The chorus of toadies who have reduced Rahul Gandhi’s resignation – as they have West Bengal Chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s - to a charade, a farce, need to be told that the best thing the Congress party could do right now is to have, not just Rahul Gandhi resign, but the entire CWC, the electoral think tank – if they have one – and then, have every single state party leader who was unable to stand up to the Modi avalanche, follow suit.
Rahul Gandhi understands the need for a mea culpa. He knows that the sheer scale of the defeat, which saw the misnamed Grand Old Party winning only 52 seats, eight more than 2014 as opposed to the BJP’s jaw-dropping 303+ spells finis to the party, as he and every Congressman has known it.
I cannot see why the rest of his party doesn’t! Yes, yes, we’re told that the BJP will use it to say he is running away from the battlefield. That without the Gandhi glue, the Congress will go back the Narasimha Rao-Sitaram Kesri era when every leader from Arjun Singh to Madhavrao Scindia to Rajesh Pilot and even P. Chidamabaram, left.
But then the question that must be asked is this - why couldn’t he – and for that matter, every one of the many stalwarts who have fought poll after poll– see what was coming? See what was staring them in the face – the undercurrent of support for Modi, the willingness to give him a chance to make good on his promise of a better India? Why couldn’t they sense what everyone else could, that this would be Modi 2.0, even if some of us greatly under-estimated the groundswell of support that Narendra Modi clearly commands across the country that cuts across caste, creed and community?
The flaws in the Congress’ campaign were so glaring as to be almost laughable. Driven by the belief that this would be a repeat of what happened to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2004, and not, as they believed, what happened to Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was re-elected to a second term, the poll rhetoric attempted to paint Narendra Modi as a crooked politician who lined the coffers of his coterie, and like any other sitting dispensation would face anti-incumbency.
Except, there was no proof. Mr. Modi’s status as Mr Clean couldn’t be smirched. The tired ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ litany, that was fresh and potent when Mr Modi’s home state went to the polls, certainly didn’t have the ability to draw blood, a good 12 months later. Frankly, the Congress analysts should have known that the reasons that drive voters to punish sitting governments – especially three time chief ministers – are not the same reasons that govern their choices in a parliamentary poll. Pragya or no Pragya! Especially in the absence of an alternative prime minister.
Instead, the charge that dynasts run the Congress, with Mr. Modi’s usage of the word, ‘naamdaar’, drew blood. Curious that the Congress, instead of tackling the charge head-on, ignored it completely. Are there no dynasts in the BJP? No sons, no daughters, no widows, no wives who get tickets? The Shiv Sena’s Thackerays. Ram Vilas Paswan’s Chirag. Garam Dharam’s Sunny Deol.
The silence, the reluctance to engage on the subject, was equally evident in the refusal of the Congress to bat on behalf of the Muslims. Why was Unnao, and the lynch mobs, not made an issue of? If not by the Congress, then Muslim leaders in the lawless Hindi heartland? Far removed, one must say, from the sanity of the south.
Even if it’s true that Mayawati, the BSP chief scuttled the alliance that the Samajwadi chief Akhilesh Yadav wanted to forge with the Congress because she was worried that if she did, she would face the wrath of the ED, why would a Dalit leader stay silent on the BJP’s move to give reservations to the Brahmins, as a first step to amending the constitution that would disenfranchise people whose cause she espouses? The world’s media was quick to pounce on Mr. Modi’s record on agrarian distress, the drop in employment, labeling him Modi, the great divider. But no, not the Congress! It even forgot to plug its own tired socialistic trope of putting money into the pockets of the poor.
The smart thing to do – yes, in retrospect – would have been to have a smart campaign where the Congress subsumed itself and played the role of just another opposition party, and strategized with its allies in the states on the way to counter the Modi-Shah combine.
Rahul put in the miles. But it was Narendra Modi and Amit Shah who outflanked and outmanouvred and outran ‘em all.
