Congress is running on empty

The BJP has already decided that the younger leaders it is going to send to the states are its chief ministerial faces in the state elections next year. This is the case with Madanlal Khurana in Delhi and that will be the story with Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Uma Bharati and Ananth Kumar, if they are finally despatched to Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka respectively.

Nobody knows the Congress’s road map to power in UP. Ultimately, the party will have to tie up with Mulayam Singh Yadav but in the meantime it has no choice but to build its own strength. The only way to do it, and this may be a cliche but is true nonetheless, is to go back to the people. But the Congress leaders no longer know what that means.

A.R. Antulay is a case in point. He may be angry that the party did not nominate him as its presidential candidate, but he really takes the cake when he says the Congress did precious little for the minorities in Gujarat. It was he who was the all-India chairman of the minority cell of the party. How often did Antulay visit Gujarat? How many days did he spend in the camps meeting the traumatised, mobilising relief and support for them?

But coming back to UP, what are the credentials of Sonia’s ‘munna’, the Congress’s newly-appointed chief minister-in-waiting chosen to mobilise the 117-year-old party in a state which enabled Congress to rule the country for 50 years? A former minister in UP, Arun Kumar Munna has little to show for himself, apart from being a Thakur. But that is not good enough today, and there is a limit to symbol-oriented politics. He will have to contend with Rajnath Singh on the other side and possibly Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who is set to be elevated as vice president — a position which sends its own message to the Rajputs.

That Munna is the only one the party could find speaks volumes for the bankruptcy of the party’s state leadership — in a state that has produced stalwarts like Jawaharlal Nehru, Gobind Ballabh Pant, Sampoornanand, S.B. Gupta, Kamlapati Tripathi, H.N. Bahuguna, to name just a few.

If it had to be a Thakur for PCC chief, why not Harikesh Bahadur? At least he has a clean and a secular image and a capacity for hard work. Why not Rita Bahuguna? The present CLP leader, who is a Brahmin, could have been changed, if the inhibiting factor was having two Brahmins on board. The Congress cannot hope to bounce back in UP unless it first wins back the support of the Brahmins. Small wonder then that Advani lost no time in declaring, soon after he took over as deputy prime minister, that Vajpayee should lead the BJP in the next elections. This was meant to placate the Brahmins of UP, who have not been too happy with the BJP recently.

Better still, why not entrust UP to a leader like Arjun Singh — not as PCC chief of course but as a guiding force — with a group of younger leaders to work under him, and the brief to concentrate on reviving the Congress in UP? Singh, at least, has the wiliness and sense to bring the various factions in the state together, to begin with, and to match the other side in strategy.

Just look at the speed with which the BJP took the lessons from its routing in the MCD polls in Delhi. It has now rewarded all its prominent Delhi leaders in some way or another: Madanlal Khurana is the Delhi party chief; Jagmohan, Sahib Singh Verma and Vijay Goel are in the ministry; Anita Arya is in the party and, now, Vijay Kumar Malhotra has been made the chairman of the Sports Authority of India, with Cabinet rank The idea is to end factionalism in the party.

The point about Munna is not just Munna himself. Or even his less than impeccable image which could cause embarrassment to the party in the future. It is the message the appointment has sent — that Sonia Gandhi has given up on Uttar Pradesh.