Decoding the current crisis of Congress across states

There appears a crisis in the Congress party’s government in Karnataka. And it seems to follow a pattern that was witnessed in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The ‘dissidence’ against Chief Minister P Siddaramaiah may soon be quelled if the dissidents are ‘accommodated’ in the cabinet or their ‘aspirations’ to serve the people are taken care of by offices and the paraphernalia that come with it, and it is also aimed at shoring up their resources. All this did not begin in Arunachal Pradesh or after the BJP-led NDA began ruling from Delhi in May 2016. This is not to say that BJP being in power at the Centre has no role in these developments.

We may trace this back to the Congress party’s inability to internalise the fundamentals of multi-party democracy. After losing power in nine states across India in the general elections of 1967, the Congress, under Indira Gandhi managed to orchestrate dissidence against the Chief Ministers  and caused non-Congress governments to fall. The height of this was in Haryana when MLAs changed allegiance with such ease that it was described as the state of ayarams and gayarams. The trend not only continued but also spread across the country. When Indira Gandhi returned as Prime Minister in 1980 (after the Janata debacle), she institutionalised dissidence within the Congress state units and thus ensured she was the supreme leader.

There is indeed more than a change of roles here. Well, it is not merely about the BJP doing to the Congress what the Congress did to the opposition earlier. The point is about the Congress dissidents willing to beat the law (as it stands under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution and the severe restrictions post-Bommai judgment to the use of Article 356) and sup with the BJP even while Rahul Gandhi is working overtime to position himself as the pivot of a non-BJP unity across the country before May 2019. It reveals that Rahul Gandhi’s views on the nation are not in sync with that of his own party folk, more particularly with members of the legislative assemblies (MLAs).

It is not that the Congress MLAs have found it prudent to walk into the BJP’s arms only now and after Narendra Modi coming to power and the decline of the Congress position to its all-time low in Parliament. The Congress legislature party had witnessed such shifts of loyalty earlier too. Many familiar names from the Congress stable had joined the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh during the 1990s. And some prominent faces that ran the party’s affairs in the state are now in the BJP. Seen along with the fact that the Congress party’s social base in the region (if we call it the Gangetic valley to include Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) is what made the BJP a force there, one would find the developments involving abuse of Article 356 as something deeper than mere politics of convenience.

It is then possible to locate the roots of the crisis in not merely the political culture of power and aggrandisement, a feature not uncommon across the parties, but that they are being rooted in the compromises by the Congress with majority communalism. This tendency, which was certainly evident even during the struggle for independence, seemed to move centre-stage post-Emergency and even dominate the Congress strategy post-1985. The elections in Assam in 1985, when the AGP without even pretending to talk secular won power in a state where at least 35 per cent of the people were Muslims, exemplified this.

Rajiv Gandhi seemed to have learned the wrong lessons from that and the sequence of events beginning February 1986 (when the Babri Masjid was allowed to be turned into a place for worship by the majority community through a court order) only prove this. The Congress rank and file deserted the party to rally behind the Janata Dal, associating with the BJP. This had left Rajiv Gandhi and his party without a base. This development in the Gangetic valley was accompanied by the rise of regional platforms across southern India, Maharashtra and elsewhere marking the decline of the grand old party. 

This is not to say that the Congress is only history and that it has no future. The point is that none would have expected the party to have won nine Lok Sabha seats in 2004 and 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 from Uttar Pradesh after having seen its decline since 1989 in the state. This is probably the hope with which Rahul Gandhi seems to live and even engage a campaign manager, known to have delivered positive results for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, and for the Janata family in the 2015 Bihar assembly elections, to steer the Congress in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. It is not the purpose here to either write off the Congress as an electoral force or otherwise.

The point is what would such a recovery or revival mean to the party and its future when there seems to be no ideological clarity among those who would end up as Congress MLAs? In other words, any such revival will mean loyalty to a factional leader who would in turn be ready to bargain with any one of the parties across the spectrum. If someone like Naresh Aggarwal, the Uttar Pradesh Congress MLA, managed to remain a minister in cabinets led by a cross-section of political parties in Uttar Pradesh — SP, BSP and BJP — and now in the Rajya Sabha representing the SP, Rahul Gandhi can expect his legislators to stand by him only in the event his party guarantees power to them, and that they will go with another party where that is possible. 

In other words, it is easy to revive the Congress in parts of the country where the BJP or another political formation gets into power, indulges in misrule and alienates itself from the people. But such a revival makes little sense when an exodus as in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and seemingly in Karnataka, is also bound to happen. Is Rahul Gandhi, then, prepared for the long haul and restore ideology into his party’s ranks and file?

The writer teaches History in Sikkim University, Gangtok