Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: Congress is Bihar’s biggest loser
The Congress lost, and will continue to lose, until it admits that its grassroots muscles have withered and died across India. What now passes for the political party of our freedom movement is a bunch of sycophants
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with Tejashwi Yadav (PTI File Photo) This column is being written after many hours spent glued in front of my TV screen, watching the results from Bihar. So mesmerised was I by what was happening that I barely had time to sip my tea or take a break for lunch. Nobody, not the exit polls, not the TV political pundits and not us newspaper political pundits expected a landslide victory for the combination led by Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar. It is not easy to decipher why Bihar’s voters have given such a decisive mandate to a man who has been Chief Minister of the state for more than 20 years.
During the campaign there were mixed reports. Some said that Nitish Kumar was in poor health physically. And mentally as well. So, he sometimes said things that made no sense. Others said that Tejashwi Yadav had shaken off his jungle raj legacy and was seen as a credible new leader. Still others said that Rahul Gandhi had made such waves with his ‘vote chori’ yatra that there were chances of the Congress party reviving in a state that it has not won for more years than anyone can remember. I have covered every Bihar election in the past decade or more, but could not go this time for personal reasons, so I was dependent on second-hand reporting.
From the start, the theory I found hardest to believe was that there was a Congress revival in the offing. I would have liked to see this happen because the biggest danger to Indian democracy is the absence of a strong Opposition at the national level and, now, in most of our major states. When Narendra Modi failed to get a full majority in the Lok Sabha election last year and Rahul Gandhi finally won enough seats in Parliament to become Leader of the Opposition, the Congress party began to behave as if it had already thrown Modi out of power. Since then, Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi and Bihar have been lost.
By now, you would have read enough analysis of the Bihar results to be bored with yet another piece of analysis. So, I am going to concentrate on the implications of these results at the national level. What we saw was our only national Opposition party decimated so humiliatingly that it is not surprising that the Leader of the Opposition and his sister seemed to vanish on the day the results came. This led to snide remarks about how they always left for some distant land when political trouble banged on their door. When they resurface will there be introspection? Will there be a sincere review of why the Congress party has lost nearly every election since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014?
It is my fervent hope that this happens. I am no fan of the Dynasty. My main reason for not being a fan is because I believe that Sonia Gandhi has turned the party she has led for longer than any Congress president into a family firm. She has now managed to get herself and her two children into Parliament so they can all keep their homes in Lutyens’ Delhi. It is time to take a backseat. This time if the family allows real analysis of the defeat in Bihar, they may discover that nobody ‘stole’ yet another election. The Congress party lost, and will continue to lose elections, until it admits that the party’s grassroots muscles have withered and died across India. What now passes for the mighty political party of our freedom movement is a bunch of sycophants, time servers and courtiers in Delhi.
If there is introspection, then the Congress party’s ruling family will be forced to admit that their current heir has failed to raise political issues that matter to voters or to get his message across to them. This is not for want of trying. He does a very good job of mingling with our poorest citizens and trying to put himself in their shoes, making sure that this happens when TV cameras are around. So, we have seen him harvesting rice, becoming a roadside cobbler, carrying stones on his head while working as a construction worker and, most recently, leaping into a village pond in Bihar to see what fishermen go through.
It is not at all wrong for a political prince to discover what life is like for the lowly and the destitute. But there must be some purpose to the exercise. If after all this effort he cannot come up with the sort of new economic and political ideas that would revive the party that was his inheritance, then it is simply a waste of time. If he stopped treating the Congress party as if it was a private family estate instead of a political party, he might find ways to revive its dead roots. He should ask himself what would have happened if instead of him it was another political leader who had led our oldest party to defeat in more than 50 major elections. He would have been asked to resign. Right?
As a political prince, this will not happen to him. Instead, he needs to bring together the handful of real politicians he still has in the party and ask them to prepare reports on what has gone wrong in their state. This could lead to those dead roots slowly coming back to life.
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