Congress is all set to implode

When Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister, he frequently faced a complaint that he was not doing enough to help opposition parties grow.

His always polite answer was that he did his best but they had to help themselves as well. Indira Gandhi was much better at creating opposition. She split the Congress and ensured herself a party which will passionately hate her. But she also seduced the Left who danced to her tune and enjoyed the patronage of the prime minister.

Ram Manohar Lohia argued that the only sound ideology was to be anti-Congress. His idea worked thanks to Indira’s behaviour. Indira created an opposition coalition against her in the Emergency and it brought her down. But the Janata Party failed to cohere as a stable alternative.

So we began a new chapter in the 1980s with the Congress back in ascendancy and the opposition divided.

Rajiv Gandhi benefited from his mother’s assassination and got the largest majority in a long time in 1984.That was the beginning of the end of the Congress and not its comeback. Rajiv on his own lost the Congress the majority and it has never come back.

The process inaugurated by Indira Gandhi resumed and opposition parties grew stronger by each election. At first the Congress hoped it could keep the opposition divided but then the BJP emerged from its long time in the wilderness to become the only other serious national party.

The Congress never thought the BJP would ever get far. It was blinded by its dogmatic secularism in which all virtue is with the Congress and all evil with the BJP. So began a phase in which we had ‘anti-BJP’ as the only ideology left for the Congress to practice.

It sold this message to the Left and other casteist parties who wooed the Muslim vote. The BJP proved more stable than the Janata Party and created its own coalition in 1998. Though it lost in 2004, the BJP has not gone away. If anything it is more coherent now than ever before.

The UPA’s current problems arise because being either anti-BJP or purely secularist has become a threadbare ideology and it fails to glue the coalition together. There is no common theme in the UPA except a desire to stay in power.

The Congress has lost any party organisation because it bets only on Dynasty and does not allow any leader to grow tall lest she or he challenge the Yuvraj or the Rajamata.  I have always held to the notion that this secularism/communalism stuff is a snare and a delusion.

Every party in power is sectarian when it suits it. Riots break out and the police stand by if the party in power approves of the rioters.

People know this. Muslim voters are trapped into voting for a secular party but all these secular parties together have done little for Muslims who stay poorer and less educated than the average.

Money for going on Haj is scant compensation for a lifetime of ill health, unemployment and misery. Left parties have shown in West Bengal that they can rape and kill like every other party when their power is at stake. Their radicalism is a narrow defence of the salaried public sector workers and visceral anti-Americanism.

India has the chance in the next election to vote for parties which will deliver public goods and allow the private sector to achieve high growth. Ideology is irrelevant if it is what it is today.

The Janata coalition of 1977 had no Communist parties in it because they had supported Indira. So right-wing parties like Swatantra, Jan Sangh and Old Congress leaders along with Lohiaite socialists came together. N

ow once again one can envisage a coalition in which the Communist Left will not take part. But a right of centre coalition can be created once again which promises to deliver without getting trapped into ideology.

Between the Congress and the BJP they can get around 280 to 290 seats. At present the Congress has 145 and the BJP 138. Up until last month, I expected the BJP to get around 180 seats and the Congress about 100 to 110. There is however now a distinct possibility that the Congress may do much worse and get only around 90 seats.

This is likely because this is where it has been heading since 1989. In 2004, the Congress surprised itself by winning 145 seats but 100/110 was its level in the late 1990s. Dynasty can help but with each generation its influence wanes. This is why Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi failed in UP, Gujarat, Haryana and now Karnataka.

If the Congress seat count goes below 100, then the BJP will be above 200. We can then see a sea change in Indian politics.

The Congress may finally implode and break up into a bouquet of small regional parties, one in Maharashtra, another in Haryana, and so on. In UP, which is the Dynasty’s base, there is no future for the Congress. Rahul will be relieved to be out of a race he loathes.

This should have happened in 1977. India wasted three decades in getting its politics right as previously it wasted four decades before getting its economic policy right. That time Dr Manmohan Singh turned the economy around. This time if he resigns he would have begun the end of the Congress. He would have done a favour to the country twice. A true Bharat Ratna!

Email: m.desai@lse.ac.uk