BJP has 3-course Cong lunch

Forget minor setbacks, the tragedy, say Congressmen, is that the party has not changed its style after a series of major setbacks over the years. And this was evident in the election campaigns where the Congress was cut in the old 1960s mould and hopelessly inept in face of the BJP’s collective, corporate, snazzy, hi-tech blitzkrieg.

But it’s not just about helicopters, mobile phones and computers—which the BJP had in ample supply. The anti-incumbency factor apart, the Congress campaign floundered because the party remains caught in a time warp that affected it in every department—on the question of pre-poll adjustments, in the style of campaigning, and, most importantly, in its attitude towards the electorate.

The Congress still regards itself as India’s pre-eminent party and this hubris prevented it from striking alliances in any of the four states which went to the polls. A senior Congress leader felt the party’s failure to implement the Shimla Sankalp (that gave a green signal to alliances and coalitions) in the assembly elections was the main cause for the party’s poor showing.

‘‘If we had accommodated the demands of smaller parties and run a joint campaign, it would have sent an entirely different signal to the electorate and helped consolidate the secular vote,’’ he said. For instance, the BJP left four seats in Delhi for the Akali Dal but the Congress refused to give even one seat to the RJD, though Laloo Prasad Yadav is its most reliable ally.

Similarly, despite the CPI’s request to leave the Bara Malehra seat in MP where the CPI candidate had secured 32 per cent of the vote against the Congress’s 25 per cent in 1998, the Congress refused. In case the CPI and Congress vote had combined, Uma Bharati may even have lost the seat, Congressmen now ruefully admit.

The second area where the Congress presented a dismal picture was in the actual campaign. In each of the four states, the Congress campaign revolved around just one person—the chief minister. And the only national leader on show was Sonia Gandhi.

Contrast this feudal, one-person-centric approach to the BJP’s collective offensive—Vasundhara was backed by Pramod Mahajan and his team, Uma Bharati by Arun Jaitley and Sanjay Joshi, and scores of Union ministers, party general secretaries and pro-BJP filmstars crisscrossed Chhattisgarh—effectively countering the lack of a CM candidate in the state.

Congressmen today complained that it wasn’t as if the party lacks talent— it’s just that they were simply not asked to contribute. While the BJP operated on a war footing, drawing in the services of every first, second, third and fourth-rung leader, Congressmen were watching the campaign at home on their TV sets. One leader, who went on his own to campaign for a couple of candidates in MP and Chhattisgarh said, ‘‘I was hanging around my hotel room for two days in Bhopal but the state unit did not have anything scheduled for me.’’

A fiesty woman MP said,‘‘The BJP had put up Vasundhara and Uma and we needed to counter their appeal among women. But the party did not bother to put any of us in the campaign. There was simply no micro-level planning at the constituency level.’’

The party also miserably failed to understand the mood of the new Indian electorate. Digvijay Singh, Ashok Gehlot and Ajit Jogi sold the line to the high command that their ‘‘development’’ card would work—that it would consolidate the “poor” behind the party against the BJP’s ‘‘urban rich.’’

The Congress party thought that just as in the days of Indira Gandhi, populist slogans and sops were enough to keep the voters happy. They seem unaware that the profile of the garib has changed, that the urban-rural divide no longer operates as it did even in the 1980s, that aspiration levels have escalated across the board, and so has voter impatience.

Heads may roll in the AICC, new comittees with old faces will be set up to ‘‘introspect’’ and come out with fresh ‘‘action plans.’’ But Congressmen, in the off-the-record conversations through the day, conceded that the party is groping in the dark for a turnaround strategy that can save it from a further rout next year.