No-brainer Opposition

When was the last Parliament session in which the Congress looked like the largest party of Opposition instead of a bunch of agitators? When...

When was the last Parliament session in which the Congress looked like the largest party of Opposition instead of a bunch of agitators? When, indeed, was the last time the Congress showed it had the imagination and political skill to set the agenda of debate?

Does anyone remember the last issue on which the party hauled the NDA over the coals without itself getting singed by the heat? These questions came to mind as Congressmen protested vehemently and oh-so-predictably yesterday in Parliament against US Secretary of State Colin Powell8217;s remarks on Kashmir.

In the new uproar, they recycled the same old shopworn pieties 8212; the US official8217;s remarks were a 8216;slur8217; on the nation8217;s 8216;sovereignty8217; and 8216;self respect8217;, the government8217;s 8216;submissive8217; and 8216;weak-kneed8217; response was an act of 8216;surrender8217; to the US, and so on.

The stale clamour worked up by the Congress on this issue, coupled with its inability to summon a combative response on other more pressing issues, reaffirms what many have suspected for a long time now: that it has been a long while since the Congress made a serious effort to think.

And that in the absence of thinking through an agenda it could call its own or a genuinely oppositional strategy that could take on the government, Sonia8217;s party has abjectly surrendered the initiative to the BJP.

Take a look, for instance, at what the Congress has achieved on Gujarat. Despite the sounds of outrage, in spite of the grandstanding, the party has completely failed to pick up the gauntlet Narendra Modi has flung down in the state.

Party leaders cowered inside their safe shelters during the killings; they were unforgivably slow to surface to assist in the relief and rehabilitation afterwards. Now with Modi calling for early polls, the Congress still hasn8217;t made any move to wrest the initiative from him. Instead, making weak noises about the undesirability of early polls, its high command has propped up as the Gujarat Congress chief an old RSS-BJP hand. There is no reason to believe that the party will be able to effectively counter the Modi-led BJP8217;s agenda of hate under Shankarsinh Vaghela.

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The Congress does not seem to have any alternative agenda it could take to the people in Gujarat with any modicum of believability.

Be it the absence of strategy in Gujarat, then, or the largely me-too response to the issue of criminalisation of politics thrown up by the Supreme Court8217;s recent initiative on full disclosure, or its inability to call the government to account on agricultural policy in a year of terrible drought, the Congress underlines the poverty of opposition in the country.

Could the BJP have scripted a better opponent?