P S Jha: RaGa's lack of leadership qualities will ensure that Congress will continue to lose elections

by Guest Fri Dec 22, 2017 10:37 pm

Compare this to the way Rahul and the Congress party have treated Aiyar and Sibal, both of whom were cabinet ministers in Manmohan Singh’s government. When Modi twisted Aiyar’s remark into a caste slur, he did not counterattack by exposing Modi’s misrepresentation (to use a word that fits into the Congress’s heritage). Nor did he remind Gujaratis that both B.R. Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram were members of the Congress party; that it was the Congress that had made SC/ST reservation a part of the constitution and that it was the Congress that had put up a Dalit, Meira Kumar, to be the president of India last June. Instead, he went into a blind panic, hastened to distance himself and the Congress from Aiyar, and then asked him to apologise to Modi.

The lesson that Gujarat, and one suspects India, learned was not that Rahul is a gentleman, but that he is not a fighter. Not only will he not defend his foot soldiers on the battlefield, but he is also far more likely to cut and run at the first whiff of grapeshot. The contrast between him and Modi could not, therefore, be more stark.

Not surprisingly, Modi was the first person to sense this. That is why he made Aiyar the single point focus of every speech during the rest of his campaign, accusing him of going to Pakistan to take a supari (contract) for arranging Modi’s assassination; of hosting a “secret” dinner for Pakistani officials to meet high-ranking Indian leaders, including the former prime minister and vice president of India; and so on ad nauseam.

He did this because he knew that, having thrown Aiyar to the wolves, the Congress could only sit and watch as he and other BJP leaders savaged him into pieces till there was nothing left of him to tear into bits. Modi knew, moreover, that every time he mentioned Aiyar, his audiences would think: Congress, thus the appeasement of Pakistan and therefore appeasement of Muslims in general. So he threw truth, decorum and constitutional propriety to the winds and went for the Congress’s jugular, while Rahul and his sycophantic advisers stood on the sidelines and watched.

Rahul’s lack of leadership qualities is the real reason why the Congress lost in Gujarat. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s share of the vote had risen to a mammoth 60%, from 48% only two years before, because Congress voters simply did not cast their vote. As a result, Gujarat recorded the fifth-lowest voter turnout, at 63.7%, in 2014. This was 7.6% below the turnout in 2012.

This year, both the Congress and the BJP’s share of the vote reverted to more or less what they had been in 2012, but its distribution was hugely different. The voting pattern shows that there was a huge anti-incumbency surge in Saurashtra and a smaller one in north and central Gujarat. Only in Bhuj, and south Gujarat, did the BJP vote remain utterly unshaken.

But the voting pattern also shows that the revival of the Congress vote remained incomplete, for inspite of the large anti-incumbency sentiment revealed by the pattern of victories and defeats, only 4.7% of the 7.6% who had boycotted the polls in 2014 returned to vote. Had even a small fraction of the rest done so, it is possible that the BJP would have lost its majority, for the BJP scraped through to a victory in nine constituencies in north and central Gujarat, and seven in Saurashtra, with margins of 5,000 or fewer votes. Nine of these were won with less than 2,000 votes. It is these seats that could have gone to the Congress, had the voters fully regained their confidence in the Congress.

The targeting of Aiyar occurred so late in the campaign – when the first phase of voting was already over – that it is impossible to tell how much it affected the morale of anti-BJP voters and dissuaded them from going out and being counted. But it could hardly have raised it, or reinforced their confidence in Rahul’s capacity to lead the nation.

That is why “seasoned leaders” like Moily and Gehlot have been pulled out of mothballs to defend Rahul’s ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour. But these are has-beens whose names have not even been heard in the past year. What Rahul needs to learn from is the silence of the leaders who have been most active in bringing the Congress back into the media limelight, such as P. Chidambaram, Sibal, Manish Tiwari, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot and Shashi Tharoor. They know the damage, tantamount to suicide, that Rahul and his cronies have inflicted not only on the Congress but also on India. Because after his tame acquiescence to Modi’s destruction of him through the instrumentality of Aiyar, there is once more no leader visible on the ‘secular’ horizon, who can make ordinary Indians feel safe as Modi has managed to do.

https://thewire.in/207407/gujarat-elections-bjps-congress-loss-rahul-gandhi/

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P S Jha: RaGa's lack of leadership qualities will ensure that Congress will continue to lose elections

P S Jha: RaGa's lack of leadership qualities will ensure that Congress will continue to lose elections