Anand K. Sahay 
The questions are important: After the Congress party was blown away in the recent assembly elections to the three north Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan when, for the most part, it engaged the BJP in straight fights, is it finis for the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha election?
And as a consequence, is it over for the ‘INDIA’ alliance in the joust for power at the Centre against the ruling BJP, since the Congress is the largest component of the bloc?
Also, a related question: Will the anti-BJP forces in the crucial north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar be able to successfully take on the BJP helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi without the effective and absolute support of the Congress, no matter that in recent decades this party has weakened considerably in these states?
Put another way, are the pre-eminent state parties of UP and Bihar self-sufficient in tackling the BJP in the way that the DMK is in Tamil Nadu or even the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal?
The record does not seem to suggest that. Nevertheless, in ordinary conversation and in general analysis, it is all too commonly assumed that the BJP’s regional opponents in the INDIA alliance are strong enough to hold their own against the BJP, but the Congress is not.
The Congress has frequently been called the “weak link”, although it is acknowledged by the INDIA parties that there cannot be a national challenge to the BJP by keeping the Congress out.
Bihar chief minister and JD(U) founder Nitish Kumar was most explicit about this when he broached anti-BJP parties to come together to challenge Modi rule before the alliance was officially announced earlier this year. Has the situation changed since then?
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When looking at the utility of the Congress for the alliance in UP or Bihar, it’s useful to consider that even at its weakest, the party has summoned close to 10% of the popular vote in a parliamentary election in these states. Though usually scattered, this vote is sufficient to fill important gaps in an alliance.
Indeed, in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll, the Congress pulled off as many as 21 seats in UP, just short of SP’s 23 and ahead of the BSP (20 seats). It would appear that while long past its finest hour, the party still has latent votes (given historical associations) that can come good when the political alchemy is right.
If we look at the overall score-line in the recent polls, the Congress did notch a sensational win in Telangana. However, this was against the BRS, a regional entity and, crucially, not against the BJP, which has formidable strengths that cannot be overlooked in any assessment.
The ruling dispensation at the Centre has demonstrated ideological expansion, sturdiness and clarity. It has a superb organisation that no party matches, and massive money and muscle power on account of its control over every organ of the state.
Besides, it has the unerring tendency to be vengeful and vituperative against opponents and dissenters, and in untrammelled fashion uses the coercive apparatus of the state against them. In addition, it has near-total sway over the media through a carrot-and-stick policy honed over a decade.
The short point is, has the hill the Congress and its allies must climb become higher after the recent state polls? Are the possibilities that looked attainable after Karnataka receding in the mirror now?
The BJP has a superb organisation that no party matches, and massive money and muscle power on account of its control over every organ of the state. Photo: X/BJP4India.
Much of the analysis points in that direction, though it is noted that the Congress held on to its assembly poll percentage of 2018 when it had wrested these three states from the BJP. In the recent era, that is unusual for the party when it is face-to-face with the BJP.
And in Rajasthan, it nearly made it. Had the bid succeeded, it would have broken the state’s tradition of not letting an incumbent return.
As the losing side, the Congress’s relatively high vote shares in the three north Indian states point to a new development: namely, the party’s state leaders could hold their ground although they competed not against the BJP’s state leaders, as may be expected in state elections, but against Modi, whose purported invincibility – and popularity – is so much the staple of media commentaries even out of season.
The upshot then is that with some actionable introspection on the part of the Congress, the party can possibly hold its own against Modi in these particular states even in the parliamentary election, which is barely five months away.
This impression is bolstered by the fact that in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh, the BJP had already won practically all the seats in the last Lok Sabha poll. To reach the cent per cent mark in these states, the saffron party need only win three more seats while holding on to its 2019 tally of 62.
How realistic is this when the Congress has shown it is cohesive enough to retain around 40% of the vote share in state elections in spite of the absence of ‘jointness’, to use a military term, in its ranks or in relation to allies or potential allies?
There is a caveat here – that holding 40% of the vote in an assembly election does not guarantee winning the same vote share in the same state in a parliament poll, unless the body of supporters has turned unshakeable. That proposition remains to be tested.
In addition, there appears to be a whole new phenomenon on the horizon that all parties – not just the Congress – need to contend with or pay attention to.
This is that in the three states where the Congress lost recently – and in UP, which is electorally the country’s most significant state, as it sends up the highest number of MPs to parliament – Modi’s leadership of the government and his total control of the BJP party apparatus appears to have wrought a cultural putsch, or something akin to a cultural revolution.
At any rate, in these regions, it has succeeded in creating a cultural rift that can be accelerated and catalysed into something resembling a revolution if Modi returns for a third five-year term.
The rampant misuse of the levers of state power at all levels – from the panchayat office that the saffron party holds to the PM’s office – and social media propaganda on an unimaginable and uninterrupted scale to promote and further the perception of an idyllic past when there existed only Hindu society in India, now seems to find sympathetic acceptance among increasing numbers of people.
Creating grounds for an embrace of Hindu-supremacist ideas are the essence of such a scheme. In this massive exercise, the emphasising of rituals in everyday life, and the re-adoption in daily practices of irrational beliefs and superstitions which appeared to be on the way out, are being undertaken as part of a plan.
In the experience of the present writer, this is all too evident in rural parts of the Hindi-speaking states. In this belt, the struggles of everyday life are harsh on account of deeper and more extensive poverty, and the penetration of modern ideas and culture – such as gender equality, rationality and democratic conduct – way slower than in many other parts of the country.
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This has made them prime catchment areas for the RSS and related bodies, including the BJP, whose stock-in-trade is some contrived notion of past greatness, single-religion nationalism and the bearing of overt signatures of allegiance to a particular belief system.
Given the massive push in this broad direction, the finding in the CSDS-Lokniti surveys in respect of MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan that substantial numbers of those surveyed (percentages vary in the different states) had made up their minds to vote for the BJP regardless of what the issues were and who would lead the campaign, though they agreed that unemployment and high prices were serious problems they faced, can occasion no surprise.
Indeed, this can be said to be a pointer to the production of a carefully crafted cultural rift being well under way.
Alongside the emphasis on rituals, irrational beliefs and superstition in the name of tradition and culture, through massive high-dosage propaganda exist the legitimising of caste-based entitlements and also of a certain type of political ideas, as well as gossip, aimed at destroying the heritage of some leaders of the freedom movement and the first important leaders of post-independence India, in particular Nehru – and his legacy and ideas.
Through personal interactions over time, the present writer has also observed in rural areas the continuing and organised political assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, although the most senior leaders of the current establishment take care not to be associated with such activity, while known rabble-rouser BJP MPs are perhaps permitted to make no secret of their admiration for Gandhi’s assassins.
This particular aspect is of course directly related to the propagation of anti-Muslim (and anti-Christian) sentiment amongst the widest section of the populace in a variety of ways – through songs, jokes and other cultural mediums, and a range of coercive tactics that are widely reported in the media, such as calls for love jihad, lynching in the case of alleged cow slaughter, running of bulldozers in Muslim areas, attacks on churches, and even calls for genocide by so-called holy men.
These are doubtless deemed important ways of voter mobilisation, especially among people who are simultaneously being brought under the spell of the concatenation of ideas that make up the belief in a pure Hindu society and Hindu state. The overt communalisation of politics is made a subset of the larger universe of the drive toward advancing the notion of Hindu society, culture and state.
Sabyasachi Das, the young economics teacher who earlier this year was obliged to resign his position from Ashoka University on account of the impact of his academic paper that dealt with vote manipulation possibilities in closely contested constituencies in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, does point to the suppression of the Muslim voter, although he notes that he looked at data only from eleven constituencies and was for that reason not reaching firm conclusions.
In such an atmosphere of revived devotion to pre-modern ideas especially built up in the Modi era, the (Hindu) voter is far from impressed when a BJP opponent stands up and criticises the PM’s call to bang thalis (metal eating plates) to ward off the coronavirus, or when he claims ancient Hindus had mastered plastic surgery and cites as proof Lord Ganesha’s elephant trunk.
This is the magic being wrought through the cultural putsch.
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For that matter, criticism of Modi for demonetisation, which ruined micro and small industries that are avenues of bulk employment, or faulty GST implementation, appear to cut no ice among significant sections of voters.
This is because Modi is seen by them as the central figure whose presence on the scene has made the ‘new present’ – or in his own words, the “New India” – possible even if the lives of the poor have suffered immeasurably, more than under any of Modi’s predecessors.
In fact, it is this facet of Modi that appears to make him “popular”, turning that term on its head. In ordinary usage, the expression connotes appeal deriving from the innate personal traits of a public figure – politician, sports icon, or film or rock star.
When the newly constructed Ram temple is inaugurated in Ayodhya in January, just months before the national election, the reverberations of the event are expected to be felt far and wide, and not just in rural or ‘rurban’ India.
In our great cities too, millions of people from rural or semi-rural areas of the Hindi belt live in hard conditions to make a living. In their new ‘homes’ they may be exposed to metropolitan culture in a variety of ways, but they are also exposed to gargantuan levels of ‘New India’ propaganda which plays in the background twenty-four hours of the day.
The mainstream media plays up the effect even further, providing ‘legitimacy’ to what they happen to see on WhatsApp.
It is in such a setting of election politics that the Congress party and its partners of the INDIA alliance are required to forge their tactics and their strategies. The task is likely to be far from easy, although the difficulties are by no means insurmountable.
Photo: Special arrangement.
But the primary requirement is that the INDIA parties recognise that they are each an organic part of an alliance to which they formally subscribe. Security does lie in numbers, in mutual solidarity.
If this is not grasped, and the day is lost when the results come in after the parliamentary poll, each member of the alliance will be made to hang separately. This may be taken to be “Modi’s guarantee”.
On the other hand, if genuine solidarity can be forged, even if this means some sacrificing for common good here and there by dominant parties in a region, the BJP can be pushed back in state after state in every part of north India, including the Hindi belt. A cursory view of the data for assembly and parliamentary elections for the recent period would point that way.
Voting numbers in thrall of Modi’s ‘New India’ have grown steadily in recent years, but they are outdone in collective strength by a wide coalition of interests – farmers, farm workers, formal and informal sector workers and the wider intelligentsia. But there is a proviso. The appeal to these powerful sections must be made by the alliance parties acting in tandem and in coordination.
The INDIA grouping’s best chance may lie in reaching for the doable. This may boil down to reducing the BJP’s – Modi’s – numbers in Gujarat, Assam, UP, MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, which have a total of around 180 parliament seats. This does not look like an impossible ask if the Congress and the INDIA group leaders are united in their vision. That is key.
Before the recent assembly election, when the various INDIA conclaves were held, each alliance party and the Congress in particular (being the largest party, and about to go into a one-to-one battle with the BJP), was guilty of not underlining that their electoral association, which was in effect a political and ideological front against ‘New India’, had to be for national elections as well as state polls.
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In fact, a senior Congress leader in Madhya Pradesh, who aimed at high office, took pains to exclude the assembly polls from the equation.
The Congress leadership was guilty of not obliging state leaders in all states where elections were being fought to see the larger picture, to take the extra step to reach an understanding with all sections of society and all parties that were not in the BJP’s clasp – essentially, of abusing the latitude given to them and not falling in line on fundamental matters.
The playing of the religion card by CM-aspirant Kamal Nath (although this was not communal since it was not aimed against any religion group) and thinking he had aced the game, was not worthy even of an amateur. Such a leader can hardly inspire confidence for planning moves for the Lok Sabha poll.
In Rajasthan, incumbent CM Ashok Gehlot remained selfishly all-knowing. He rejected sensible advice to deny nominations to many unpopular sitting MLAs only for the reason that they had sided with him in factional warfare earlier. Again, the central leadership let this pass instead of cracking down.
The Congress top leaders could also have ensured that Gehlot struck an understanding with the CPI(M) and the Bharat Adivasi Party. This may have just helped the Congress go over the line, as psephologists have suggested.
The Chhattisgarh CM, Bhupesh Baghel, overlooked Adivasi aspirations and flirted with the religion game. Regrettably, the Congress leadership, fearing the unknown, failed to act as effective monitor.
While the leadership question is straightforward in the non-Congress parties of the INDIA alliance, the elected Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, seems to be in need of abler political all-round backroom support.
Through the Bharat Jodo Yatra, former party president Rahul Gandhi has played his part by preparing the ground for the Congress’ possible electoral revival. In an avatar as guide and consultant, he may be invaluable in formulating strategic communications strategies within his party and with alliance partners.
With Modi at the helm on the other side, the wall between state and national issues has collapsed. INDIA might benefit by continuing to project state issues in Lok Sabha polls, and steer clear of attacking individual leaders. A battle has been lost, a cultural blitzkrieg is on, but a war is more than one engagement.
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.