Sonia’s rajniti test

November 19 — Indira Gandhi’s birth anniversary by wicked coincidence. This, of course, is an implicit threat to split the Congress in Kerala.

The battle is no longer confined to the old rivalry between A.K. Antony and K. Karunakaran, it is one between the doughty old man and the chatelaine of 10, Janpath. And it puts the lady squarely on the horns of a dilemma. Does Sonia Gandhi want to go to the polls in north India with a government falling just twelve days before voting day? On the other hand, does she want to approach the people having earned a reputation as a weak leader who can be pushed around by a regional satrap? Nobody awaits the answers with greater interest than other Congressmen.

Sonia Gandhi has a patchy record as a campaigner. In 1998, she was the Congress’s ‘principal campaigner’; the party could not get a single seat more than under Narasimha Rao. In 1999, having replaced the hapless Sitaram Kesri as president, she led the party to its worst performance ever. And nobody has forgotten the devastating defeat at Narendra Modi’s hands ten months ago. The Congress’s victories — in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh for instance — seemed to come in spite of Sonia Gandhi, not because of her.

The recent by-elections suggest that Sonia Gandhi continues to be irrelevant, to put as good a face on it as possible, during elections. It isn’t just the loss in Ernakulam that rankles, there were also the defeats in the west (Solapur in Maharashtra), in the north-east (Laban in Meghalaya where it lost to both the BJP and the Nationalist Congress Party), in the east (Birmaharajpur in Orissa and Uttarpara in Bengal), and in the centre (Karwan in Andhra Pradesh). The sole consolation came in Karnataka (Hungund) — but that was because the Janata Dal put up three candidates (who split 35,000 votes between them to 32,000 for the Congress). The by-polls were not a happy augury for Sonia Gandhi.

The challenges to her leadership come from two sides — satraps within her party and potential allies outside it. It is not just Karunakaran who is warning her to keep away from his state, there is also, for instance, Digvijay Singh repulsing any thought of joining hands with the Bahujan Samaj Party in Madhya Pradesh (which just happened to be one of her brainwaves). Obviously, neither a Karunakaran nor a Digvijay Singh can challenge Sonia Gandhi at the all-India level, but what remains of her authority if one state unit after another repudiates it?

What of the allies? At Shimla, the Congress buried the ghost of Pachmarhi — when it had announced its decision to work for a single-party government at the Centre. The chastened party has now adopted the view that it must seek the help of other ‘secular’ parties. The sheer logic of numbers dictates that the Left Front must be one of those allies. But what can the Congress bring to the table when the time comes to bargain?

The CPI(M), the biggest constituent in the Left Front, is technically a ‘national’ party. In reality, however, it is confined to West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura. What will the Marxists gain if they join hands with Sonia Gandhi?

In the last assembly elections in West Bengal, the CPI(M) won 143 seats on its own, with its allies picking up about fifty more — a handy majority in a House of 294. In Tripura, the CPI(M) got 38 seats in a House of 60, with allies picking up three more. Adding the Congress will simply lead to more headaches for the Marxists as its allies jostle for more seats. That leaves Kerala, and here Karunakaran is as good, or even better, than Sonia Gandhi. The Ernakulam by-election proved that an aggrieved Karunakaran could split, or shift, votes to the benefit of the Marxists. In a state where margins of victory can be as little as 1 per cent, a Karunakaran in the hand is better than any number of Sonias in the bush!

Personally, I doubt Karunakaran has the numbers to topple Antony even if he joins hands with the Left. But that is not the point, he has enough influence to topple the Congress at the polls. And since the party has already admitted it needs allies in Delhi, the Left Front’s hand will be stronger if it grabs as many of Kerala’s 20 Lok Sabha seats as possible. Equally obviously, the same logic applies to all the other potential allies — Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, and so on. What incentive can Sonia Gandhi offer to reduce their ambitions?

Congressmen are fond of repeating that ‘X’ or ‘Y’ does not understand ‘raj dharma’. Karunakaran has a different question for Sonia Gandhi: “Do you truly understand ‘raj-niti’?”