Road to 2024 | Caste push to INDIA bargains: Congress finds it is easier said than done

Recent developments within the party in several states show the situation has not changed much.

While senior Congress leaders including Rahul Gandhi often explain it away as the party always having space for contradictory impulses and divergent views and not being a dictatorship – “unlike the BJP” – the resistance to publication of the caste survey in Karnataka is embarrassing for the party at at time when its central leadership has made it a poll issue.

To top it, Rahul first unveiled his new caste push while campaigning for the Assembly elections in Karnataka earlier this year. At a speech in Kolar, he first demanded removal of the 50% cap on reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs, and asked the BJP government to release caste-based data from the socio-economic and caste census conducted by the UPA government.

This was two months after the AICC session in Raipur saw the party committing to conduct a Socio-Economic Caste Census along with the decennial Census if voted to power.

But now, even as Rahul peppers his speeches – including in the current round of elections – with the promise of a caste census, the Congress government in Karnataka itself is divided over release of data of a socio-economic caste survey conducted by the previous party regime in the state.

The Congress’s tallest Vokkaliga leader and Deputy Chief Minister, D K Shivakumar, has put his weight against release of the data, putting the Siddaramaiah government on a spot. The fear is that the survey, conducted by the State Backward Classes Commission in 2016, will show that the Lingayats and Vokkaligas are not as prominent as they are assumed to be.

With Shivakumar having his hand on the pulse of the people, the state Congress government has put off release of the survey data for now.

The resistance shows the limitation of the Congress central leadership’s writ.

Cut to Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress high command could not convince its state unit spearheads Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh to accommodate some of the INDIA alliance partners when it came to seat-sharing. This despite the fact that the Congress central leadership has invested heavily into forging an anti-BJP national front.

A senior leader of the Congress, who held a meeting with the heads of a clutch of smaller parties in Madhya Pradesh (among them the Gondwana Gantantra Party, JD-U, tribal outfit JAYS and the Samajwadi Party), said the party could have accommodated all of them by giving less than 15 seats. The SP with whom the failure to reach a seat understanding blew up into a major war of words could have been settled with five seats, the leader said.

A Congress leader admitted the smaller parties could damage the Congress in many seats.

The central leadership surely can’t complain that the veteran Kamal Nath lacked an understanding of policy issues of the party. Interestingly, Nath also cocked a snook at the central leadership by giving an interview to a television anchor who was in the list of 14 announced by INDIA as part of a “media boycott”, which remained still-born.

Another disconnect is reflected in the push for welfare politics, disregarding financial resources of states, though the BJP too has now joined this. While the Congress is promising freebies in all the election-going states, the cash crunch faced by Himachal Pradesh is an example of the pitfalls of welfarism. The state had to delay payment of salaries to government employees and contract workers earlier this year.

By all accounts, the Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu government in Himachal Pradesh is staring at a grim fiscal situation, raising questions on uninterrupted implementation of the guarantees promised by the Congress during the elections.