Five odd months before elections to the Lok Sabha are due, the Congress party has lost three assembly elections in the Hindi heartland.
Despite the fact that the contest was between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the said three states and not between the INDIA bloc and the BJP, already media channels friendly to powers-that-be are busy touting this Congress loss as that of the alliance.
Had the Congress pulled off victories that many pollsters had envisioned, the burden of most primetime debates (sic) would have been to say that assembly elections after all remain unrelated to parliamentary elections in the voter’s psyche.
But now that the Congress has lost, the assembly results are sought to be extrapolated to endorse the Modi slogan that the three-state victory of the BJP foreshadows a coming “hattrick” at the centre.
Just to note in passing: the Congress polled 4 crore 90 lakh votes in the five states that went to polls against the BJP’s tally of 4 crore 81 lakh popular votes.
This tally of popular support may discourage the view that the Indian National Congress is, as the right-wing likes to propagate, a miserable political has-been.
It is another matter, though, that in our flawed version of representative democracy, votes polled do not necessarily match in a rational way the seats won by a party.
Unfortunately, the corporates whom a two-party system suits best, where each party is, at bottom, in terms of class interest, a mirror image of the other, have used their clout to defeat any attempt to install a system of proportional representation, wherein all political contestants are rewarded with seats proportionate to the votes polled by them.
Be that as it may, the defeat of the Congress in the heartland states stands to redefine the power equations between it and other members of the INDIA bloc.
What may make entrenched regional forces particularly wary is the fact that the Congress has succeeded in vanquishing a powerful regional satrap in Telangana – perhaps the first time in recent history that a national party has done so.
Evidence of this new equilibrium between a chastened Congress and other members of the INDIA bloc came when four stalwart leaders from West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand stated their inability to attend the meeting of the alliance called by the president of the Congress for December 6, causing the said meeting to be cancelled and replaced by one in which parliamentary floor leaders participated.
Already, there is outspoken criticism from the Janata Dal (United) that the ambition of the Congress to try its muscle against the BJP on its own resulted in the sidelining of the man who has been the brain behind the idea of an all-party joint challenge to the ruling party, namely Nitish Kumar.
It might have been thought with justice that Nitish Kumar ought to have been projected as the vanguard leader of the alliance in order to enable a sharp focus on its ideological initiative related to seeking justice for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
It is to the credit of Nitish Kumar and his party that they successfully persuaded ambitious regional forces, often antagonistic to the Congress, that no alliance without the Congress would have the least chance of ousting the Modi-led BJP in 2024.
The Congress need not be abject after the assembly losses, given its tally of the popular vote; but when the hard work of assessing prospects of various member parties of the alliance in regard to each single parliamentary constituency begins within the alliance, hopefully without loss of time, the Congress must be ready and willing to support the candidature of member parties in constituencies where they provenly deserve to be protagonists.
Likewise, in the two hundred or so parliamentary segments where the Congress remains the chief antagonist to the BJP, all others must be ready and willing to contribute what clout they can muster so that the fatally crucial electoral strategy of one-on-one contests is not derailed.
In a state like Kerala, in all likelihood, an even distribution of seats may be advisable between the Congress and the Left.
Incidentally, the assembly gains in the just concluded elections promise little to the BJP centrally, given that they already have some 61 parliamentary seats from a total of 65 in the three Hindi-belt states.
If one-on-one contests do materialise, that tally is only likely to dwindle in these states rather than increase, as in any other state.
The right-wing hype thus needs to be isolated from the actual prospects for the ruling party.
The nitty gritty lies in this: the point-counterpoint among the alliance partners must cease forthwith, and the business of putting heads together to formulate both a common agenda and an agreed seat-sharing format be accomplished and made known with dispatch.
All that of course will happen only if the alliance, the Congress included, acknowledges the reality of the existential moment in our post-Independence history: should the Modi-led right-wing return to power in 2024, the constitutional order may come to be formally jettisoned.
Not unless all partners to the INDIA alliance persuade themselves to believe the truth of that likelihood will the alliance fructify as a force on the ground, and the voter be persuaded of both the sincerity of the alliance and the actuality of the prospect that confronts the republic.
This will take some doing: it will be no easy task to counter and neutralize the propaganda blitz that the ruling right wing will unleash with the full endorsement of media channels and money bags.
It is best to recognise that the prime minister is now a cult figure for some 36% of Indians.
They see him as the “defender of the faith’, and are quite willing to place Sanatan above the constitution and the law, much as Salafi/ Wahabi Muslims place the Sharia above the democratic order.
Just to remind ourselves: when L.K. Advani set out on his most consequential rath yatra in 1990, it was his objective to transform Hinduism into an Abrahamic construct; the new Hindu order was to have but one God in Ram, one chief place of worship in Ayodhya, and but one scripture, namely the Ramcharitmanas.
That putsch was meant to negate the ground reality that Hindus were, in fact, indubitably divided among social groups whose conjoint interests and loyalties often vitiated any monochromatic communal agenda.
It must remain a curiosity of a high order whether what has happened in the last ten years would have happened if Advani had become prime minister.
Be that as it may, over the last decade, that which Ambedkar had cautioned the republic-to-be about has come to pass: bhakti (unquestioning devotion) has indeed overtaken political life in India, and, the dominant trope of public/political life has come to be religion.
The INDIA bloc thus has its work cut out; if it fails the call of history, the Indian Republic may decisively go the way of Weimar.
Some 60% of India stands either to sink or swim together, and the Indian National Congress must refrain from being carried away by its most heartening revival.
Just as the many other constituents of the INDIA bloc must also rise both above pique and solipsistic opportunism.
The lesson that the political life of the last decade has brought home is that democracy is still not a non-negotiable principle, even for the very highly educated Indian.
Only the cloutless hoi polloi stand to live or die by its continuance or disappearance.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
