The Endless Congress Dilemma Is Advantage BJP And A Constant Bottleneck For United Opposition!

The only political party that is always having the last laughs on the pathetically prolonged Congress dilemma and its manifestations is obviously the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is greatly advantaged to stage a hat-trick of victory in the 2024 General Elections, even though the biggest national democratic exercise is more than two and half years away. The oldest political party of India, the Indian National Congress (INC or simply Congress), has been suffering consecutive routs in both the General Elections since 2014 and in most of the Assembly Elections in recent times, leading everyone to believe that the only second pan-India party, apart from the BJP since 2014, is caught in the throes of an irreversible decline and fall. It still remains a party bound irrevocably to the Gandhi family, despite the repeated failures of the leadership and internal conflicts led by several veteran Congress leaders called the G-23 demanding a change in leadership and holding organizational elections for more than two years now, after the debacle of the 2019 General Elections. The Congress High Command, instead of listening to their own stalwarts and discussing openly the issues, has been following a confrontational line thanks perhaps to the grand advice offered by the old guards, always supporting the Gandhi leadership in a mental framework akin almost to sycophancy and slavery.

 

The resignation of the then Congress President Rahul Gandhi after the rout in 2019 and his steadfast refusal to hold the post again, the growth of the G-23, the growing dissidence all across the country, the mess the party created in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh losing power after coming back to electoral victories, the continuing drama in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and the pending meet of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) failed, as always, to convince the ‘high command’ about the urgent need for structural changes and democratic reforms within the party. Instead, the loyal old guards pitifully prayed to Rahul Gandhi to reconsider and failing to do so requested the erstwhile President Sonia Gandhi to be the interim president to which she obliged. Thanks to a caustic remark by one of the most prominent Congress veterans of the G-23, Kapil Sibal, that he was not aware about who had been the taking the party decisions as there was no permanent leadership, the ‘high command’ finally called for a CWC meeting recently.

 

But alas, no crucial decisions were taken in the meeting about making the Congress united and strong. What had been seen and heard was that Sonia Gandhi confirmed herself as a full-time president and that a new president would be elected after she complete her term which is almost one year away and during which the crucial assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab are to take place. Lady Gandhi further accentuated the divide by telling the 23 leaders of the differently-opinionated group to approach her directly for discussions and not through the media, failing miserably to understand why at all the G-23 was forced to go to the media. The old guards again pleaded with Rahul Gandhi to resume next year to which Rahul assured of reconsideration. Of course, the CWC promised party elections and a new president during August-September, 2022. The two leaders of the G-23 who were present in the meeting, unfortunately, lacked the courage to make bold demands which raises questions about the potent political impact of the group. The party gleefully delighted about the proceedings is again the BJP, because as long as Congress remains dynastic and weak it’s their furtherance of the ambition to capture the whole of India by 2024.

 

As is now obvious, the biggest setback that looms due to the prolonged dilemma of the Congress is for the prospect of forming a national united opposition front—as an effective force to counter the BJP expansion—notwithstanding the ardent efforts of Mamata Bannerjee who defeated the BJP loud and clear in her state of West Bengal. While the Congress high command always supported Mamata’s efforts the Congress state party in West Bengal did everything for a division of votes by forming an alliance with the Communist Party-Marxist (CPM) that directly favored the BJP plunge in the state in the West Bengal Assembly Elections-2021; it is only due to the mature decision of the voters who never wanted a communal party to come to power in their secular state that helped Mamata achieving a landslide, and of course, the electoral-strategy wizard Prashant Kishore who joined Mamata’s Trinamool (grass-root) Congress (TMC) was a great help in terms of strategy and planning. Ironically, the same Prashant Kishore who expressed his willingness to join the Congress to help them lead a united opposition has still not been realized.

 

This puts all the political opposition parties of the country in a dilemma too: they realize that any united front cannot be formalized without the participation of oldest political party and its pan-India status; but as has been proved in Bihar where the promising young leader Tejashwi Yadav lost by an agonizing margin to BJP in the Bihar Assembly Elections-2020 due mainly to the non-performance of his prime ally Congress and in Assam where the Congress failed to work out an understanding with the emerging regional parties and instead joined forces with another communal party thus effectively creating a division of votes which clearly favored a worried BJP retain power in the Assam Assembly Elections-2021; barring Maharashtra where Congress is still sticking successfully to the opposition coalition government in spite of the some stray contrary comments made by its leaders now and then, in most of the other states the party has been viewed as a liability for any opposition alliance.

 

The case of the state of Punjab which is always considered the unassailable stronghold of the Congress party comes as the latest case in support of the party being called a liability and mostly, inadvertently or otherwise, favoring the BJP in expanding their roots. The Punjab crisis led to the ousting of the strong Chief Minister and Congress veteran Captain Amarinder Singh who now is reported to be moving toward joining the BJP, like numerous other promising Congress leaders leaving or planning to leave the party over the past two years. The Congress high command, mainly Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, sided with a comically inconsistent Navjot Singh Sidhu who, even after fulfilling his target of assuming the state Congress chief post and having a change of chief minister and government, recently resigned from the post and a few days later did an about-turn rejoining his post, supposedly after his talks with the Congress ‘high command’, and in an immaculate dynastic hold the party is projecting Priyanka Gandhi as the new Chief Ministerial face for the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections early next year. Punjab too will go for assembly elections during the same time and the present Congress-created crisis favors the BJP strongly to consider make a tremendous fight to gain power for the first time.

 

Nobody can guess with conviction how and when this Congress dilemma is going to end or end the party itself from the Indian election scenario. For any tangible action by Congress one will have to wait for another year. In this perspective the role of the G-23 is crucial in trying to debate within the party and convince the party for a change that is so much needed to change its tag of an ‘unreliable ally’ in all forthcoming electoral alliances. There have been issues always to counter the ruling power: the disastrous handling of the Second Wave of COVID-19 and the vaccination hassles; the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) movement; the ever-rising fuel prices crossing the 100-rupee mark and still moving ahead; the still unresolved farmers’ agitation and the recent violence in Lakhimpur-Kheri in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh leading to deaths of four farmers; the increasing communal divide and lynching cases; and the alleged bulldozing of democratic norms and values. Rahul Gandhi, of course, makes the right kind of noises, but he vanishes afterward, at times into his unpredictably mysterious sabbaticals; and not allowing the Indian Parliament to function is clearly not an alternative. The oldest political party of India must introspect very intensely indeed and time is running out.  Else, the monopoly of the BJP is set to continue like a juggernaut and in the furtherance of its most loved ambition of having a one-party and much-hyped Congress-free democracy in India.

Why No Lockdown In West Bengal Or Still No National Lockdown?

A stupendous election victory against the might of the national ruling party; Didi Mamata Bannerjee installed for the third term as Chief Minister of  West Bengal; and the immediate promise to take the fight against the COVID-19 virus in its deadly second wave head on. But, in the days that followed the state government had not shown any real intent to take on the promised fight, deciding only to augment a little the earlier state administration order that was announced a day prior to the counting of votes on 2^nd May 2021, to shut down restaurants, cinema halls, malls, gyms, sport complexes and so on, and to schedule the business hours of the general markets.

 

The order came the very day of the oath-taking ceremony, no doubt a very subdued affair due to the situation, of Mamata Bannerjee as the new Chief Minister; but, unfortunately, the new order yields precious little in terms of strict curbs or a most-preferred complete lockdown. The order follows largely the same format of the previous order except for the rescheduling of the business hours of the general markets, completely stopping the local train services with immediate effect, reducing the trains of the Metro railway by half, buses to run at half-capacity and ordering all government/private offices at 50% attendance. These measures are far from what is actually desired considering the COVID spread in the state, mostly due to the 8-phase state elections. We will see why.

 

First, the daily timings of the general markets are from 7 to 10 in the morning and 5 to 7 in the evening other than the essential shops/stores like the chemists and the groceries which are open as usual, and the jewellery shops from 12 noon to 3 pm; but in actual practice, as observed, all essential/non-essential shops manage to remain open throughout or at best are ‘allowed’ the concession of overshooting the closing hours regularly. An average citizen of any age can easily move out of home, travel from end to end of the city, crowd the market freely during the ‘general’ hours or in the ‘essential’ hours or in the ‘jewellery’ hours and can gorge on street food available on the stalls about which the order is not specific or for that matter, about all other vendors selling anything. This defeats the purpose of the stay-home doctrine, so crucial to break the chain of infections.

 

Second, some of the other measures are contradictory: all offices are to work with 50% attendance, but if local trains are discontinued, metro trains restricted and buses at half-capacity passengers, then how the office-goers are to travel to the workplaces, which means there would be inevitable crowding in the metro trains and in the buses. Not to speak of the commuting needs of the countless businessmen, traders and vendors. Masking norms are mostly being followed in Kolkata and other major cities of the state, but it’s a tough job to enforce the controls in semi-urban and rural areas. Besides, the social distancing norms have been compromised everywhere thanks to the half-hearted measures.

 

Lastly, although the daily COVID-19 cases have risen slowly from around 17000 to around 19000 in the last few days, we had seen rapid rise from around 1000 cases to over 15000 daily cases during the later election period, and our point is that the slow trend in the last few days cannot be justification for liberal norms, for the dangerous variants of the virus can rise exponentially or even explode anytime like in the states of Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh. Therefore, it must be said emphatically that the state government is playing with the lives of the people of the state, and waiting for the cases to explode for imposing lockdown is very risky, considering how people have still been dying due to lack of oxygen, lack of medical facilities and over-stressing of the health infra all over the country.

 

For India as a whole, national lockdown was imposed on 25^th March 2020 with hardly a four-hour notice, when the daily infections were just in a few hundreds, concentrated in Maharashtra and Kerala. Well, this is not to contest the decision to lockdown the country, for in the global perspective and the experience of many countries it was deemed necessary. Data analysts were extrapolating at that time that without lockdown the infections and the deaths would have been in hundreds of thousands. This is exactly our point.

 

While the first pandemic peak in India, reached mid-September 2020, was just above 97000 cases a day and deaths around 1000 a day, the present numbers are more than 4,00,000 daily cases and 4000+ fatalities. The 4-Lakh mark was crossed about ten days back, after which the figures were fluctuating between 3.5 to over 4 Lakh, giving rise to false hopes of the second pandemic peak reached; however, some experts maintain that the peak is expected mid-May or end of May this year. Therefore, it is a valid question to ask: why still no national lockdown? The scenario has been getting bizarre with the states arbitrarily announcing partial or full lockdowns, weekend lockdowns or mini lockdowns whenever they desire, except for the most disciplined state of Maharashtra where the lockdown and anti-COVID strategy has seen the positive results.

 

In fact, a whole lot of medical experts, scientists and international agencies have been urging India to impose national lockdown since over a fortnight. The Government of India is not listening perhaps for the blues of the earlier lockdowns in terms of economic devastation. We say that the damage done last year is due more to lack of planning and haphazard unlocking than the failure of lockdown as a strategy. No doubt, lockdowns are no solutions, but they can definitely break the chain of infections and save lives by forcing people to stay at home. Further, experts believe that there has been much under-reporting in the numbers of daily infections and deaths, some saying that daily deaths must be around 25000 to create that kind of pressure on the crematoriums, the round-the-clock burning pyres all over the country being witness to the immense human tragedy unfolding. At the moment the most important things to do are to prevent more deaths, de-stress the health sector and ensure regular supply of oxygen; and to achieve that a national lockdown is a must, which, experts maintain, has to be of at least of a two-week duration.

The Miracle Lady Mamata Wins One Of The Biggest Election Battles Of India!

All the odds were stacked against her. She was facing the double anti-incumbency factor her party, Trinamul Congress (TMC), having ruled the state of West Bengal for two terms of ten years and herself as Chief Minister; there had been palpable anger against her party for charges of corruption and the lack of development. Then, the national ruling party BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) had its full focus on this state after having conquered the whole of North Eastern region, most of the Eastern and the Northern region; since 2014 when the BJP-led government was established in India with the ideals of aggressive Hindu nationalism and religious polarization, the BJP decided to win over the whole of India, and West Bengal became the epicentre of their expansion plans; the BJP mastered only three seats in the Assembly Elections of West Bengal in 2016, but that increased in a spectacular fashion in the Lok Sabha general elections in 2019 when the BJP captured 18 seats of 42 thus reducing TMC’s seats from 34 in 2016 to 22; and buoyed by that the national ruling party wanted to win the 294-seat Assembly Elections of West Bengal-2021, desperately enough even to defy the threatening second wave of the pandemic.

 

Therefore, she got pitted against the full might of the central government in terms of limitless money and muscle power; all the machinery and the agencies of the government geared up; and all the top leaders of the BJP including the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and almost all other ministers holding rallies in the state preaching against her that amounted, at times, even to heckling. The eternal fights between the workers of BJP and TMC flared up months prior to the elections leading to deaths on both sides and crossfire of allegations from both sides.

 

Then, quite early in the campaigning trail, she suffered a fracture on her left leg, just above the ankle, and after spending a few days in hospital had to do the remaining campaigns from the wheel chair. Further, the election was planned in an unprecedented 8-phase schedule which she alleged was done only to suit the BJP. Further, many of her trusted ex-ministers and members of her party defected to the BJP. Lastly, most of the exit polls predicted a tight fight between the BJP and the TMC, even indication a hung assembly, and in light of the immense power of the national ruling party just reaching the halfway mark was not considered safe for TMC as horse trading and defections, of late, have become an integral part of the Indian elections.

 

And, Mamata Bannerjee, the two-term Chief Minister of West Bengal, not only won the elections, but registered her third consecutive landslide victory; even bettering the haul of 209 seats in 2016 with 213-14 seats out of total 292 polled this time. By all the parameters as mentioned above this battle was billed as one of the biggest election battles ever in India with an air of absolute suspense about the final outcome, and the tremendous victory of Mamata cast a spell of absolute wonder and admiration over the media and all stakeholders, and of course, the ecstatic supporters of TMC and the citizen-voters of the state many of whom could not stop themselves coming out in the streets defying COVID norms. The victory has instantly catapulted Mamata Bannerjee as the most potent opposition leader of the nation to creditably fight the might of the BJP, a secularist challenge to the prevailing communal politics.

 

Mamata Bannerjee always calls herself a worker, a grass root worker at that, and in fact, her party’s name ‘Trinamul’ means grassroots. She has never been a lady with the sophisticated mannerisms of a seasoned politician; she acts and behaves always as a tough street-fighter, and never says no to challenges irrespective of how big or impossible these are. For this election too, she has kept on fighting like a tigress declaring the now-iconic 'khela hobe' (let's play), never bowing down to anything or compromising anything. Her key associate Suvendu Adhikary defected to the BJP in December 2020, somewhat initiating the surge of defections. Adhikary has been Mamata’s best bet from the constituency of Nandigram for the last two elections, and his defection was a huge loss. The local BJP leadership teased her to fight from Nandigram if she dared. The brave lady, endearingly called Didi (elder sister) in the state and now nationally, indeed took up the challenge, abandoned her usual constituency and filed her nomination from Nandigram against Adhikary; and she even declined to contest from a second constituency for safety. The Nandigram fight became the national obsession. And it was in Nandigram she broke her leg, in an incident that was officially declared as an accident, doubts, however, remained.

 

Nandigram fully justified why it should be a national obsession. From the initial rounds of counting Suvendu Adhikary was leading, at one stage more by than ten thousand votes, but in the later rounds Didi was catching up fast and managing to take a slender lead. Finally, at the end of the 16^th and last round a news agency declared Didi as winner by 1200 votes; however, after some time Adhikary was declared winner by around 1900 votes. The Election Commission of India said, at that stage, that it had not received the final figures; however, afterward Didi’s loss was confirmed. It was an anti-climax of sorts in the unbelievable proceedings of the counting process. Didi conceded to this defeat magnanimously in her first address to the public and later to the media, saying that this loss was nothing in comparison to the overall verdict; but, she maintained, she wouldn’t let it go like that and would appeal for a recounting. She also asked her fans to go back home, strictly abide by COVID-appropriate behavior and to plan celebrations only when the dreaded virus was brought under control.

 

So then, this was the brief story of a brave odds-defying lady staging a tremendous victory. This writer had been a little critical of her autocratic inclination on earlier occasions; and yes, she retains her share of autocratic dealings and the charges of appeasement-to-minority politics. But, at this historic moment we salute Didi and look forward to having her as a great leader on the national front in near future in the pursuit of re-establishing the time-tested values of secularism, so important for a richly diverse and plural democracy like India.

 

In the remaining four state assembly elections, as results were declared after the counting of votes from the 2^nd of May 2021, the Left Democratic Front created history in Kerala by retaining its power with a thumping majority, for the first time in the history of the state’s assembly elections; in Tamil Nadu the DMK-Congress alliance successfully stopped the AIADMK-BJP alliance and came back to power after ten years; BJP retained power in Assam, and defeated the Congress in the Union Territory of Puducherry where the BJP engineered a defection drama before the elections managing to form an alliance and winning the majority of the seats. The Indian National Congress or the Congress party was decimated pitifully everywhere except for its piggy riding bout on the DMK in Tamil Nadu, and in West Bengal the Left-Congress alliance was totally obliterated denying BJP the expected gains from a split of the anti-BJP votes.