The toughest challenges before Sonia Gandhi

In the way she has calibrated her public appearances following her surgery abroad, Sonia Gandhi wanted to send a clear signal to her party — and to the country — that she is back in business.
She wanted to scotch the rumours about her ill health, creating an element of insecurity and uncertainty in the Congress about the shape of things to come.

Her decision to chair the party meeting to decide tickets for the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, her personal intervention in the spat between senior ministers Pranab Mukherji and P Chidambaram, her courtesy call on President Pratibha Patil, her call on the Lok Sabha speaker, and her visit to Raj Ghat on Gandhi Jayanti where the cameras caught her walking briskly and looking like her old self, all these were meant to convey the same message — that she is firmly in the saddle.

Her meeting with Meira Kumar sent the Congress grapevine in a tizz — was Kumar was being considered as the party’s chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh?

The government has lost a lot of ground in the last one year, and already there are serious misgivings about its ability to complete a full term. Events are pushing the country’s politics into what can be described as the ‘pre-Mandal politics of VP Singh’ pitted against his ‘post-Mandal politics’.

The first phase in 1987-89 saw the anti-corruption fervour (symbolised by kickbacks in the Bofors gun deal), capturing the imagination of urban middle-class India and essentially the upper castes. Today’s middle-class mood in urban India against corruption is somewhat reminiscent of that phase, and epitomised by the Anna agitation. In all likelihood, the BJP may become its biggest beneficiary.

Small wonder then that LK Advani is about to undertake his Janchetna Yatra against corruption in 27 states and 100 districts of the country, and Kalraj Mishra and Rajnath Singh will criss-cross through UP on their mini yatras taking up the same theme.

Anna Hazare has also come out much more openly against the Congress. Without waiting to see if the government brings the Lokpal bill that it promised in the winter session of Parliament, he has already come out against the Congress candidate in the Hissar by-election in Haryana. He has also declared that he would oppose the Congress in UP. The urban middle class — and the upper castes — are essentially the catchment area of both Anna and the BJP.

As things stand, no matter what the Congress has done, and no matter which weighty politician or corporate honcho has gone to jail on corruption charges, the party has not managed to stem the damage or win back the support of this opinion-making group.

The second phase of VP Singh’s politics revolved around the rise of OBCs, Dalits and Muslims, and it changed north Indian politics. The question then arises: Can a beleagured Congress recreate this constituency for itself?

The Muslims can gravitate to the Congress in a national election and one of the reasons why the RSS may be getting a rethink on Narendra Modi as BJP’s PM candidate is to prevent this from happening.

Unlike in the past, the Dalits are not with the Congress. Rahul Gandhi has made sporadic attempts to woo Dalits by visiting their huts and staying in their hamlets, but the Jatavs in UP remain firmly behind Mayawati. So far the Congress has not come out with a strategy to win over, if not the Jatavs, then at least the Valmiks and other SC communities in UP.

As for the OBCs, traditionally, they have not constituted the Congress’ vote base.  But the party could forge an alliance with the OBC parties, and as a matter of interest, they did not react favourably to the Anna agitation because they suspected it as an attempt to restore the rule of the upper castes. But it will not be so easy for the Congress to reach out to Mulayam Singh’s SP, Deve Gowda’s JD-S or even Ajit Singh’s RLD, or the smaller groups and rumps, not only because they will demand their pound of flesh but also because it will have to give up its go-it alone policy for revival.

Sonia Gandhi’s immediate challenge is to galvanise the party — and forge alliances, if necessary— so that it can win the forthcoming elections in Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and form a coalition government in UP with Mulayam Singh Yadav (which can happen only if the Congress can emerge as the kingmaker). Only this can help turn around the situation for the Congress, given the beating the party’s image has taken in recent months, and the demoralisation in its ranks.  

The mid-term challenge before Sonia Gandhi is to fashion a new base for the party around a new political axis, and new themes that catch the attention of its potential constituents — like a reduction in food prices, which has caused the party more damage than anything else, a fair compensation for land, when acquired, to farmers, adequate and guaranteed food security. In other words, to go back to being the party of the aam admi in more than just rhetoric.

It is not as if all the damage was done only in the five weeks that Sonia Gandhi was abroad, a period that coincided with the Anna agitation. Even before, the Congress was unable to get on top of a difficult situation with successive scams taking their toll. But what is still going for Sonia Gandhi is that she still wields a moral authority in the party, and this was evident when she could get warring senior leaders to ‘patch-up.’

— The writer is a social and political commentator