Nitish Kumar’s desertion of the INDIA alliance at the precise moment when Modi was anointing himself as the eleventh avatar of Vishnu at Ayodhya may have sealed the fate of not only the INDIA alliance, but also of India’s short-lived democracy.
Modi’s appropriation of the sceptre of the Chola kings to inaugurate the new parliament building in Delhi and his consecration of the idol of Ram in the new mandir at Ayodhya testify to the near-divine status he has begun to ascribe to himself. In the past five years he has launched a succession of unbridled personal attacks on the leaders of all rival political parties, tamed the judiciary, harnessed the central investigative agencies, virtually wiped out habeas corpus and destroyed civil liberties, most notably the right of dissent.
Modi’s Destruction of Dissent
Despite having headed the governments of Gujarat and India for 22 years, Modi’s thirst for absolute power has remained unquenched. So, it is a safe bet to say that if and when he comes back to power, every remaining voice that seeks to safeguard civil liberties and uphold the right to dissent will be silenced, and every constitutional institution designed to safeguard these will be robbed of its powers.
Through his desertion of the INDIA alliance, Nitish Kumar has immeasurably increased Modi’s chances of success. Future historians will remember him as the Benedict Arnold, or the Mir Jafar of democratic India. But the question that will remain to haunt them is that when Nitish Kumar was the first chief minister to advocate the formation of an anti-BJP alliance as long back as in 2016, and even stayed away from Modi in 2014, why was he the first person to stab it in the back after it was finally formed? The facile answer, now given by Rahul Gandhi and others in the Congress, is that he is an unprincipled politician who is determined to stay on the winning side, no matter what it costs the country.
That might have been credible on January 30, when Gandhi said it. But five days later, when both the Trinamul Congress in Bengal and the (much smaller and less influential) Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) in Tamil Nadu have also questioned the utility of the alliance, it is necessary to find another explanation.
Needed for INDIA: A Principle for Allocation of Seats
The first essential step towards creating a viable alternative to the BJP for the 2024 election would have been to announce a principle for the allocation of seats within the INDIA alliance that was palpably fair. One was there, staring the leaders in the face, since the first day when the Alliance was mooted. This was to leave the 242 seats that the BJP did not win in 2019 untouched and allot the 303 seats it had won to the first runner up. This might have left a handful of seats where changes that had occurred in the past five years could have justified a different allocation. But these would have been easy to manage.
The second requirement was the framing of a common campaign agenda. This required highlighting the Modi government’s failure meet its grandiose economic promises during its first term in office, and its ruthless assault on peoples’ rights and freedoms during its second. From the steady decline of the economy’s growth rate, the pain caused by a blundering and unnecessary demonetisation, sharp and continuing rise in unemployment, the encouragement of communal attacks on the minorities and the perversion of the judicial system to ensure that none of the attackers got punished, As the largest party in the Alliance, and the one with the greatest experience of government at the Centre, the Congress needed to take the lead in preparing this offensive. Apart from occasional walkouts in parliament it did no such thing.
Developing such a concerted counter-attack on the BJP government would have taken some time, but the most immediate and effective way of cementing the alliance would have been to rise to the defence of the opposition leaders whom Modi was systematically singling out for attack, humiliation and arbitrary imprisonment under its own authoritarian amendments to the criminal and economic offence laws. Tragically, it did no such thing.
On the contrary, not only did it maintain a Sphinx-like silence throughout the Modi government’s attacks on members of the Alliance. In some cases, such as the Aam Aadmi Party’s supposed ‘liquor scam’ in Delhi, its local leaders openly praised the Modi government for putting Satyender Jain and Manish Sisodia in gaol saying, “We told you they were corrupt”.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra in Kashmir. Photo: Twitter/@bharatjodo
Congress must introspect
The list of the Congress party’s short-sighted follies does not end there. The crowning one has been the timing of its launch of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyaya Yatra. Had the party done this after the INDIA alliance had agreed on the principles it would adopt to choose its candidates for the Lok Sabha election, neither Mamta nor Nitish would have felt threatened by it. But by embarking upon it when none of these issues had been resolved, Rahul Gandhi has ensured that every additional vote the Congress succeeds in capturing will be at the expense of the Trinamool Congress in Bengal, and the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar.
The reason for believing that this will happen is to be found in the shift in voting pattern that took place in the Karnataka Vidhan Sabha election last May after Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo yatra had passed through the state. In it the BJP’s share of the vote hardly budged. Almost all of the Congress’s increase in votes came from Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular) or JD(S). This shift ousted the BJP because the Congress was the only opposition party in Karnataka, had a strong cadre base and therefore had a good chance of winning. In sharp contrast, the Congress is a minor player in all of the states that Rahul Gandhi’s Nyaya Yatra is going through, with the exception of Chhattisgarh. Any shift of vote to the Congress because of the Nyaya Yatra will therefore only weaken the BJP’s main opponent. The Congress has every right to strengthen itself but not when the immediate logic of the INDIA coalition demands the defeat of the BJP in as many seats as possible rather than the maximisation of individual party tallies.
How little the impact of the Yatra will matter to the BJP can be judged from the fact that in 2019 it won 14 of its 18 seats in Bengal with more than 50% of the vote. In those constituencies the BJP will remain, impregnable. Rahul’s second yatra might increase the Congress’s share of the vote in Bengal by two to three percentage points, but what difference will that make to the Alliance? For in 2019 the Congress won only one seat out of Bengal’s 42, and was the runner up in only one more, Murshidabad. Even there the margin of its loss was 20.1%. This is a gap that no form of Bharat Jodo Yatra can bridge.
If entering Bengal is going to be counterproductive, carrying on to Bihar will be suicidal. For in Bihar too the Congress won only one seat in 2019, and was the runner up in only 6 more of the state’s 40 constituencies. What is more, the margins with which it lost in these seats ranged from 57,000 to 3,54,000 votes. No Yatra can bridge such a huge gap.
Nitish Kumar was fully aware of not only the Congress’s weakness, but also its overweening, and entirely unrealistic ambitions, which would almost certainly have made it ask for a disproportionately high number of seats in Bihar. He has therefore decided to cut his losses and rejoin what he is now convinced will be the winning side in the Lok Sabha elections this year. Since the BJP’s rivals are all members of the Alliance, the Nyaya Yatra is likely to work against them in all but one or two of the 15 states he will traverse. In the rest, the net beneficiary will be the BJP.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.
