This round of assembly elections has brought into sharp focus the leadership dilemmas of both the Congress and the BJP. The Congress has a galaxy of new contenders at the state level, but there are hardly any leaders besides Sonia Gandhi who have come into their own at the national level. There is an impressive second-rung emerging in the BJP after Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani — like Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Pramod Mahajan and Venkaiah Naidu. But barring Narendra Modi, the party’s state units are devoid of leaders they can rally around. The Madhya Pradesh campaign amply demonstrates this contrast. Thanks to its national leaders, the BJP has turned things around in the state. Whatever be the outcome of the election, they have managed to put Digvijay Singh on the defensive. There must be hardly any state where bad roads and power shortages do not exist, but they have rarely become poll issues the way they have in Madhya Pradesh this time. The national leadership of the BJP concentrated its fire on the state, they were all there campaigning. Vajpayee, Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Swaraj — you name them, they were there. In addition, Jaitley camped in Madhya Pradesh throughout (as Mahajan did in Rajasthan) to coodinate the campaign on a daily basis. This was not left to the chief ministerial candidate. In contrast, look at the Congress. Besides Sonia Gandhi there was hardly any other senior party leader campaigning in Madhya Pradesh. Kamal Nath stuck to his Chhindwara area, Jyotiraditya Scindia to Gwalior, and Arjun Singh only hammered in the point being made by the BJP when he apologised for the bad power situation. It was left to Digvijay to hold the fort — ditto for Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan and Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh. The situation may not be much different if elections were to be held in A.K. Antony’s Kerala, S.M. Krishna’s Karnataka, Sushil Kumar Shinde’s Maharashtra, etc. While office and responsibility play an important role in shaping new leadership, it would be simplistic to argue that it is only power that is responsible for it. The BJP has been in power in Uttar Pradesh but it has not managed to throw up people who could lead the party for the next 20 years. Kalyan Singh is out, Rajnath Singh did not get a long enough stint. For all the support they got, neither Kalraj Mishra nor Lalji Tandon could make it. Nor could Gopinath Munde carve out that kind of a profile in Maharashtra. Delhi and Madhya Pradesh have been the BJP’s traditional strongholds but there is no new leadership in sight in these units. An initially reluctant Uma Bharati had to be sent to Madhya Pradesh, and in Delhi the party was unable to project someone who could keep pace with the changing profile of the country’s capital. Though Bhairon Singh Shekhawat ruled for three terms in Rajasthan, there was a vacuum after him and Vasundhara Raje Scindia had to be despatched from Delhi. In Bihar Sushil Modi is sincere and hard-working and has kept plodding against Laloo Prasad Yadav but has not managed to make him sweat. Ananth Kumar has still not been able to swing things in Karnataka though at one time the BJP was doing well in the southern state. It boils down to the structure of leadership in both parties. The Congress suffers from the genetic problem. The party has to turn to the Nehru-Gandhi family because they are unable to accept each other’s leadership. That is why no matter how good or capable a Congressman may be he can only aspire to the second position. His rise is dependent on the attention he gets from the party president, and he often behaves like a competing sibling, to please, to win favour or secure another’s downfall. What happens to the party becomes secondary. The Congress rank and file craves charismatic leaders. There is always a hankering for someone who will deliver the votes without them having to do anything for it. The dynamics of leadership in the BJP are very different and it relies on a mechanism of inner selection like other cadre-based parties. This dialectic, however, sidelined Govindacharya but projected Uma Bharati. Despite the dilution of ideology, all aspiring leaders want to stay on the right side of the RSS. But here too there is a contradiction and Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself represents it. This then is the story of the two mainstream parties, the BJP with a strong national leadership but weak in the states, the Congress with a host of leaders in the states but nobody except Sonia Gandhi at the national level. It remains to be seen how it affects the outcome of the coming general elections.
