Few options on table, is Mallikarjun Kharge the card Congress – and INDIA – should play?

The BJP leader was more circumspect though: “Kharge could be projected as the figure leading the Congress into the elections, not as a PM chehra. Making him the Congress face could itself send out a message to the Dalits.”

The Dalit community is without a national “aaka (tall leader)” today. The Congress used to represent them at one time, but lost their support to BSP founder Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. Then, many of them fell to the charms of Narendra Modi, with the BJP further gaining from the demise of Ram Vilas Paswan and Mayawati’s political reticence.

Kharge belongs to the Left-leaning Mala subgroup amongst the Dalits. They are equivalent to the Jatavs in the North, who have looked away from the Congress over the years.

India has had OBC Prime Ministers (H D Deve Gowda and Modi now, though Gowda belonged to the intermediate Vokkaliga caste who are given OBC status). But India has not yet had a Dalit PM. When K R Narayanan, a Dalit, became the President in 1997, it had created ripples even though the post is a figurehead. Ram Nath Kovind became the second Dalit to serve as President.

Just before Mayawati became the Chief Minister of UP for the first time, in 1995, I remember being asked by some of the Dalit watch and ward staff in Parliament who were following the drama minute by minute: “Will they (the upper castes) really allow her to become CM?”

Dalit leader Babu Jagjivan Ram, who had been in the Jawaharlal Nehru-headed interim government of 1946, and had held every major portfolio over the years, had said in 1977, quite bitterly: “A (Dalit) can never be the prime minister of this country.” The remark was made as he stood in his garden after he was told that it was Morarji Desai, and not him, who had been chosen as the PM by the Janata Party coalition that had defeated Indira Gandhi – even though a majority of the MPs had favoured him during the informal consultations.

Jayaprakash Narayan and J B Kripalani, tasked with zeroing in on a leader, had been guided not by Jagjivan Ram’s caste but the fact that he had moved the resolution in favour of the dreaded Emergency when he was with the Indira Gandhi government. The Janata leaders had come to power opposing the same.

That apart, Jagjivan Ram came close to prime ministership three other times. He was considered for the post when the Allahabad High Court judgment came in June 1975, unseating Indira Gandhi from Parliament for electoral malpractices. But, she opted to declare the Emergency rather than the alternative of appointing “Babuji” as PM till she was cleared by a higher court.

Indira Gandhi told her confidants at the time, “Kisi bhi keemat par Jagjivan Ram pradhan mantri nahin banane chahiye, hatenge nahin zindagi bhar (Jagjivan Ram should not become the PM at any cost, he won’t leave the post in his lifetime).” She feared his Dalit credentials – the Dalits, Brahmins and Muslims formed the core of the Congress’s vote bank in the North at the time – as also his huge administrative experience.

Kharge too brings to his role as head of India’s grand old party years of administrative experience, including steering the Congress in Parliament for the past nine years. He was not the Congress’s first choice for president, when the Gandhi family decided that no one from among them would take up that position. Kharge was chosen only after a process of elimination, when Ashok Gehlot refused to give up the chief ministership of Rajasthan and after Ambika Soni turned down the offer.

The flip side of projecting Kharge is that many, including the regional satraps, see him as the Gandhi family’s mouthpiece. Kharge had stated quite unambiguously that there was no shame in seeking the counsel of the Gandhi family, and that they were a factor in the party’s decision-making processes.

The family, on the other hand, may fear that Kharge could become another P V Narasimha Rao, and beat an independent path. (At the time of writing, a controversy is on over Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar calling Rao the “first BJP prime minister” over his alleged pro-Hindu agenda, which the BJP has latched on to, to label the Congress as an anti-Hindu party.)

Kharge’s projection as a Dalit need not alienate the upper castes, for he has not made his Dalitality the central issue of his politics over the years and has said several times, “count my seniority, not my caste”.

Though from Karnataka, Kharge is proficient in Hindi, and has displayed deftness in the last few months in taking on the Modi-led BJP, including in managing to unite a faction-ridden party in Karnataka, a state the Congress went on to win. Kharge can also take the credit for bringing the warring groups together in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and even managing to convince a restless Sachin Pilot to consider national politics, something the Gandhis were not able to do.

Through his recently announced Congress Working Committee – which is more like a “Shivji ki baraat” rather than a tightly knit decision-making body – Kharge has reached out to other dissidents like Shashi Tharoor and Anand Sharma, and signalled that he wants the party to close ranks, a prerequisite for the health of any organisation.

Apart from Kharge, the new CWC includes older leaders like Manmohan Singh, Meira Kumar, A K Antony and Soni, which reassures Sonia. The inclusion of Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and Deepa Dasmunsi, both Mamata Banerjee baiters, raised eyebrows. But in Kharge style, he may use their presence to demonstrate to allies that the Congress can keep its dissenting voices in check for larger Opposition unity.

The central question, however, is different: How will Kharge‘s projection, directly or indirectly, affect leaders of the INDIA alliance? They may see it as a move by the Congress to impose its will on the alliance, even though Kharge has repeatedly said that the Congress would not make a bid for prime ministership in 2024 (were the INDIA alliance be in a position to form the government).

Can Kharge be a match for Modi in a national face-off? The answer is “no”, as things stand. Can his projection electrify the Dalits across the country, as some hope? This clearly is not going to be an overnight phenomenon, but it could start to send suitable signals to the SCs.

What Kharge may be able to do is to add Dalit votes to the Congress kitty — and also to INDIA’s – and consolidate the South behind the Opposition that much more.

But the secret, as a Congress leader put it pithily, “will be to play the (Kharge) card, without opening it (fully)”.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 10 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of the recently published How Prime Ministers Decide)