Sometimes this works well, as for example it did with Rajiv Gandhi as AICC President and N.D. Tiwari as PCC President in the mid-1980s. At other times it can be disastrous, as happened with Narasimha Rao as AICC President and Jitendra Prasad as PCC President in the mid-1990s.

 

Moreover, the decline of the Congress organisation in UP began with the decline of its local leadership within the national party. With the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, the UP Congress lost its last link with the epicentre of power at Delhi. Indira Gandhi knew, understood and was sensitive to the politics of Uttar Pradesh in a far more calculated measure than either her predecessors or her descendants. She was also far more actively concerned with the politics of the UP Congress than any other President of the Indian National Congress, before or since. With her death an entire apparatus and infrastructure of understanding about Uttar Pradesh within the Congress Party disappeared. One illustration of this was the political marginalisation of leaders such as Kamlapati Tripathi whose ouster deprived the party of a genuine understanding about the Ram janmabhoomi issue which was in the ascendant at the time.

The only remnant of the old guard who carried on into the mid 1990s was N.D. Tiwari. His continued presence as leader of the UP Congress well into the 1990s is in itself indicative of the maladies afflicting Congress politics in UP, reflective of both a leadership crises and the lack of any alternative state leadership. Even if one takes into account that Arun Nehru and V.P. Singh, former UP hands, had deserted the Congress Party in the late 1980s and that Vir Bahadur Singh was no longer alive then, by the time Narasimha Rao became prime minister in 1991, the UPCC was in tatters.

The split in the party in 1994 affected the UPCC more than any other part of India because it was centred in Uttar Pradesh. As N.D. Tiwari left Congress to form his AIIC(T) he took with him a large chunk of party workers and the state party machinery, thereby depressing an already reeling UPCC, which had just been struck with the volley of the Babri masjid demolition and its political consequences. Subsequently, the alliance of 1996 with the BSP was concluded on terms that can best be described as political euthanasia. As a result of this cohabitation with a relatively new political party, the Congress almost obliterated its presence in 299 of the 425 seats in UP. It contested only 126 seats in this crucial contest, the first after the Babri demolition, and won only 33 seats in the 425 member assembly.

 

By outsourcing its support in order to create an illusion of progress and strength, the Congress party had reduced its own state organisation to a rump. Many of its district level workers (those that remained after N.D. Tiwari’s departure), perceived they had a better future with the BSP. If the mismanagement of the Babri masjid-Ram janmabhoomi issue had forced Muslim voters towards the SP and the brahmins (and other upper castes) to the BJP, the 1996 alliance with the BSP formalised the exit of the dalit vote-base. In combination, all the moves illustrated above institutionalised, at its own hands, the decline of the Indian National Congress in UP. The ramifications of what had so far been an internal crises for Congress were fully evident at the Lok Sabha polls in 1998; Congress received only 5.28% of the vote share and failed to win even a single seat to Parliament from the 85 in UP.

Under scrutiny, the period between 1989 and 1999 appears to have been a political disaster for the Congress party, particularly in UP. During the 1999 general election, the tide of decay, prevalent for an entire decade, appeared to ebb. The Congress won 10 seats and 13.50% of the vote. There was no question of a reversal of fortunes for the party yet, but a general stabilisation appeared to have begun. The central leadership under Sonia Gandhi also had a better understanding about the state than either the Narasimha Rao regime or Sitaram Kesri’s sterile interlude. It is a surprise, therefore, to note that in five years (2000-2005) the office of UPCC President saw five occupants, reflecting an indecisive approach by the Centre. Since 2005, however, the Centre-state party-political relations appear stable and a higher degree of autonomy is available to the state leadership.

 

Meanwhile, across UP, a fatigue in political action and discourse is visible. From 1996 to the present day there has also been an exhaustion of political issues with no serious or divergent strain leading to mobilisation over new concerns. In such a situation the UPCC does not need any radical shock therapy, just readjustments such as procedural standardisations. Those who fancy their private eminence alone, (though publicly long since diminished) and work to ensure their survival within the party structure must be denied further opportunities. After all it was a particular generation of state level Congress leaders who were responsible for the mismanagement of party political affairs in the first place. They were toothless on Mandal and tight-lipped on Mandir. All they were vocal about was the state of their personal standing within the party. These (usually) septuagenarians continue as real roadblocks to meaningful party reform.

With regard to caste and community groups and their support systems, both the BSP and the SP have tried hard to redefine their political reach. From being caste entrenchments, both parties have sought to create a wider platform for community groups. In the case of the BSP this has led to a move to secure greater support among the brahmin community. If in the 1990s the Congress position symbolised ‘the pressures faced by catch-all party (sic) when it faces competition from cleavage-based formations’,⁴ in 2007 the situation is different. All the major political parties are competing for the votes of every available caste or community group. The result, therefore, is a competition between all for all. In this sense (of multiple caste/community representation) one might say of the various competing political formations that they are all Congress now.

 

For the Congress the challenge is how to balance a more hawkish approach to political associations in UP with an attempt to create a political umbrella under its own leadership which incorporates smaller and specific caste groups. This probably is a much better long-term strategy for ideological and organisational regeneration than alliances struck with the SP and the BSP aimed at stabilising local equations between elections, as happened throughout the 1990s.

One of the ironies of the 2002 Vidhan Sabha elections for UP was that the Indian National Congress was least prepared to give the state a Congress government at a time when it was most needed. Naturally, organisational weaknesses and a supine state leadership were the major contributing factors to that development. In 2007, the situation is only marginally different with regard to the party organisation. Nevertheless, the issue of leadership is finally and for the first time in decades not a crisis as the party prepares for elections. The inter-operability between AICC and UPCC is evidently better than it has been during the last two decades. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that Congress is in a worse situation today than it was in the post-Emergency period (1977-1980).

 

Organisationally at least, the party has to replicate the systems it employed in 1980 for 2007. That means recruiting its candidates after careful deliberation and, more importantly, fielding prospective legislators who are representative of the ideological and political style synonymous with the Congress at the Centre. That alone will create the distinct brand which separates the identity of the Indian National Congress from the fast merging and identical face of all the other political groups in competition in the state.

In his book, Inspite of the Gods Ed Luce has observed: ‘The BJP sometimes dilutes its message for tactical reasons. But everybody knows what it really believes in. It is often a struggle, on the other hand, to work out what Congress believes in nowadays. This is both a weakness and a strength. It is a weakness because there is no clearly defined cause behind which to marshal party workers…’⁵

While the cause and motive are available (that is the reversal of decline and the pursuit of government in UP), the creation of a separate Congress identity is yet to be accomplished. The rank and file of the Congress Party, especially in rural UP, has always been hawkish about party ideology and what it has traditionally stood for. In accordance with the political dictum that it is no good defending a political position unless one is prepared to defend the worst aspects about which it is criticised, the hard-core of the Congress Party’s working class has neither been tempted away nor been torn from the last remaining vestiges of the Nehruvian consensus. Due to the pressures analysed in this paper, this clique however remains small. The Congress Party leadership, whether at the district, state or national level, however, has at one time or another consistently jolted and tried to redefine this equilibrium between worker and ideology. Narasimha Rao did it memorably throughout his term in office (1992-1996). He balanced (though precariously) the position of the Congress nationwide but demolished it in UP (accidentally or through design is inconsequential now).

 

Notions, partly populist, partly intellectual, of the heroic infallibility of the Congress party’s provenance, make its contemporary leadership appear ineffective and remote. However, the circumstances of politics within which the present Congress leadership must operate are far more complex, diverse and difficult than any which prevailed when its ancestry engaged itself with politics.

The decline of Congress in UP and consequently in the rest of India is a feature of the democratic political cycle and a result of the devices, that is the interplay between issues, political organisations and voters, that controls this cycle. Recent events demonstrate that Congress is nearing the end of decline without heading for a fall. UP’s past is inextricably bound with the history of the Congress party; the near future may well see this balance restored.

 

Footnotes:

1. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life. Abacus, 2003. He was quoting Antonio Polito.

2. Zoya Hasan, ‘Representation and Redistribution: The New Lower Caste Politics of North India’, in Parties and Party Politics in India (ed. Zoya Hasan). Oxford University Press, 2002.

3. In 1991 the strength of the UP Vidhan Sabha was 425. Due to the formation of Uttaranchal in 2000 this became 403 for the 2002 election.

4. Anthony Heath and Yogendra Yadav. ‘The United Colours of Congress’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 August-3 September 1999.

5. Edward Luce, Inspite of the Gods, The Strange Rise of Modern India. Little Brown, 2006.