Op-Ed: What's Wrong With the Congress

New Delhi: As the pathetic performance of the Congress brings out the claws in everybody who's anybody within the party, I thought back to the time last month when I was roaming around the towns of Chhattisgarh covering election rallies. It was right after Diwali, and Congress heavyweights like Ajit Jogi, Motilal Vora, BK Hariprasad and Mohsina Kidwai had organised a road show in Rajnandgaon, and I remember how we had real trouble locating where it was, which is unusual for any political meeting, because it hardly drew any crowd.

And it was there, watching an embarrassing effort to create a ramp for wheelchair-bound Jogi so that he could climb aboard this truck for the roadshow, that I realised how the situation in Chhattisgarh was like a microcosm of what's wrong with the Congress party as a whole. As they put two uneven pieces of wood planks together, tried to push his wheelchair through, while he sat uncomfortably in the heat that marks this region even in November, and after 15 minutes of uninspired efforts when they finally gave up to have him just move along the truck in his motorised wheelchair, you knew you had got a live demonstration of the attitude that marks the party's lackadaisical efforts at everything.

Why else would they not have made an issue of the Naxal attack that wiped out their state leadership on May 25? The only people who mentioned the Jiram Ghati in their election speeches were Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi who suggested there was a conspiracy behind the killings, and that's where it ended. Anyone would have thought the sympathy factor was a no-brainer for a political party, but obviously politicians and especially, Congressmen do not work that way. The Naxal attack didn't figure even in one poster, not even in Naxal-infested Bastar. And the only mention of those who died was an 'in memorium' in the manifesto, and not a political point.

I was mystified by this omission and kept asking Congress leaders who said things like - "That was a long time ago, and is no longer a factor." Their Congress chief Charan Das Mahant also tried to take a moral high ground by saying after their defeat that they didn't want to encash on such tragedy but it took a modest Congress worker to really tell it like it is. How could they have harped on the Maoist massacre when most of them suspected it was an inside job, he said. In fact, Ajit Jogi has gone on record, bitterly complaining about how his colleagues suspected him for tipping off Maoists. Raman Singh cleverly made no such suggestions but he didn't have to either. Such rumours gained enough traction for the local Congress to view each other with suspicion.

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And it is in this manner that the eternal Congress problem of infighting played out in the state and called 'sabotage' by those like Mahant. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi cracked the whip enough to make state leaders appear to come together to fight elections, that is Digvijaya Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh and Jogi and Mahant in Chhattisgarh. But inside, there was always confusion and contradiction. If Jogi's people have got 60 of 90 tickets, why was he missing from Congress posters? Was that because the Congress leadership also knew that Jogi evinced a whole load of negativity? "Congress doesn't want to lose the votes of those who are really scared that it's going to go back to 2003-5 when the Jogis were in power," explained one worker to me in Jogi's stronghold of Bilaspur.

They had the same idea also in Rajasthan. While the BJP had put Vasundhara Raje's posters all over the state, standalone and also with Narendra Modi, the Congress avoided any images of Ashok Gehlot. The man couldn't be seen in any of the cities I travelled to, from Ajmer to Sawai Madhopur and not even in Jaipur. "There are too many negative connotations of his rule," said one senior Congress leader, hinting at the anti-incumbency factor with many of Gehlot's minister's in jail implicated in sex scandals. But if that was the case, why wasn't he sacked? And who was the Congress pitching instead of him?

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It seemed as if there was an unequivocal face of the party in Madhya Pradesh, at least from the safe distance of Delhi. But when I travelled there, locals asked if Jyotiraditya Scindia was indeed the leader, why was it that Digvijaya Singh's nominees got thrice as many seats? The ostensible reason was of course that Scindia was only familiar with his regions of Gwalior and Chambal, but it didn't seem convincing on the ground.

And so, just as the central leadership is leaving 2014 PM candidate unsaid for now, just as they are playing hint-hint-wink-wink about Rahul Gandhi, attempting to keep all their options open and ruling out nothing, all the State Congress units too kept their options open and hoped the opposite camps had bigger problems than theirs. Instead of working on their unity and projecting some big ideas, they all worked on the negatives of their opposition. In Chhattisgarh, they hoped Karuna Shukla and other dissidents would break away Raman Singh's government while in MP, they tried to project the chief minister and his wife as being 'greedy' and 'corrupt'. The personal attacks couldn't get any lower in Rajasthan where Ashok Gehlot made oblique references to Vasundhara Raje's 'latka-jhatkas' and her London trips.

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In the end, it all came to nought. Rahul Gandhi may have tried to revolutionise the process with his five-page application forms for perspective MLAs but voters saw he didn't walk the talk when he gave tickets to dynastic families - Jogis, Voras, Patels, Madernas, Singhs, and a whole host of other families who are supposed to form the Congress 2.0.

It all reminds me of an analogy that Narendra Modi used during his campaign in North Bastar - how Congress governed Chhattisgarh initially which led to an unhealthy state, but it took strong medicine of the people to administer a dose of BJP. Maybe, the Congress needs a good doctor too - to first prescribe and then administer it treatment.

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