VIEWPOINT
AMITABH SHUKLA
AICC General Secretary Rahul
Gandhi made two separate visits to Punjab within a span
of a few days to find out the reasons for the defeat of the Congress in the
Assembly polls earlier this year. He, however, desisted from visiting poll
bound Himachal Pradesh where the party is battling it out and sweating
profusely to pose a challenge to the ruling party.
What is baffling here is the
obsession of the Congress with the past rather than the present or the future. Punjab
could have easily waited. The postmortem could have been done even after
November 4 when Himachal Pradesh goes to polls. The time he spent in Punjab
could have been spent in the hill state
to motivate the moribund party workers who are out on the streets only now when
barely a few days are left for the polls
which could well shape the political course of events in the run up to the
general elections of 2014.
The question is why does Punjab
interest Gandhi more than Himachal Pradesh? Is he afraid of electoral politics
of which he is very much a part of and instead wants to concentrate on backroom
operations of the party? Does he want to take the bulls by horn or simply wait
for things to happen on its own? My suspicion is that after burning his fingers
badly in Uttar Pradesh this year, he does not want to be the key figure and
mascot of the party in the poll bound Himachal Pradesh. His lack of focus on Gujarat
is understandable as Narendra Modi has managed to decimate the Congress
effectively and the writing is very much on the wall. But Himachal is a border
line case where a little extra effort from the Congress could have turned the
tide and still everything is not lost. Remember, in the last over two decades,
the state has voted against the incumbent governments.
It is here that the Congress has
bungled badly. Instead of focusing on the issue in hand and take an aggressive
lead over its rivals in Himachal and Gujarat first by
building the momentum and then by intensive campaigning, it is merely waiting
for things to happen. What happened to the paper tigers of Congress like
Digvijay Singh who sit in Delhi and
issue one statement after the other, instead of getting into the nitty-gritty
of electoral politics. Digvijay has washed his hands off Madhya Pradesh, his
home state, after presiding over the defeat of the party and shifted base to Delhi ,
the easy option available to him.
Digvijay is not alone. There are
scores of leaders in Congress, some of them Cabinet Ministers for whom getting
into electoral politics is the last option and only if the party leadership
pushes them towards it. Obviously Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in this
group and an inspiration for many that even without an electoral base, you can
rise to the top.
These leaders are cocooned in the
Rajya Sabha, far away from the dust and grind of electoral politics and far
away from the grassroots and ground realities. The problem is that the number
of such leaders is only increasing and the party is hard pressed to find a
popular leader in any state who could turn the tide for the party on his or her
own accord.
I fail to understand why does
Congress patronize leaders who are
neither good in back room operations nor can count any support base in any
constituency of the country. In any case, you can’t have dozens of back room
operators and no regional leader with charisma. Why don’t they come to the
battlefield and focus on the job in hand – victory of the party in assembly
polls rather than be comfortable in their offices and homes in New Delhi and
issue one statement after the other.
Rahul may address a couple of
meetings half heartedly in Himachal and Gujarat just to
go through the motions. But so far, he has desisted from taking any initiative
or plan a campaign which could give the party an edge in the polls bound
states. Even at the AICC level, there seem to no planning at all to win
Himachal and Gujarat . It is like the party has written
off the two states from its scheme of things.
Perhaps YSR Reddy of Andhra
Pradesh was the last regional leader of the Congress who could count on
state-wide support and had an independent identity as a mass leader. You take
any state of the country and would be hard pressed to find a leader who can
claim a mass base. Take Maharashtra , Prithviraj Chavan
has never been a state leader and was sent as chief minister from Delhi .
The last leader with some mass base, Vilasrao Deshmukh, died early this year,
leaving the party to the whims and fancy of NCP’s Sharad Pawar.
In states like Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh, where Congress has been out of power for over two decades,
you cannot even name a single leader who has any significant following. In West
Bengal , Congress handed the state on a platter to Mamata Banerjee
and the only leader with some standing, Pranab Mukherjee is in Rashtrapati
Bhawan. In Gujarat , the party toyed with the likes of
Shankarsinh Vaghela and today, hardly has anyone who can take on Narendra Modi.
In Madhya Pradesh, after Digvijay Singh left, there is a complete vacuum in
leadership. In Chhatisgarh, Ajit Jogi is there but has been discredited over a
period of time. In Karnataka, the party seems to be in a good position due to
the acts of omission and commission of the BJP government but is looking at 10
Janpath to send a leader to lead the party.
In Haryana, Bhupinder Singh Hooda
has been there as CM for last 8 years and is losing relevance with every
passing day with a series of scams in land dealings and the involvement of his
ministers in criminal activities. In Punjab , there is
hardly anyone beyond Capt Amarinder Singh and he too is now out of tune with
the aspirations of the people of the state. In Himachal Pradesh, Virbhadra
Singh was brought in even as he was facing a series of corruption cases simply
because the Congress in the state was staring at a leadership crisis. In Delhi ,
Sheila Dikshit has been there and one of the longest serving chief ministers of
the party but now wants to move away. In Uttarakhand, it is too early to
comment on chief minister Vijay Bahuguna as he has hardly held any public
office before.
If you make a false start, you
are bound to finish last. The sooner the Congress realizes it, the better it
would be for the party. (October 22, 2012)
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