Opinion: Congress Needs Much More To Pull Off A Karnataka In 2024

The BJP and Congress both realise that the strategies they used in the Karnataka polls will have consequences for the national elections next year. Despite the shattering defeat in the state election, the BJP may have reason to believe that what it needs is more of the same. The party's approach to the state election was centred around Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He did not take any of the local assembly candidates or even state ministers with him on his roadshows. It looked as if the BJP's campaign in the Karnataka assembly election was no more than a rehearsal for the parliamentary elections next year. And just in case the party's failure in Karnataka rubs off on next year's national polls, outgoing chief minister Basavaraj Bommai insisted that the fault was entirely his and no part of the blame could be placed on the Prime Minister.

Ironically, it is the Congress, fresh from its victory in a major state, that needs to tweak its strategy. Its promotion of local leaders went so far that Rahul Gandhi's press conference was cancelled on the last day of the campaign. But as soon as the results were out, the focus shifted to crediting the Gandhis. It was pointed out by multiple leaders that the Congress had done extremely well in the constituencies through which Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra had passed. More than the number of seats the Congress won, the message of love over hate may well have contributed to the BJP losing the constituencies on the Bharat Jodo Yatra route that it had won in 2018. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's rallies in Karnataka were also presented as part of a national campaign as the Congress immediately scheduled rallies for her in other states.

Projecting the Gandhis may not, however, be sufficient for the Congress to break Karnataka's habit of voting different parties to power in state and national elections. The party needs to find ways to get the state to move away from the dichotomy since the 1980s between the state and the national in Karnataka.

In 1985, the state gave a resounding victory to the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress in the parliamentary election, which was followed just a few months later by an equally strong verdict in favour of the Ramakrishna Hegde-led Janata Party in the assembly polls.

For the Congress to ensure this pattern is not repeated next year, it needs to find ways of synchronising its successful local narrative with its strategy for the Lok Sabha polls.

The knee-jerk reaction to this challenge would be to simply do the same at the national level. What worked in Karnataka was the set of five welfare guarantees that turned out to be extremely well-targeted. The Congress will be tempted to simply scale up the same strategy to the national level. It could step up welfare measures it is closely associated with, like the MGNREGA. But the "national" is not just a sum of the states, and the states are rarely the sum of their sub-regions. The effect of national programmes is not uniform across the country. To complicate matters further, the variation is not always on expected lines.

A programme like MGNREGA with its built-in identification of the poor would be expected to do well in the poorer parts of the country. Yet it is not unusual to find MGNREGA being used to a greater extent in relatively more developed parts of the country than in the less developed regions. It may be that in the better-developed regions, the wages are high enough to ensure that the supply of labour is not constrained by the lower-wage jobs offered by MGNREGA. The elite then have no reason to object to those who cannot find work in the high-wage market, taking up lower wage MGNREGA work. In contrast, in the more backward regions, where the difference between market and MGNREGA wages is not as significant, jobs in MGNREGA may affect the supply of labour to other activities. It is in the interest of the local elite to reduce the availability of MGNREGA jobs. A national increase in allocations to MGNREGA does not ensure that the poorest will get a greater share of these additional funds.

If the Congress wants to extend the quality of its targeting - which brought it rich dividends in the Karnataka election - to the national level, it will have to develop a mechanism which will provide its national leadership with a sense of the primary concerns in each of the country's 543 parliamentary constituencies. It must be able to raise these issues in each of the constituencies through locally accepted leaders, who would become potential candidates.

Even if it does get through this massive task, it would be left with the challenge of packing diverse needs into a cohesive national approach. The easiest economic response would be to launch national welfare schemes, which would work well in some regions and less well in others but would not hurt anybody. But such welfare schemes are necessarily expensive and there must be some doubt about whether the economy will grow at a rate that can sustain them. Also, the growth-at-any-cost approach that is popular with all political parties today may only increase the demand for welfare.

Getting Karnataka to vote the same way in the parliamentary elections next year as it just did in the assembly polls is, therefore, no easy task. Unless the Congress can make major structural changes that will allow the national party to get a sense of the local across the country and then develop a consistent approach, it may be left with no more than Rahul Gandhi's love-over-hate campaign. The recent elections have shown that such a campaign is not without some traction. But at a time of economic distress, it would demand too much of love for it to conquer all. 

(Narendar Pani is Professor and Dean, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.