BSP is only doing what most hard-nosed regional parties will do to prepare for 2019; Congress’ woes will mount

It has been a political pity-inducing sight to see Congress leaders floundering over the past 24 hours. First, as they tried to make sense of BSP leader Mayawati’s lethal blow to the prospects of a tie-up with them in the Hindi belt by going ahead and unilaterally announcing a pre-poll alliance with former Congressman Ajit Jogi’s regional outfit Janata Congress in Chhattisgarh for the Assembly polls due in the State, while simultaneously announcing candidates for 22 Assembly seats in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh too even as the grand old party thought it was in discussions with the BSP supremo on seat-sharing. Subsequently, the Congress veterans’ even more pathetic attempts to explain her move as only for State Assembly polls which would not impact plans for a nationwide grand Opposition alliance or mahagathbandhan for the Lok Sabha poll in 2019. Really. The penny seems still not to have dropped for the Congress. Indian politics is ruthless, regional parties will sing secularism in one voice with the Congress only till they feel it has the capacity to deliver minority votes and no regional leader of stature will agree to work under the Congress or even with it unless it gets its own house, which is support base, in order. A look at the line-up regional parties willing and/or eager to do business with the Congress and the issue will clarify itself — the only States where the regional parties are willing to take the Congress along is where it has been reduced to a rump and polls five to eight per cent of the vote which could prove very useful in pipping the BJP to the post. Wherever the Congress is the BJP’s principal opponent, regional forces know an alliance with the Congress could mean risking their support base getting appropriated by the grand old party as it attempts to build its social coalition of yore.

So, in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan the BSP is playing hardball, in Punjab, Delhi and Goa, ditto AAP. In Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, on the other hand, where regional parties are the main players and the Congress a bit player, Akhilesh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Mamata Banerjee and MK Stalin are more accommodative because the single-digit vote share of the Congress in these States does not threaten them; in fact, it could make the difference between scraping through and winning big. Of course, all political understanding is not the preserve of editorial writers and the Congress has enough senior leaders who are well aware of this reality. Some of them have even spoken of resurrecting the long-forgotten Panchmarhi Resolution which spoke of rebuilding the Congress from the ground up, not desperately seeking allies and re-establishing itself as the second pole of national politics given the BJP has already firmly occupied the other pole. But such is the fascination of the current Congress leadership with the heavy on theory light on results Leftist cabal to which it seems to have outsourced its ideological orientation, which is then used to establish the party’s ‘political line’, that the portents for the party seem very ominous indeed. It is hurtling down the same path to irrelevance that the Communists forged for themselves post-Independence when they were seen as the second force in Indian politics to a situation today where their electoral glories are confined to winning JNU students’ union polls. The brutal political reality is that the BJP in its current avatar seems to have so spooked Congressmen and Congresswomen that they are behaving like lemmings rushing en masse to the sea.