Opinion Hindsight is 20/20

The phrase 'victory has many fathers,in defeat you are an orphan' is particularly appropriate for Indian politics.

New DelhiJune 22, 2009 05:55 PM IST First published on: Jun 22, 2009 at 05:55 PM IST

The phrase ‘victory has many fathers,in defeat you are an orphan’ is particularly appropriate for Indian politics. Judging by the political commentaries in the wake of the election results,there is nothing the CPI(M) and BJP did right in the election campaign and it would appear that the Congress did not take a single wrong step. That this sort of analysis has surfaced largely after the results,rather than during the campaign,suggests that wisdom has dawned on the pundits only with hindsight. Otherwise,we would have noticed more certainty in their predictions before the counting.

If the pundits are to be believed,the BJP and the CPI (M) are falling apart. Their leaders are at each others throats,the much-vaunted party discipline has gone for a six and the ideologies and thinking of the parties are out of touch with contemporary reality. With the steady exodus from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD,it is assumed that the party has practically packed up. It is predicted that the BSP has received a setback from which it will never recover. That the days of caste politics are over and so on.

The Congress it seems has opened up “a glorious new chapter which will change the face of Indian politics.” No one will question that the Congress has done spectacularly well in the elections. And that Rahul Gandhi must be given full credit for having the courage and vision to break with the party’s opportunistic prospective allies in UP and Bihar. The Congress won more seats in the parliamentary poll than the party leaders had ever anticipated.

Still,some of the fawning coverage of the Congress victory is a bit over the top. One should remember that luck also favoured the party in Andhra,Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu,where there were three-cornered fights to the Congress’s advantage. Rahul Gandhi must certainly be complimented for breaking new ground in his party by fielding many youth candidates who successfully contested. But,one cannot gloss over the fact that,except for Meenakshi Natarajan,all the young blood in the Congress in Parliament came from politically powerful families. Nor can we ignore the fact that Gandhi is still a bit of a greenhorn in politics. His naivety showed at a press conference in Delhi in the last days of the election campaign,where he practically revealed his party’s strategy for alliances in case of an uncertain verdict in front of the media. By praising election opponents like Nitish Kumar,Jayalalithaa and Chandrababu in the middle of the campaign,he not only infuriated his own allies like Lalu Prasad and M Karunanidhi,but even his own party Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was taken aback.

Symptomatic of these rather facile conclusions,is a recent Newsweek magazine cover story titled the “Silent Revolutionary” on Rahul Gandhi. The article claims that Rahul’s tactics “are game-changing: insisting on grassroots activism,building deep connections to rural India and trying to democratise the hierarchical Congress party itself. If he succeeds .. India could soon undergo a kind of political big bang,ushering in a new model for developing countries: combining a well-functioning democracy with good government and economic growth. And if that works,Rahul will probably also ensure his own political future as the head of the nation.”

On the young blood in the Congress,which largely comprises the sons and daughters of political dynasties,the article notes,”Just as significantly,many of these newcomers had emerged through an open and democratic selection process in the party–and were,thus,seen as more connected to the grassroots than usual Congress hacks.”

To revert to the Opposition political parties who have,no doubt,been badly bruised during the parliamentary poll. As one,who has witnessed the ups and downs of political fortunes of politicians in this country for decades,I can say with some degree of certainty that it is foolhardy to write the obituary of any political party or politician before they have been clinically declared dead. Indian politicians are a particularly long-living species of cats.

Take the way Indira Gandhi was universally written off after her electoral defeat in 1977. The Congress party disowned Gandhi and when she defiantly formed her own outfit ,the Congress (I),in January 1978 the newspapers thought it was such a non-event that they gave more play on the front page to the fact that US President Jimmy Carter was visiting Delhi.

To cite another example,which I witnessed first-hand,of the way the pendulum swings in political fortunes: In 1991,during Chandra Shekhar’s short-lived government,Deve Gowda,out of office and visiting Delhi from Bangalore,was denied entry by security guards at the wedding of the daughter of one of Shekhar’s ministers. Gowda had came straight from the airport minus his invitation card and was looking slightly rumpled. The host had to apologise profusely for the embarrassment. Several years later Deve Gowda was Prime Minister and chief guest at another wedding in the same family. This time the rest of the guests were being given a rough time by Deve Gowda’s security staff. In politics you can never really tell who will be up and who will be down. Nothing remains static.