AS the Congress kicked off its campaign in Madhya Pradesh on Wednesday with a rally in Bhopal, the low turnout was perhaps an indicator of the people’s growing disenchantment with it. The party’s losing spree in MP continues. First it lost the elections. Then it lost former chief minister Digvijay Singh’s brother Lakshman to the BJP. Another MP Satyavrat Chaturvedi has bowed out, perhaps taking a pointer from his son’s ignominious third place finish in the Assembly polls. Lakshman, a four-term MP, had come to the conclusion that he could not retain the traditional family seat of Rajgarh on a Congress ticket. And Kamalnath, facing ouster from his Chhindwara home turf thanks to the rise of the Gondwana Gana Parishad, is desperately seeking a constituency where he at least stands a fighting chance. In such disheartening circumstances, the new state leadership, PCC chief Subhash Yadav and leader of opposition Jamuna Devi had an added responsibility. At present, the Congress has 38 out of 230 Assembly seats. Much was expected of Subhash Yadav, in terms of rebuilding an organisation that paradoxically decayed during the party’s decade in power. He has tripped at the very first hurdle. The ‘maharally’ in Bhopal had a turnout that would have shamed a local corporator. It seems the party just cannot see a way out of its defeatism, primarily because it has chosen to live in denial. More than the Dalits, it was the tribals’ desertion that hit the Congress. Tribals constitute about 20 percent of the state’s population, the Dalits another 16 percent. And the power crisis made OBC farmers turn against the Congress. The party’s recent defeat with a 10 per cent dip in voteshare, saw most of these going to parties other than the BJP. Except for a few pockets such as Jhabua, the Congress can in due course recover votes that accrued to the BJP, but the same can not be said about the GGP and the BSP. It is a dangerous portent. The Congress is no longer a force in Bihar or UP, not because of the rise of the BJP, but because of parties that cut directly into the Congress’ base. In these disheartening circumstances the Congress needs to work on two fronts. To begin with it could attack the Uma Bharti government for its dismal development work. Bharti has done nothing on the bijli and sadak front and the Congress should have been at the forefront of an opposition to a government keen on implementing the RSS agenda that it has no mandate for. The rally, however, showed that Digvijay is the only Congress leader to sense this. In the longterm, the party has far more serious problems. It should draw some lessons from its partial success in containing the BSP in MP. It is not that the BSP has not grown, it is just that the BSP has grown far less than it should have. This is partly because of the differences within the party engineered by Digvijay, partly because of Mayawati’s own mercurial nature, But also because the party’s Dalit agenda has ensured that the scheduled castes have not totally deserted the Congress. The real failure of the Congress has been its inability to produce a strong SC or ST leader. The party has not had a commanding tribal leader for the past 20 years. List the important Congress leaders from MP over the past few decades—Arjun Singh, Digvijay Singh, the Shukla brothers, Motilal Vohra, the Scindias—and much of the current state of the party is explained. The party needs to innovate. It requires a new generation of tribal leaders, it needs to adopt and push for many of the GGP’s demands such as recognition for Gondi as a language, schools and institutions tailored to the local needs of the Gonds. The demands in the main are reasonable and have the additional benefit of countering the BJP’s thrust towards homgenisation that has changed the face of the Bhils in Jhabua. Instead, the Congress has made all the wrong moves, with a desperate Kamalnath backing a bid to split or coopt the GGP. Neither move can substitute for an agenda that’s responsive to tribal concerns. But the party seems to be in no hurry. And at least in MP, with such enemies the RSS does not need friends.
