Opinion Going south

The Congress’s worst ever performance in Tamil Nadu in the general election has now been followed by a split. Forced to contest on its own, the party had failed to win a single seat in May, finishing with just a little over four per cent votes. With G.K. Vasan, a former Union minister and Tamil Nadu Congress Committee chief, walking away, the party’s depleted base could shrink further. It may do well to heed Vasan’s parting comments that he was forced to form his own outfit because, despite the serial losses, the party’s central leadership had no time for course correction.

Vasan has a point, but it is also true that he has been part of the problem that afflicts the Congress in Tamil Nadu, where it has been reduced to a party of disconnected leaders. He has been a state chief and the last state unit head was his nominee, but like most senior Congress leaders from the state, Vasan too had shied away from contesting the Lok Sabha election, which the Congress was fighting on its own — Vasan, in fact, has never contested an election. Now, with the Congress seeming isolated and shrunken like never before, Vasan may be charting his own course with the intent to anchor his party with one of the coalitions likely to emerge closer to the assembly election in 2016. He seems to have plotted a way forward. That is much more than can be said for the party he makes his exit from.

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Ever since it lost the 1967 assembly election, the Congress strategy in Tamil Nadu has been to lean on one of the Dravidian giants to shore up its tally in Parliament. The central leaders negotiated deals with the DMK or the AIADMK and bargained for Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha seats by bartering assembly constituencies. As it gave up the pursuit of office in Chennai, it lost influence at the grassroots and got reduced to a party of leaders who were rewarded in proportion to their proximity to central leaders. The Congress could go the Tamil Nadu way in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, also states where it seems to be failing to stem its decline. A smug leadership that is unwilling even to reflect and learn from its failures is the party’s real problem.