Editorial: Results of a confused strategy

CHENNAI: For those of a liberal-progressive persuasion, Sunday’s election results from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana and Chhattisgarh were a crushing disappointment. It was expected of these four states to produce encouraging signs that India was emerging from its long winter of cultural nationalism ahead of the general election in 2024. As per these fond calculations, Madhya Pradesh voters were to kick out the BJP for corrupting their verdict of 2018. This, and a reasonable show by the Congress in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, would shrink the BJP’s footprint in the Hindi heartland and greatly improve the INDIA alliance’s chances of besting Narendra Modi in the coming Lok Sabha polls. That hope has been dashed, rather all-too easily.

The results have shown up several leaps of logic in that wishful thinking by liberals. One is that anti-incumbency is a sufficient condition for regime change. It often is not; incumbents have been returned about half the time in the past 25 years. Another flaw is the assumption that the Congress is the only alternative to the BJP. It is not; it may be the only alternative available, but inadequate for the voters’ purposes. In such cases, as we have seen in Madhya Pradesh, voters do look for an alternative within the ruling party. The BJP read this mood among the voters better and offered them choices within itself. It seems to have worked.

Another Congress inadequacy shown up in the three states where it has been defeated is the lack of a ground game, or rather its fallacy of believing that the Bharat Jodo Yatra would pass for one. Rahul Gandhi’s walk up the spine of India was a brave effort, and a sincere one, and it did yield some results in Telangana and Karnataka, but it does not compare with the decades-long grind put in by Sangh Parivar activists to build up the BJP’s majoritarian nationalist movement. The BJP started this work in the mid-1980s, at just about the time when the Congress had begun to abandon the grassroots.

The results are here for us to see: The Congress is now full of leaders who speak the language of liberal arts while the BJP sells robust nationalism to the young men and women emerging from rural India. Although the odd election success, such as the one in Telangana, may raise hopes of a return to halcyon days, it is clear that the ground has shifted from under the Congress’ feet—as it has from under social democratic parties worldwide. The Congress tried to arrest this trend for a while in the 2000s by shifting right itself, adopting neo-liberalism and shedding its links to communists, but made itself no more relevant to the times and was soon supplanted by the far right.

Two terms out of power, it is now a feckless entity that faces the prospect of another five years in the wilderness, or perhaps permanent oblivion. Embarrassed by its own elitism, it now tries to suck up to Lohiaite parties, talking unconvincingly about caste censuses and pretending to be comfortable with Mandal politics. The results we saw on Sunday offer little hope that this strategy by a confused party will find any favour with the voters in the next general election. Adding dread to that prospect, there is ample recent evidence that voters vote differently for the Assembly and for the Lok Sabha.