Provincialising Congress

remorse,claiming the Congress was a non-starter in Bihar.

Bihar is merely the latest example of the Congress getting the wrong end of the stick in seat-sharing arrangements. For West Bengal’s 42 seats,it gets 14 candidates and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress 28. In the present Lok Sabha the Congress held six seats and the TC one. Constrained by the Left’s support to the Manmohan Singh government,the Congress scrupulously kept out of opposition politics in Bengal for nearly five years. The TC filled the vacuum and leapt to the forefront as the CPM’s main local challenger. In Maharashtra,the Congress needs to keep looking over its shoulder to keep the wily Sharad Pawar in check. The NCP,like all Congress’s state-level allies,demanded a bigger share of the pie than in 2004.

The history of power-sharing arrangements indicates that they have invariably worked to the Congress’s disadvantage. Its allies have risen to power on its shoulders,but,once well-ensconced,have ended up kicking the footstool. One of the earliest examples of the Congress being wiped out by an alliance is in Bengal. Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee,of the mother party’s offshoot,the Bangla Congress,appointed Jyoti Basu his home minister and deputy CM in the United Front government in the ’60s. From then on,the communists went from strength to strength and the Congress was steadily marginalised. In UP,the Congress sometimes tacitly backed Mayawati to keep out the BJP. Slowly and steadily,the BSP gobbled up the Congress’s traditional vote-bank: first Dalits,then minorities and finally Brahmins,rendering the Congress largely irrelevant on what was once its home turf.

More recently,in Karnataka,the Congress’s ill-advised alliance with Deve Gowda helped the BJP ride to power in the assembly. Bending over backwards to meet Gowda’s continuous demands,the Congress even banished its own Vokkaliga leader S.M. Krishna from the state. (In contrast,in UP,one of the reasons for the breakdown of talks with the Samajwadi Party,is the SP’s refusal to back sitting MPs Raj Babbar and Beni Prasad Verma who committed the cardinal sin of defecting from SP to Congress. Similarly,Lalu is fuming after learning that the Congress planned to field his estranged brother-in-law Sadhu Yadav. In Jammu and Kashmir,in 2002,the party entered into a power-sharing arrangement with Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s PDP. The PDP whipped up

regional sentiment against then CM Ghulam Nabi Azad over land allotment for Amarnath pilgrims — although the PDP in government was party to the decision.

The power structure in the Congress is such that the head

office in Delhi does not give local units much say in management. For instance,it brusquely nixed the majority view in the Maharashtra unit,that ties with the untrustworthy NCP be broken. It was Indira Gandhi who started the systematic process of cutting local satraps to size for fear that they could pose a challenge to the central leadership. This short-sighted policy continues. A leaderless state Congress naturally finds it difficult to compete with powerful,personable regional chieftains. In comparison,the BJP,also a national party,has encouraged strong CMs. Congress leaders at the Delhi headquarters will explain to you woefully,when unsound decisions are made,that the party has perforce to sacrifice its own interests for the greater good of the Central government. But if it continues to steadily weaken its state units,the Congress at the Centre will in any case become an unsustainable commodity. That lesson is perhaps slowly beginning to sink in,given that it decided to field as many candidates as possible in UP and Bihar for the coming polls,regardless of whether that cuts into the vote share of its allies at the Centre.

coomi.kapoor@expressindia.com