dna edit: Lack of will

Hundred days may be too limited a time frame to judge the performance of a ruling party. The same alibi, however, doesn’t hold good for a party in opposition. An opposition party is expected to hit the ground running from day one.

One is, therefore,  hard pressed to find justifiable reason for the Congress party’s continued lethargy as well as lack of will in behaving as credible opposition. During these 100  days and more, the Congress, has done little but make erratic noises, indulge in knee-jerk protests even as disturbing events unfolded, one after another. The party’s two most prominent faces, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, have mostly, remained invisible.

Nowhere is the Congress’s inertia more glaring than in its electoral campaign in Maharashtra. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sent off its top leadership to the battle arena, the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, started a campaign — that too much delayed — that proved to be utterly ineffective. Rahul could have leveraged the accumulated political ammunition — there is no dearth of it — and cogently countered the BJP offensive. But coherence — clearly — is not his forte. His speeches were unfocused, giving an impression that the top Congress leader had nothing tangible to say to voters. Worse, his gaffe — describing Modi as an “opposition leader” evoked considerable amusement in political and media circles. The joke in the Congress circles these days being that the party stands to gain more from Rahul’s silence than from his speeches!

The Congress’s electoral prospects in Maharashtra — to put it mildly — are far from inspiring. Along with its former alliance partner, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the party is battling the rising tide of disaffection among the electorate against its 15-year tenure in office. That the alliance’s long rule was marred by scams, brazen cover-ups and misgovernance, have put it at a clear disadvantage against the upbeat BJP.

However ideally, elections offer a larger political canvas for the parties to leave their imprint. They provide a contested and valuable space for parties to familiarise voters with their long and short-term politics and policies. It’s of course another depressing matter that the political parties have strayed far from that original script. Contemporary election campaigns — shorn of worthwhile substance — have been reduced to nothing but fire and brimstone rhetoric.  The Congress, one can reasonably argue, doesn’t seem to want to break out of that disastrous cycle.

Since its humiliating defeat, the party has made no constructive moves to put itself together. All that it appears to have done is invest its energies in trying to secure the post of the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha. The very same post it had in the past denied to its adversaries in similar post-poll situations. Where the party could have made forceful interventions as the main opposition — for instance, the move to dilute the compensation package in the land acquisition bill or majoritarian provocations by Sangh Parivar outfits, or even Modi’s silence on these issues — it took a back seat.

Recall the recent Lok Sabha debate on communal violence — a debate Rahul himself demanded in the wake of increasing incidence of communal tensions in Uttar Pradesh. Inexplicably however, he chose not to speak in the debate itself.

It can be reasonably argued that the crisis in the opposition space today is synonymous with the crisis within the Congress. The party’s re-assertion would depend on its will to re-imagine itself as an opposition party.