11 March 2020
Since the Shah-Modi team are fond of spectacle, we saw the carefully orchestrated drama on Holi of Mr Jyotiraditya Scindia finally leave the INC by resigning his primary membership of the party in a letter addressed to interim President Ms Sonia Gandhi dated 9 March but delivered on the 10th. If this was a surprise, then you are not a political animal. If at all, this was stretched out too far, it should have been timed better for Mr Scindia, because, now he is very visibly a person who tweeted after the Delhi Pogrom calling for sanity and secularism, and who just met the PM escorted by the MHA before resigning and changing his political colours on Holi.
Naturally he has a history, so folks went all the way to Panipat and Jankoji Shinde his ancestor, who cut his losses and retreated before the rout on Solstice day in 1761. Actually, our national mood is sickeningly such a sour puss that is in utter contrast with our private posture, for insults we can trace back to our forbears, but for citizenship registry we can’t? Looking at the dissonance of the media and analysts and even ordinary voting public, one can ask, who first broke ranks? We did, long before Late Madhavrao Scindia’s son did, that too on his father’s 75th Birth Anniversary as noted by commentators. For last decade or so, Guna and Gwalior had turned coats, going from tricolour to saffron, and it was at odds with his constituency, that Mr JM Scindia was politically aligned. So now if he turns Independent, or founds a regional party or joins the BJP, he would afford his constituency with a chance to reassess him. Remember this, Nehru’s great grandson Mr Varun Gandhi is comfortably with the BJP for decades now, so why must only Madhavrao’s son carry the cross of secularism and be damned?
In any case, the INC effort to portray this as purely an ideological distancing will not work, because, it doesn’t explain the efforts Scindia put in in UP for Lok Sabha 2019. That he was one of those who felt the ‘resignation’ of Mr Rahul Gandhi post the debacle that the INC was being scuppered from within more than being targeted from without, that it needed a complete overhaul of leadership from block level to the CWC, so that genuine cadre of the INC are not repeatedly dismayed at the hustings.
Few people know the INC like Mr Rahul Gandhi does, and if you speak with former active politicos from the IYC, you know that largely the IYC is grassroots, it can still spring surprises like in Benares and now Gujarat, which means ideologically it can still attract youth in every academic batch in even states where the INC has not been in political power for ages. Yet, this progression from student/youth level talent was not getting transmitted into the parent party for the reasons that were simply Indian post colonial psyche? A fear of the unknown, fear of losing ‘respect’ if one could not command it? A disdain for youth? A sense of clinging on and not letting go?
Unlike the BJP, where the RSS has managed to churn leaders through orchestration and where now Mr Modi and Mr Shah hold an unusual amount of paramountcy which is discomforting for the pracharaks, all other parties in India are stuffed with clingers. Look at the West Bengal Rajya Sabha nomination for CPIM. You have the Karats blocking Yechuri, there is a State Committee recommendation shot down by the Politburo, which is Left Speak for High Command. Of course, BJP too now has a High Command as seen in how Karnataka CM BS Yedurappa keeps shuttling to Delhi with lists of probables for his cabinet expansion. Yet for now, this team is delivering like anything. First in Karnataka it tried the usual tricks, before finally taking the path of making MLAs resign, which involved ensuring a judicial verdict that would overturn the Speaker’s disqualifications. So with SC orders, it got all the resigned MLAs to contest as BJP candidates and win, a real risky proposition, considering how its own cadre and loyalists in those constituencies would now feel. It shows their hold over the party faithful, with the tag line- Modiji ne kiya tho kuch tho Socha hoga! ( If Mr Modi did something, he must have thought through it!)
Mr Modi and by extension, Mr Shah are the new Narada of mythical proportions. Whatever confusion or dismantling of known alliances and loyalties is now witnessed across India’s political spectrum, it would end eventually in ‘Good’. The only doubt now, is whether in the long term, it would hurt the BJP, or even in the short term like Mr Ajit Pawar, it would thwart the state unit to the extent of losing out on ruling a state for the time being. Is there something called public fatigue with this baggage of tricks and threats, that Mr Shah pulls his magical rabbits of majorities from? Definitely today’s BJP is far removed from the austere Jan Sangh, even further from the ‘Bhisma’ like principled leadership of the Vajpayee-Advani era. Yet, it is delivering unqualified success, converting electoral setbacks into legislative gains.
At a time when steam rolling majority in Lok Sabha has led to write downs to Article 370, to CAA, to Triple Talaq Act and we are now on the anvil of Uniform Civil Code and other definitive agenda of the RSS, which eventually could end up with repeal of the Ambedkar Nehru Constitution and its replacement with a Smriti backed Italian Fascist import of a totalitarian statuesque edifice that is publicly evoked as ‘Akhand Bharat /Hindu Rashtra’. So this timely switch by Mr Scindia is seen as one handing over a clear Rajya Sabha majority for the BJP. Yet, folks do not see how BJP already has a plan in the works, which would make BJD MP deputy speaker in LS, a model where once Vajpayee Government had a compact with Chandrababu Naidu led TDP.
So for all those over reacting to Mr Scindia’s departure, they are not in his shoes. He has a constituency to regain, his entire political legacy as a former Princely state to reconcile with. One that even deputy CMship of MP could not counter stance. ( Sachin Pilot who is his contemporary accepted this model for Rajasthan) Likewise Mr Rahul Gandhi is not abandoned or isolated, he has been orphaned by his own mother and sister. Else when he resigned as President, his mother would not have become interim with such alacrity, without committing to a way forward for elective leadership that he sought to replace his, as a way to fire up the base and to rebuild the party’s credentials with its voter base.
For decades now, INC’s formula has been to be where it is, trading vested interests, bartering loyalties, while leaving grassroots political work to un-empowered gullible. That is why Congress’s Committees are full in membership even as its volunteers have withered away. They have a theory that Indian masses will return to pick the INC because they have no other choice. A strategy that served them well in 1979, in 1991, in 2004 and 2009, because all these electoral results were attained without any reset of the party to its founding representational values. Even now the CWC and other Committee members, who are the establishment within the party are simply playing the biding game, only fortuitously Maharashtra was pulled off by Mr Sharad Pawar and hence their model will get sustained through this sharing with financial support. What they are yet to see is the writing on the wall…one which even Mr Uddhav Thackeray has seen and adapted to!
Electoral Bonds, pliant Administrative and Judicial arms, a compliant electoral vote bank which is looking to settle ancient scores, a media that is now a butt of stand up comics on American Television, all add up as consolidating the hold of Mr Modi and Mr Shah to power. The INC is not going to do anything to disturb this, and they are actually looking for deliverance from outside, most keenly from a return of voters to them after having had their fill of Mr Modi in 2024! They played the waiting game with Mr Scindia, they may well play it with any body from Mr Deora to Mr Pilot, for few analysts realise that they have first played it with Mr Rahul and reduced him to where he is successfully!
indiarubberman.com 