How did Punjab remain an oasis amid Congress ruin in North India?

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How did Punjab remain an oasis amid Congress ruin in North India?

Monday, 27 May 2019 | Amitabh Shukla

Punjab Congress under Capt Amarinder Singh built a counter narrative to Modi’s muscular nationalism with a regional variation and managed to counter the BJP wave effectively

Amid the ruins and crumbling edifice all over the country, Punjab and Kerala are the only two oases for Congress in 2019, giving the grand old party something to cheer about—a consolation prize in times of utter political despair and gloom.

In Punjab, Congress won an impressive 8 seats and 40 per cent of the votes which is much more than 4 seats and 33 per cent in the 2014 polls, indicating that the graph of the party is going up despite Prime Minister Modi and BJP building up a narrative of muscular nationalism post the Balakot air strike inside Pakistan.

As Punjab is a border state and has faced the brunt of all the wars which the country has fought with Pakistan—1948, 1965 and then 1971 and also faced one of the worst phases in its existence in the form of Pak-sponsored terrorism for over 10 years in the 1980s and early years of 1990s, the narrative which Modi built of national security had the potential of getting more traction in this state. But this simply failed to get dividends here because of the counter narrative built by the Capt Amarinder led Punjab Congress which has to be differentiated from the Rahul Gandhi led Congress.

Two seats which BJP won in Punjab was Gurdaspur which was largely due to the star power of Sunny Deol and Hoshiarpur reserved seat where the local factors went against the Congress as well as the improved performance of Bahujan Samaj Party, ensuring the victory of BJP candidate Som Prakash. Long-time alliance partner, Shiromani Akali Dal managed to win from Bathinda and Ferozepur with the husband-wife duo of Harsimrat Kaur and Sukhbir Badal getting the voters’ approval due to the concentration of the entire Akali machinery here.

For all practical purposes, in Punjab, Congress has been more or less converted into a regional party for a while now, with a strong regional satrap in Capt Amarinder Singh as head of the state. The party in Punjab has little to do with the high command culture prevalent in Congress where decisions are made at the central level and communicated to the states. In fact, to be fair to the party President Rahul Gandhi, he has left it to Capt Amarinder to decide what is good for the party in the state and hardly imposes his will and decisions on the state leadership.

Just before the Lok Sabha elections when former Congress Working Committee Member Jagmeet Singh Brar approached the party high command for re-entry into the Congress, possibly to contest the Lok Sabha elections, the high command simply directed him to Capt Amarinder rather than taking a decision on its own and then imposing him on the chief minister. The set-up is perfect in Punjab for the former army Captain. PCC President Sunil Jakhar is a hardcore Amarinder loyalist and even the AICC in-charge of the state, Asha Kumari, is hardly a political heavyweight and Capt Amarinder has his say in almost all matters pertaining to the state.  That’s the kind of respect Capt Amarinder enjoys right now with the top leadership of the party. Of course, the leaked messages of Brar to Capt Amarinder speaks volumes about the level of sycophancy which the former Congressman indulged in to get into the Congress but the chief minister refused to have any tuck with him given his limited appeal and party hopping tendencies.

Moreover, almost all candidates of the Congress from Punjab were practically hand-picked by Capt Amarinder and they owe their loyalty to him rather than any leader in the high command or any other faction within the party. Manish Tewari, a former Lok Sabha MP from Ludhiana, who wanted a ticket from Chandigarh, was given nomination from Anandpur Sahib Constituency, an entirely new seat for him from where he had no political linkage or any claim. Capt Amarinder ensured that Tewari emerged victorious and no doubt along with Shashi Tharoor, the MP from Kerala, he would be the face of the party in the Lok Sabha after the defeat of seasoned Congress parliamentarians Mallikarjun Kharge from Karnataka and Jyotiraditya Scindia from Madhya Pradesh.

Despite his success at the regional level, it would be ridiculous to portray Capt Amarinder as a national leader and a possible replacement for Rahul Gandhi.  It is too far-fetched a political theory and even Capt Amarinder would not agree to this as he knows his limitations as a leader beyond 13 parliamentary and 117 assembly seats of Punjab. First, he never had a national ambition nor has it now after the impressive show of his party in the Lok Sabha elections. Second, his age—at around 80, he is not getting any younger and would be unsuitable for any national role and a prolonged campaign. Third, his inability or rather unwillingness to communicate in Hindi, the language of the cow belt and large part of the country, would further reduce his appeal. It is similar to Manmohan Singh, the two-term Prime Minister, who was a poor communicator in all languages and could not communicate even the achievements of his government properly. So, it seems outrageous to even think that Capt Amarinder can have any meaningful national role. In fact, he hardly campaigned for his party anywhere else in the country even in the 2019 polls.

Coming back to the border state and the narrative of “muscular nationalism” whatever that means, Capt Amarinder repeatedly extolled the armed forces first for the surgical strikes and then hitting the terrorist camps in Balakot post Pulwama. Coming from an ex-serviceman who takes pride in using “Captain” before his name, a person who had seen the 1965 action from close quarters as an officer in uniform and is a proud military historian, Modi’s narrative fizzled out in the border state. Even when Capt Amarinder asked for evidence for the Balakot strike, he was convincing as he himself gave numerous examples from the 1965 war where the victorious Indian army officers had brought trophies of war from amongst the Pakistani army as proof of victory. So once the narrative of “muscular nationalism” fizzled out in Punjab, there was little chance of it getting the desired votes for the SAD-BJP combine. The simple fact of the matter is that Capt Amarinder matched Modi step by step in the aggressive narrative post Pulwama-Balakot episodes and did not follow the Congress party line of being suspect and unsure how to react to these developments.

Again, BJP has been riding piggy-back on the Akalis for several decades in Punjab now, unsure if it can have an independent identity of its own in the Sikh dominated state. RSS too has been trying to expand its influence amongst the Sikhs through the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat for years now with limited appeal and little scope of penetrating the rural Sikh peasantry. Akalis have been fighting a battle of perception ever since their defeat in the Assembly elections in 2017 and are constantly on the back-foot since then. Family rule has been firmly established in the Akalis with several members of the Badal family dominating the political firment of the state for long. Amongst the hitherto loyal Akalis, there is resentment and voices have been building up against them in the last over two years. The general sentiment amongst the common Akalis is that they had always fought for religious issues of the Sikhs and the leadership was broad based and largely collective, not concentrated in the hands of one family as is the case right now.

Moreover, in Punjab, Capt Amarinder also tried to play identity politics like never before as a foil to the Akalis and much like Modi and his BJP did in the rest of the country. He tried to and to some extent appropriated the religious issues which the Akalis had been using for decades. This was like hurting the opponent where it hurts the most. When police firing took place at a place called Baragari on protestors after several incidents of sacrilege of religious scriptures came to notice, the Akalis were on defensive. Like a good heavy-weight wrestler, Capt Amarinder simply raised the pitch on Baragari police firing in his entire campaign, making one announcement or the other to keep the Akalis on the defensive, on the mat. Capt Amarinder got the police officers responsible for the firing arrested, promising to reach to the top of Akali leadership which was the then chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and his son Sukhbir Badal. Akalis, in turn, had little or nothing to offer to the aggression of Capt Amarinder and his team who was clearly enjoying the new rules of the game which he had just introduced.

So in reality, Congress did become an umbrella organisation of all groups in Punjab—the rural Sikhs for whom religious issues are important, the urban centric voters for whom Akali Dal has  little or nothing to offer and also the large section of the dalits in the Doaba region where Congress always had more traction than its rivals. No wonder, the party emerged as an oasis amid despair in north India and also gave appropriate lessons to the central leadership how to successfully counter the narrative of “muscular nationalism” with a similar one with a regional variation.

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