Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is no longer the trump card of the Congress in Punjab as he used to be earlier. His popularity is clearly on the wane in the state from where he hails from. So it wasn’t surprising to find that the Prime Minister hardly has much involvement in terms of election rallies and meetings in the state which goes to polls on January 30.
The Congress rally which was held in Amritsar on Saturday gave ample indications that the Prime Minister has lost out in the popularity ratings in a state which revered him not a long time back for being the “son of soil” and a Punjabi who has made it big nationally and internationally due to sheer hard work and not due to family connections.
Held at Ranjit Avenue in Amritsar, the rally attracted only a handful of people, all Congress workers from the city and nearby areas. One of my colleagues, Nishu Mahajan, who was covering the rally for the newspaper, told me that when the PM was speaking, chairs at the end of the venue were being removed by the workers of the tent house as it remained unoccupied throughout the rally. Perhaps the chairs had to be shifted to some other venue for which advance booking had been done. Only the first few rows were full and there could have been a headcount of the people present, while the last rows had empty chairs.
Singer and actor Gurdas Mann, who performed on the stage, managed to involve the small gathering for a while but that was before the PM spoke. Manmohan Singh was the last speaker and clearly the crowd had lost interest by then and had started leaving the venue. This does not augur well for Congress which is trying to overthrow the Akali-BJP regime and Punjab is a crucial election in the run-up to the 2014 polls and could well determine the contours of national politics in the days to come.
Not long time back, during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Singh was the face of Congress in not only Punjab but also the rest of the country. Candidates contesting the polls here, invariably had a big smiling picture of the PM in their publicity material even though they had kept the pictures of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi much smaller in size.
I remember covering a rally in Amritsar which Singh addressed with Rahul Gandhi in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. He had already been declared as the PM candidate by no other than Congress President Sonia Gandhi. There was enthusiastic response in the holy city and Congress did not have to use the gimmick of Gurdas Mann to get the interest of the crowd going. It is a different matter that despite the PM campaigning for Congress then, BJP’s Navjot Singh Sidhu won the polls, albeit with a reduced margin.
But not this time round. Captain Amarinder Singh seems to be the “star” campaigner of the party and his pictures have been splashed prominently in all publicity material of Congress rather than that of the Prime Minister. Singh is there as a matter of routine on top of the manifesto paper and some posters, but he does not find a place of pride in the publicity material now.
The PM came to Amritsar on January 1 this year to pay obeisance at the Golden Temple and Durgiana temple but desisted from addressing any political gathering and only met his brother and extended family members. Congress leaders say that there were no requests made to the PMO to have a political function on January 1. The PM, however, had to face a black flag demonstration in Amritsar, apparently from a few members of Team Anna.
Earlier, Singh was invited by the Punjab government, headed by Shiromani Akali Dal, to inaugurate the Khalsa Heritage Centre at Anandpur Sahib, a few weeks before the model code of conduct was enforced in Punjab. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal gleefully announced that the PM has “accepted” the invitation. Obviously the Akalis would have thought that getting the PM to inaugurate the function would help them in the elections.
But politics of the Congress variety soon took over with Captain Amarinder Singh meeting Sonia Gandhi and seeking her intervention on the issue. He also wrote a letter to the PM asking him not to inaugurate the Centre as it had already been inaugurated once. The PM did not attend the function and no reason was given either, clearly suggesting that he succumbed to the pressure of the local Congress leaders and could not take a stand on the issue on his own.
A senior Akali Dal leader told me that though they did not rake up the issue of PM’s absence, it sent an extremely wrong message ahead of the polls. “The PM was shy of associating with a function related to the panth,” he said, pointing out that the rural voters of Punjab are very sensitive about such issues. He said that Punjabis like “decisive and strong leaders” and after showing initial promise, they do not find such traits in the PM now when he is in his eighth year.
I am not an expert on the psyche of a Punjabi or a Sikh but sensing that Manmohan Singh could be attacked in Punjab, something which the Akalis have desisted from doing all these years, the BJP has now reiterated that he was a “weak” PM and his stature is unbecoming of the coveted post.
“Singh is a weak PM, therefore the Congress as well as its allies interfere in his decisions,” BJP leader Arun Jaitley said in Jalandhar on Friday while campaigning along with the senior Badal for SAD-BJP candidates. Issuing a statement, critical of Singh, was something which the opposition did not do in Punjab earlier. This is the kind of change the election has brought about.
The PM's position has been further deteriorated by the repeated interference of Congress and its allies in key decisions, Jaitley said, though he did not refer to the refusal of Singh to inaugurate the Anandpur Sahib function.
In Punjab, political circles are abuzz with the theory that the Prime Minister could not even get a ticket for Surinder Singla, former Finance Minister of the state. Singla is considered close to Singh and wanted to contest the polls desperately from any constituency which the party offered. He could not get party ticket and no one for sure knows why the ticket was denied to him.
I don’t know whether Singh asked for a ticket for Singla or not. But earlier, such perception itself was a good enough reason for somebody to get party ticket. It seems things are changing for Singh, in Punjab at least. (22.1.2012)
(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer, Chandigarh)
http://dailypioneer.com/state-editions/chandigarh/36984-punjab-forgets-punjabi-pm.html
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