#dnaEdit: The last gamble

With news reports indicating that Priyanka Gandhi is set for a larger role in the Congress campaign for the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the party has made it clear that its revival strategy continues to centre around the Gandhi family’s charisma and little else. The party cadre are understandably excited because Priyanka, with her uncanny resemblance to her grandmother Indira, may be able to forge a connection with the electorate. But the Uttar Pradesh of the early 1980s, which the Gandhis for long treated as their personal and political bastion, has long since moved on. The Nehru-Gandhi connection has receded into a distant memory and the state’s politics has been complicated by issues of caste and religious identity and political patronage. The Congress failed in the 1980s to read these changes and was reduced to three and five seats respectively in the 1989 and 1991 Lok Sabha elections. The precipitous fall was all the more remarkable as the Congress had won 83 and 73 seats respectively in UP in the 1980 and 1984 Lok Sabha elections and 269 seats in the 1985 assembly elections.

It will be too much to expect Priyanka to stem the rot, nearly three decades later, which had set in during her father Rajiv’s lifetime. Of course, the UP electorate has an uncanny knack of sniffing the political wind. In 1977 and 1989, the anti-Congress sentiment in the country was captured correctly by the UP electorate. In the 1990s, the state propelled the BJP to power in the 1996, 1998 and 1999 general elections. In 2009, the Congress surprised itself by winning 21 seats in UP, mirroring the nationwide trend in that year’s general elections, but was humbled in the 2012 assembly polls. The Narendra Modi wave that swept the country in 2014 was also noticed by the UP electorate which gave a thumping mandate to the BJP, though the state unit of the party has been in the doldrums since losing power in 2002. Like Modi before her, it remains to be seen if Priyanka will succeed in setting off a hysteria around her political entry and address the aspirations of the UP electorate, without being hamstrung by the lack of a strong grassroots organisation. 

In 2014, the BJP had mounted a highly visible tech-savvy campaign centred around Modi and his achievements in Gujarat, which was supplemented by the RSS cadres, who once again took enthusiastic part in the BJP’s UP campaign. The Congress has roped in Prashant Kishor to mimic both strategies but no perceptible groundswell is visible yet. The recourse to Priyanka, who has little political experience, other than managing her brother’s and mother’s campaigns and constituencies in Amethi and Rae Bareli, also reveals the Congress’ difficulties with negotiating identity politics. Because of its poor track record in UP, the Congress cannot claim to have empowered the backward groups, socially, politically or economically. It has lost the Brahmin, Dalit, Muslim and whatever OBC votes it could lay claim on, to other parties who have aggressively played identity politics unlike the half-hearted, symbolic manner in which the Congress went about it.

With formidable leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati cultivating a dedicated votebank, Priyanka Gandhi will enter the fray as an outsider. The Congress will have to soon decide what it can offer the electorate, besides Priyanka. Reports from the grass roots indicate that the young electorate has grown cold to the promise of transformation made by a young Akhilesh Yadav in 2012 and Narendra Modi in 2014. The entry of Priyanka into the UP campaign will also be read as an implicit admission by the Congress that Rahul Gandhi has failed to turn around the party’s fortunes. If Priyanka cannot achieve the turnaround either, the utility of the Gandhis will be reduced to keeping a shrinking party united.