Eating hasty pudding in K’taka

Winning the Karnataka Assembly election has been the easy part for the Congress. Once the euphoria of victory wears off, the party will need to take a hard look at its situation nationally and come to some sober decisions. First, it would have to reckon that it had much going for it in Karnataka that it cannot count on in some of the states going to the polls this year and in the Lok Sabha elections next year. To start with, the Congress had in Karnataka something it does not in most of the other states where it has ceded ground to the BJP: a strong and resourceful leadership in the state unit of the party. The presence of Siddaramaiah and DK Shiva Kumar at the helm of the Congress campaign offered a credible choice to the voters of Karnataka and they took it. A few months earlier, the party did not offer such a proposition to the voters of Gujarat and was thus routed there.

The lesson for the Congress high command from the party’s success in Karnataka is that it needs to overcome its distrust of strong leaders at the state level. Dating back to Indira Gandhi’s time, this distrust predisposes the high command to act by the counsel of sycophants and distances it from mass leaders who know the pulse of the people. In Telangana for instance, this failing has allowed the BJP to creep in and steal the Congress’ district-level leadership and cadre.

In Andhra Pradesh there was a mass exodus of cadre to the YSR Congress after the party ignored its own leaders’ advice against bifurcation of the state. The high command now needs to reverse this trend and work with the state leaderships to revitalise the party from the grassroots up through people contact activities like the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Another lesson for the Congress is to resist reading much into the victory in Karnataka. It was a win aided by the poor performance of the Bommai government, and by the fact that the BJP had not won the mandate in 2018 but only stolen it through horse-trading. These factors may help the Congress again in MP, but not in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, where it is the incumbent, when elections are held later this year. In Telangana and Odisha, the party has to do something audacious to recapture the people’s attention as an alternative to the respective ruling party.

It would also be a misjudgement to conflate the Karnataka election to the national level. That state in particular has a record of voting differently in state and Lok Sabha elections. A differential voting pattern in Assembly and Parliamentary elections has been evident in several other states as well, notably West Bengal, Bihar, MP and Rajasthan. That is palpably due to the Narendra Modi factor, whose cult-like following turns the Lok Sabha election into a presidential contest.

For the Congress to play that game and offer Rahul Gandhi as an alternative to Modi may be a risky strategy, for it requires disparate opposition parties to agree on it and the people to accept it. Instead, a wiser approach may be to ignore the Modi government’s divisive provocations and fix the nation’s focus on the regime’s failures on unemployment, poverty and economic management. For this to be effective, high command figures need to go down to the grassroots, walk along rural paths and knock on every door, as they did in Karnataka. The people will do the rest, as they have done in Karnataka.