States of Disarray

It took three days, beginning on 12 June, for the Congress’s central leadership to appoint Kamal Nath as the party’s in-charge for both Punjab and Haryana, defend his appointment in light of vociferous criticism, and then agree to his giving up the posts. The move was so tone deaf—Sanjay Suri, a reporter for the Indian Express, had testified as a witness before both major inquiries into the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 to put Nath at the head of a mob that burnt two Sikhs to death near the national parliament—that it spawned various conspiracy theories. Some suggested Nath had been set up by his opponents within the party. Some speculated that the whole thing was part of an elaborate plot to put the Congress’s involvement in the 1984 pogroms behind it. None of the explanations floated made much sense. All the episode did was lend greater credence to the notion that between Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi—effectively the Congress’s entire high command—two heads are worse than one.

Incredibly, one reason Nath was given these appointments was to handle the fallout from another bad call by the Gandhis. When Om Prakash Chautala, the head of the Indian National Lok Dal, asked the family to back his preferred candidate for a vacant seat from Haryana in the recent Rajya Sabha election, Sonia agreed without consulting the Congress’s unit in the state. That candidate was RK Anand, a former lawyer and member of the Rajya Sabha, who cross-examined witnesses of the 1984 violence before the Nanavati Commission on behalf of several senior Congress leaders, including Nath. For the Rajya Sabha post, he was meant to defeat Subhash Chandra, an independent candidate with backing from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the owner of the Zee media empire—whose channels have been particularly critical of the Gandhi family.

The command to back Anand was especially trying for Bhupinder Singh Hooda—a long-time Gandhi loyalist who served two terms as Haryana’s chief minister, and has taken flak over a land-allotment to Robert Vadra, Sonia’s son-in-law, and over the Gandhis’ alleged involvement in the National Herald case. Hooda and Chautala are both Jats, competing for Haryana’s crucial Jat voter base, and the Congress leader had to react against his rival if he wished to retain his stature in the community. In such a situation, instructions from Delhi count for little. After the state legislative assembly voted, 14 of the Congress’s 17 ballots were disqualified for being marked with a pen different from the one prescribed. There is very little chance that this resulted from a genuine mistake. In the eyes of many, it amounted to a tacit revolt by the state Congress unit against the central leadership.

These back-to-back incidents are in keeping with indications that the already haemorrhaging Congress is no longer able to even manage its own house, and that state units are defying the Gandhi family’s authority in unprecedented ways—including in states preparing for upcoming elections, where Congress defeats would severely undermine the chances of the party’s long-term national revival.

The most serious recent evidence emerged from the Congress’s defeat by the BJP in Assam. Contributing to that failure was the defection to the BJP of Himanta Biswa Sarma, who had spent over two decades with the Congress and done enough to expect that he would eventually take over the party’s state operations from the man who currently controls them, Tarun Gogoi. But as Gogoi’s son Gaurav gained prominence in the party, Sarma saw his chances fading away. He tried to reach out to Rahul Gandhi, but was rebuffed. “Rahul Gandhi humiliated me, Tarun Gogoi humiliated me, people witnessed this,” he told India Today after the BJP’s election victory in the state. “The problem with Rahul Gandhi is that he is not serious. I am very happy that Rahul Gandhi has got his lesson.”

Apart from the Gandhis’ arrogance in refusing to hold internal consultations, Sarma’s case illustrates a systemic problem that now bedevils the family’s control over the party. A Congress in national power could have accommodated Gogoi’s son in Delhi, and left Sarma, a seasoned leader, free to do his work in the state. But in a party without an overriding ideological commitment to keep members within the fold, the reduced ability to dispense power and wealth makes managing conflicting ambitions nearly impossible. Party members are particularly impatient since, with the Congress’s present trajectory, a future return to its earlier ways looks unlikely.

The Sarma phenomenon has repeated itself in Punjab, where the Congress veterans Jagmeet Singh Brar and Sukhpal Singh Khaira have left the party in the last six months. Neither was as crucial to the party there as Sarma was in Assam, but both were among the handful of people who could have taken on leadership roles once age forces the Congress’s leader in Punjab, Amarinder Singh, to give way. At the moment—with no replacement appointed for Nath, the many established leaders leaving, and the Punjab election looming early next year—the Congress may well be replaced by the Aam Aadmi Party as one of the two political poles in the traditionally two-party state (the Akali Dal, now allied with the BJP, is the other).

Meanwhile, in Uttar Pradesh, which is likely to go to the polls early next year too, the Congress is trying to put up a brave front by finding a figure with some mass appeal to helm its campaign. The election strategist Prashant Kishor, who has a record of success with Narendra Modi in the last general election and Nitish Kumar in the last Bihar election, is now helping the Congress, and has made no secret of his desire to see that figure be Priyanka Vadra, Sonia’s daughter. But the family is unlikely to oblige him. In the event that it does, the loss that probably awaits the Congress given its present condition would destroy whatever residual cache the Gandhi name commands. Choosing someone else to lead the campaign—the former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit was seen as a candidate until she recently refused the party’s advances—would still be a matter of putting a face to a lost cause. The party’s only realistic hope in Uttar Pradesh is to replicate its Bihar strategy by playing second fiddle to a major state party—in this case, either the Bahujan Samaj Party or the Samajwadi Party. So far, the BSP’s leader, Mayawati, has rebuffed every approach, and so the less palatable choice of aligning with the SP may be all that remains. A Congress–SP alliance risks repeating the failure of the Congress–Left alliance in West Bengal, which found no way to counter a charismatic opposing leader.

After the elections in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the party will head into an election in Gujarat, sometime around the end of 2017, and ones in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, sometime around the end of 2018. In each of these states, the Congress will go up against rivals that will have been in power for three consecutive terms—and it is very rare for a government to exceed that limit, with only the Left Front government in West Bengal so far having managed it. Under ordinary circumstances, with three terms of anti-incumbency acting in its favour, these are all elections where a Congress victory would have been taken for granted. It says something of the health of the party that it can’t now be sure of a win in any of these states.

In Gujarat, the acute centralisation imposed by Sonia and the failure of Rahul’s attempts to establish new leadership are weighing the party down. Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi’s man Friday and currently a Rajya Sabha MP for the state, has no political standing of his own—he has never had any—but wields great power. Patel, however, has never managed to earn the trust of Rahul Gandhi, who has picked another political lightweight from Gujarat, Madhusudan Mistry, as his confidante. Patel and Mistry’s roles in ticket distribution and party organisation in the state are immense, and are based firmly on their connections to the Gandhi family. This, in effect, undercuts local leaders and the state unit’s power structure.

In Chhattisgarh, the long-term Congress member Ajit Jogi recently resigned to form a party of his own. He had been accommodated in Delhi for much of the past decade, but evidently no longer saw any future in that arrangement. He hasn’t yet expressed a desire to oppose the Congress, but this is only a question of his waiting to see which way the pre-election wind is blowing.

In Madhya Pradesh, the party is burdened both by Rahul spin-offs such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, a middling scion of storied political lineage, and old-timers such as Kamal Nath—who represents the state in the Rajya Sabha, and may yet be appointed to lead the party in the state despite the controversy in Punjab. This may not gain the Congress much in Madhya Pradesh, but it would leave the party even less capable of credibly raising issues against the BJP surrounding the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat. In any case, none of the Congress’s potential leaders in Madhya Pradesh has popularity beyond a single parliamentary constituency.

All of this demonstrates that, since Sonia took over the party in 1998, the Congress has failed to produce a single leader with mass electoral appeal. Instead, it has become increasingly dependent on Delhi-based lawyers and technocrats, who may be able to handle television debates, but do not contribute to the party’s political success. Rahul, who has been active in the party since 2007, has made desultory attempts to reinvigorate it by holding organisational elections, but these have also amounted to nothing.

In each of the state elections coming up over the next two years, the party faces two choices: to go it alone, as it did in Maharashtra, Haryana and Assam, where it was trounced by the BJP in a straight contest; or to choose allies, as it did in Bihar, and remain one, by no means dominant, partner in a larger formation. On the evidence so far, the former choice is no longer defensible, as the Congress seems incapable of taking on the BJP directly. Yet if the party fails to win against the BJP in at least two states out of Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, it can definitively forego any claim to being a national alternative to the ruling party. What it might be able to bring to a national anti-BJP alliance will hinge heavily on how it performs in Uttar Pradesh. With Sonia and Rahul in charge, the best the Congress can hope for is to be the first among equals in such a national alliance, but now even the chances of that are far from certain.