Words without meaning












Though general elections are a few months away, the BJP and the Congress are simply attacking each other. Will they pull out a rabbit from their hats and bring a fresh narrative?



Amitabh Shukla

After Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s entry into active politics, our grand old party, the Congress, looks energised, motivated and has the momentum on its side to face the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Of course, it has been helped in no small measure by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which now looks jaded, carries the disadvantage of anti-incumbency and is seemingly devoid of the same energy and enthusiasm that marked the party’s campaign throughout 2013 till the 2014 general election. Despite being on a roll — to an extent as Congress supporters would like to believe — after last year’s victories in the Assembly elections to Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, this would be the first battle in recent years where the grand old party, which by default is the main challenger to the BJP, is yet to come out with a positive poll narrative or sound implementable promises. It needs a pitch, now.

Rather than projecting any positive agenda for the creation of jobs, to boost the country’s economy or putting forth any dynamic agenda which it might have for foreign policy vis-à-vis our neighbouring countries, all it is dependent this time around is on the “failure” of the Modi regime to fulfill promises it made in 2014. As of now, Rafale seems to be the single most important agenda for the Opposition, even as the ruling party is spiritedly defending itself and has been denying any wrong doing. Attack, attack and attack…seems to be the Congress’ mantra as it enters the last phase before the elections are formally announced by the Election Commission of India. But Rafale doesn’t have the ability to wash with the electorate as an emotional issue. Can the Modi Government’s alleged failure, therefore, become the trump card for the Congress? If the party’s think-tank believes it can take the electoral plunge without any positive agenda, or without any performance-oriented narrative, it is, perhaps, going through a delusional phase. There will be near unanimity among non-BJP parties and also a large section of the academia and economists that demonetisation was a blunder and that the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) could have been done in a better way, and perhaps, in a phased manner. There can be no argument on this front. But can this failure of the ruling party become the main weapon of the Congress fightback?

At present, all that the Congress has offered include loan-waivers to farmers in States like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where the party won last year, triggering speculation that it would do well in the general elections too. But can loan-waiver alone be the panacea of all the ills that plague the farming community? No farmer, agriculturist or expert dealing with the farm economy and farm crisis thinks so. At best, it is a pill which can only remove the symptom but can never fight the cause of the disease.

So, what can the Congress offer to the farmers of the country? Farm distress is, perhaps, the single most reason to make the Modi Government unpopular among the rural votebase. Low farm prices have ensured that the farmers’ returns from investments in crop, seeds, fertilisers and land are reduced and have, in fact, come down significantly in recent years. But will the Congress implement the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission report, which advocates a new mechanism for fixing Minimum Support Price for their crops? We have not heard much from the party on this front except some vague promises.

In fact, even in Punjab, where the party has been in power for almost two years now, and which is plagued by farm distress and farmers’ suicides for long, we are yet to hear much except that provisions for cosmetic loan-waivers have been made. Farmers continue to be stressed in the State even though the Congress under Capt Amarinder Singh took over the reins of power almost two years ago.

If you do not have anything concrete on the farm front, that’s fine, you can take a call later. But what are your plans about job creation and giving impetus to the economy? There is no denying that demonetisation, which was followed by GST in quick succession, affected job growth. In fact, the combine triggered massive job losses. Has the Congress come up with a plan to infuse new life to the economy and create jobs? The answer obviously would be a big no.

In 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was bidding for power at the Centre, he, too, attacked the Congress left, right and centre, using every possible imagery to pin down the party and expose its inner contradictions. This was similar to what the Congress is doing right now. At that time, Modi found traction among voters with three crucial words — Modi, Modi, Modi — that echoed in almost all public meetings in the Hindi heartland throughout the campaign period. But at the same time, while tomtomming his personal charisma, he  had also come out with slogans of creating two crore jobs every year and gifting 15 lakh in every bank account from the black money which was supposedly parked in foreign accounts. Of course, the promise of achhe din acted as the catalyst that instilled hope among a large section of the population, cutting across caste and religious lines.

Five years down the line, all of these largely remain a promise and the slogans raised then have been given a decent burial. Even the “Gujarat model of development”, which was supposed to be implemented at the national level, remains forgotten and no one hears anything about it anymore. What Modi and his party are doing this time around is what they did in 2014 — virulently attack the Congress.  Dynasty and alleged acts of omission and commission are the top subjects on which the grand old party can be attacked. There is no attempt to even sell a rescue plan for stressed Indians.

So, there you are: Both the main contenders are calling each other names, they want the people to believe that the other is corrupt and are trying to attract the voters’ eyeballs with their colourful vocabulary, which they are using against each other. What catapulted the BJP under Modi in 2014 was complete disillusionment with 10 years of UPA regime, charges of big ticket corruption, perception of a remote-controlled Prime Minister and loss of hope among the electorate for the future. Modi brought in a wave of fresh air, positive change, political machismo and above all, hope for achhe din with some specific policy measures.

In the absence of a positive narrative among both contenders for power — BJP and Congress — electioneering so far has been reduced to charges and counter charges, attack and defence. Of course, real electioneering is yet to pick up and will be seen only after the nation gets over the Pulwama tragedy. But people are still wondering if elections this time round would be fought on negative agenda, making both sides look opportunist than committed visionaries who will see us through. (February 22, 2019)

Test of a United India





The fissures in the mahagathbandhan are gradually becoming visible and its ability to maintain a united front till after the election results will be the decider



Amitabh Shukla

As the Lok Sabha election gets tantalisingly close, the season of mahagathbandhan or a grand alliance has started in right earnest. So has flexing of political muscles by what can loosely be called as the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (anti-BJP) — a conglomeration of diverse regional parties, united by a single agenda of removing the Modi-Shah duo from national politics in the Lok Sabha election. Of course, BJP rebel and now architect of the “Save Democracy” movement Yashwant Sinha adroitly reminded everybody that the Modi versus Rest  narrative would only strengthen the former’s image and the Opposition needed to counter the BJP on ideological counts.

Raised hands and clenched fists of all leaders present in the Kolkata rally, organised by the Trinamool Congress (TMC), not only gave a perfect photo opportunity to Opposition leaders but somewhere down the line increased the frown lines of the defender — the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Many considered the rally largely as an exercise to project TMC chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as a possible prime ministerial candidate of the grand Opposition alliance for the Lok Sabha poll even though the stated objective was to bring all anti-BJP parties on the same platform. But that’s just one aspect of the burgeoning index of Opposition unity.

Of course, all the 20-plus parties that participated in the Kolkata rally on January 19 had different agenda on their minds. Most of them were looking for a better outing in the Assembly polls with their respective alliances, where the BJP has become a force to reckon with since 2014. But given that the TMC hosted the first successful Opposition rally and managed to get on board almost all leaders and parties opposed to the BJP, it can now safely claim to be the leader of this Third Front. Banerjee also pitched herself as a sort of an arbitrator for possible disputes, whenever and wherever they arise, among this Front. Her diplomatic handling of the stage and giving importance to all the leaders present amply suggested her ease of managing diverse interests, her acceptability and showed her national ambitions.

But the fissures in such a loose formation are still too wide and its ability to pose as a united front before the election is still a matter of speculation. Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief Chandrababu Naidu, who was present in the Kolkata rally, has practically abandoned the Congress with which he had sewed an alliance for the Assembly polls of Telangana.  Congress president Rahul Gandhi and Naidu had become the poster boys of this mahagathbandhan then, beaming as they were with hands raised in solidarity.

As an afterthought, the TDP supremo perhaps realised that he cannot give much space to the Congress to grow in his home state of Andhra Pradesh. An alliance with the Congress in the State would limit his chances to have a go at the chair of Prime Minister. He might have perhaps looked at the prospects of him somehow becoming a possible compromise candidate in the event of this Opposition grand alliance getting close to government formation.

Besides, Mamata Banerjee and Chandrababu Naidu, who are possibly looking at a national role for themselves, this anti-BJP Opposition front also has Dalit leader and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati as the prime ministerial candidate. She has been endorsed strongly not only by her own party but also by her newly-found political partner and nephew Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP). The Bua-Bhatija alliance is the one which has set the tone and template for the general election and almost every political pundit now says that the road to New Delhi this time would go through the lanes and bylanes of Lucknow and Uttar Pradesh.

Days before the Kolkata rally of the Opposition, the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh triggered a wave of anticipation among the anti-BJP front and threw open a wide range of political possibilities at the cost of the saffron party in the largest State of the country. The  TMC rally simply took the idea of unity ahead and sort of announced to the world that the neutral Third Front was alive and kicking  and both the BJP and the Congress should consider it as a possible contender for the throne in Delhi provided it gets the numbers leaders are hoping for. And if all parties do well individually, then the Congress can provide outside support if the situation so warrants.

Coming back to the SP-BSP alliance, even the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar, which has a vote base similar to the SP’s in Uttar Pradesh, is excited about  its prospects. This perhaps explains why Tejaswi Yadav, the de facto supremo of the party in the absence of the incarcerated Lalu Prasad Yadav, dashed to Lucknow to congratulate Mayawati on her birthday and tweeted pictures in which he touched her feet reverentially. It’s rare to see bonhomie between the parties representing the Dalits (BSP) and OBCs led by the Yadav community (SP and RJD), as they have not only been at political but also social loggerheads for decades.

Tejaswi knows for sure that keeping the BSP in good humour would only help consolidate and expand the vote base of the grand alliance in Bihar. Dalit leader and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan is firmly in the NDA fold, at least for the Lok Sabha election, and the RJD would be more than happy to get any incremental votes of Dalits in the State if Mayawati is on board even if the BSP does not contest a single seat as part of the grand alliance in Bihar. In fact, the RJD could go to the extent of offering a seat or two to the BSP even though the Mayawati-led party does not have any foothold in the neighbouring state.

In this season of anti-BJP posturing, photo ops and alliances ahead of the Lok Sabha poll, the only motive seems to be removal of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister by working out sound electoral mathematics and ensuring a higher seat  turnout than the BJP did in the 2014 polls. The SP-BSP alliance is simply banking on the fact that if it gets a combined vote share, which is higher than the NDA’s in the state, it would be in the driver’s seat. Of course, chemistry and adjustment are equally important in alliances and it remains to be seen how firmly it is cemented at the grassroots  and booth levels.

Left out of the alliance in Uttar Pradesh — a move on expected lines — the Congress is neither happy nor unhappy at this moment, contemplating the different possibilities along with permutations and combinations ahead. Optimists in the party believe that at the end of the day, the SP-BSP alliance could be a part of the UPA if the numbers so demand and they are at a striking distance of forming the next government. Of course, Mayawati would throw her hat in the ring for a possible go at the chair of Prime Minister if the situation so warrants and the mahagathbandhan gets a respectable number of seats. This situation would be conditional on the Congress not doing well and remaining well below 100 seats, regional parties dominating the results and the BSP itself performing well and getting a reasonable number of the 38 seats it would be contesting out of the 80 in Uttar Pradesh.

But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Post-verdict electoral understandings, support and alliances could be quite different from the ones cemented pre-poll. In a possible scenario where the NDA is a little short of majority, the BSP could always spring a surprise. It has a history of aligning with both SP and BJP, and there has been no shift in BSP’s ideology even as it goes to polls this time around as a formidable force in alliance with the SP in Uttar Pradesh.

Similarly, the TDP, too, could go anywhere — from the NDA to the UPA, or to Third Front — in the post-poll political calculations. In the last six months, we have seen the party travelling all platforms. So there we are. It all depends on numbers after the polling and till then, all political parties would  be posturing and keeping their options open. Much water will flow till then. (January 22, 2019)

The Chameleon's game





Regional parties have become experts in sensing the political climate by switching sides at the slightest possibility of a better electoral outing and negotiating a relevance for themselves



Amitabh Shukla
 
The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) may be the latest ally to desert the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, introduced in the last session of the Lok Sabha recently, but by no stretch of the imagination can the party be termed as a “political weather scientist.” Similarly, the tag should also not be passed on to the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which parted ways with the NDA last year. Compulsions of state politics and scouting for better opportunities at the national level forced these two regional parties to break away from the NDA rather than their potential to gauge trade winds.

In that sense, the bellwether status should go to Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan. For long, he has been described as the ‘mausam vagyanik’, who can assess which way the political wind is blowing or which party would reap the electoral harvest and form the next Government.

Many have even appreciated his ability of being “accurate and correct” with his political moves over a period spanning three decades. Both his admirers and critics believe that he has got so much of expertise in reading “people’s mood and pulse” that he always supports the winning cause — the coalition which rules the country.

Paswan has been a part of all national coalitions. He was first elected as an MLA in Bihar way back in 1969, though he has always preferred to be in Central politics after the Emergency when he first won the Hajipur Lok Sabha seat by a record margin in 1977. Be it the Right (NDA led by the BJP) or the one in which the Left had a major role (Third Front led by VP Singh) or the Centrist party (Congress-led United Progressive Alliance), one factor which has always been common is the 75-year-old Paswan. No ideology is anathema to him as long as it takes him to the treasury benches.

He was first inducted in Union Cabinet by VP Singh in 1989 and since then the Dalit leader has never looked back. Of course, he lost one election in 2009 to an old rival in Bihar —Ram Sundar Das — from his stronghold of Hajipur and had to remain out of power for five years. His followers, however, term that period as an “accident” and an “aberration.”

When he decided to stick to the NDA in Bihar for the 2019 polls, successfully bargaining a healthy six seats for his Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and one Rajya Sabha seat for himself, many in his home state wondered if he had lost his ability to predict the political climate with the same perfection and astuteness.

Many in Paswan’s home state say that Upendra Kushwaha, the former junior HRD minister in Narendra Modi’s Government and the first one to jump ship in Bihar from NDA to UPA, has now developed the knack which Paswan possessed at one point of time. Kushwaha, as president of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) and a Koeri himself, joined the grand alliance (mahagatbandhan) of the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in the Hindi heartland, hoping to have a role in the next Union Government.

Kushwaha knows for sure that his utility in NDA ended the moment Nitish Kumar and his Janata Dal United (JDU) joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to retain power in the State and oust the RJD with which JDU had fought the Assembly elections in the first place. Kushwaha and Kumar share a similar caste support base and he realised he would be more useful to the mahagathbandhan in Bihar than the NDA. So Kushwaha’s ouster was a foregone conclusion. In fact, it helped Paswan get a better deal with the NDA in seat-sharing as whatever incremental votes his party gets in Bihar helps the latter’s cause in its bid to do well in the State.

Bihar will be an important battlefield in the 2019 general election with 40 seats, a State where both the UPA and NDA are firmly entrenched. Hence, this is one State where the battle is largely between the two and not the constituent parties as such.

Besides RJD, the Congress and now the RLSP, the grand alliance in Bihar also has former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi’s party, Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) founded by Sharad Yadav, who broke away from the JDU. Then there is Mukesh Sahni, who had floated his political outfit Vikasshil Insaan Party (VIP) and joined the grand alliance, aiming to get votes from his Nishad community spread across the State. In addition, there is a possibility of even the Left parties becoming a part of the grand alliance, which could leave a couple of seats for them to show it is an umbrella alliance of all castes, groups and ideology.

On paper, the alliance looks really  ‘grand’ given the various caste combinations it carries with it, but on ground it is difficult to visualise how competing castes, parties and groups would jell, and whether one community would be able to transfer its vote to the other. Also, the sharing of seats is still a mystery and several conflicts, claims and counterclaims could emerge.

Ironically, it is in Bihar where the BJP had to concede to its allies in a big way, which many see as the end of the road for its expansion in the State. It won 22 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, and along with its allies LJP (6) and RLSP (3), the NDA won 32 seats even though the combined Opposition then on paper was quite strong — RJD and JDU. The BJP would be contesting only 17 seats, forcing it to part ways with five seats which it won last time, clearly a set-back for the party cadres who were hoping for expansion and some day form the State Government on the party’s own strength like it did in Maharashtra, breaking from the Shiv Sena and contesting Assembly polls alone.

As of now, Bihar is the only State where the battle lines have been drawn and demarcated firmly with alliances in place. Many see this as a microcosm of India — emergence of a two-alliance formation where the BJP would head one polarity and the Congress the other with regional parties siding with one or the other depending on their state politics, perceptions at a given point of time and crass opportunism, of course.

It is now gradually becoming clear that it will be the regional parties which would become the new weather scientist of the Indian politics —switching sides at the slightest possibility of better electoral outing and reviewing their decision every now and then according to their convenience and smell of opportunity. Bihar is a perfect example where you do not find any permanent political friend or enemy.

Every single regional party of the State has a history of deserting either the NDA or the UPA in the past several years ever since the days of Mandal and Mandir politics which peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Both Paswan and Nitish Kumar are sailing in the same boat — changing sides seamlessly, that too repeatedly, without the baggage of ideology or any other factor. Paswan may be the expert on this but others are quickly playing catch-up. Kumar has almost caught up with Paswan, changing from one extreme to the other — first NDA to UPA and then back to NDA — without batting an eyelid. (January 15, 2019)