What Rahul can learn from Feroze Gandhi. And the road ahead for Modi till 2019
Has Congress president Rahul Gandhi realised after 13 years in politics that appealing to 80 per cent of the Indian population is a better electoral strategy than appeasing the other 20 per cent?
If so, it marks the first big shift in Congress strategy since 1986 when father Rajiv used his parliamentary majority to overturn the Supreme Court's enlightened verdict on Shah Bano, a Muslim woman divorced by her husband Mohammad Ahmed Khan who pronounced triple talaq and left her homeless and penniless. That single act captured a large demographic of the Muslim vote for the Congress. It subverted real secularism in the name of minoritism and ironically paved the way for the BJP's majoritarian electoral success in the next decade.
Parliament
Rajiv was in some ways more Parsi than Hindu. His father Feroze Gandhi was a brilliant parliamentarian. Feroze played the role of an Opposition leader in the 1950s when there was very little opposition to the Congress in Parliament. His death following a heart attack in 1960 at the age of 48, when Rajiv was just 16, deprived India of one of its finest but least heralded MPs. If there is a role model Rahul should follow in politics, it should be his grandfather Feroze, a non-Nehru who embodied both inclusive nationalism and real secularism, not the fraudulent variety practised by the Congress today.
The BJP has reacted to Rahul's assertive new political mien in exactly the wrong way. It focused on Rahul throughout the Gujarat campaign, building him up as a threat (which he duly became) rather than on development. Rahul meanwhile has shown a ruthless streak. Not all of it is inherited from mother Sonia, who was dispatched to England at 16 by father Stefano Maino to find work and learn English. She developed her cold, clinical toughness in those difficult years before she met Rajiv at a restaurant in Cambridgeshire.
Rajiv too was tougher than he looked. The manner in which he sacked foreign secretary AP Venkateswaran in 1987 during a press conference is still remembered by IFS veterans as an act of "refined brutality". If a Prime Minister like Narendra Modi were to dismiss and publicly humiliate a foreign secretary (currently the affable S Jaishankar), he would be roasted, and rightly so, by the media.
Rahul has a tricky agenda ahead of him but he could get lucky on two counts. First, of the eight states due for Assembly elections in 2018 (Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura and Mizoram), the Congress has a good chance of holding on to Karnataka and winning back Rajasthan from the BJP. Thus at the end of 2018, the Congress could have three large states - Punjab, Karnataka and Rajasthan - in its fold along with a few in the Northeast. Rahul will claim credit for the Congress' turnaround. No one will begrudge him that.
Fortune
Rahul's second stroke of good fortune is the mild disarray within the BJP. If rural voters, including farmers, in other states follow Gujarat's lead, the BJP may face a real problem in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
The lack of talent in the BJP was cruelly underscored by the CBI court's verdict in the 2G telecom case. If the BJP's law minister (under whom the special public prosecutor functions), home minister (who is responsible for the CBI) and finance minister (under whom the Enforcement Directorate and the directorate of Revenue Intelligence operate) cannot build a coherent prosecution in an open-and-shut case, it's no surprise that it has made tactical errors in other areas.
Much good work though has been done by the Modi government over the last three-and-a-half years. For instance, the Mudra Bank has helped millions of small entrepreneurs and created an army of self-employed.
Other schemes too have quietly transformed the way Indians receive subsidies and transfer money. But the government has made elementary mistakes as well. It hasn't moved ahead on police reforms. Judicial reforms remain stuck in a face-off with the Supreme Court. Bureaucrats continue to mislead, distort and delay. Finance ministry officials, for example, sat on the One Rank, One Pension (OROP) file for five months after then defence minister Manohar Parrikar had cleared it, losing for the BJP goodwill among the armed forces.
Coalition
This, however, is where Modi too has encountered a stroke of good fortune. He will face a national coalition in 2019 of corrupt, communal, communist and casteist parties. The Congress will lead this ragtag coalition made up of the Left, TMC, SP, BSP, RJD, NCP, AIMIM and NC, among others. The politics of Sitaram Yechury, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Lalu Prasad, Asaduddin Owaisi, Sharad Pawar and Omar Abdullah was rejected in 2014 and likely will be in 2019. They form a toxic mix. Their collective odium will not burnish Rahul's chances in 2019. Modi knows this.
That said, he also knows that the clock is ticking. To regain political momentum after Gujarat, the prime minister needs to focus on the pledge of maximum governance and minimum government. Arbitrary tax claims, interference in citizens' lives over matters like food and films that shouldn't concern a progressive government, and allowing fringe elements to impose their perverse idea of India, often violently, are not signs of maximum governance, minimum government.
The prime minister has less than a year to set things right before campaigning for 2019 consumes him.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)