{"id":209648,"date":"2014-01-30T16:26:17","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T10:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=209648"},"modified":"2014-01-30T16:26:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T10:56:17","slug":"a-lose-lose-presupposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/a-lose-lose-presupposition\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lose-lose presupposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rahul\"
Man with a plan<\/strong> Rahul is willing to bear defeat now for long-term gain.\u00a0Photo: Arun Sehrawat<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nCongress Vice-President and putative prime ministerial candidate Rahul Gandhi told a TV news channel last week he believed his party would win this year\u2019s Lok Sabha election. Given that a spate of opinion polls have predicted a drubbing for the shambolic Congress party, shocked commentators asked, does he really think so? If those around Rahul are to be believed, no, he doesn\u2019t think the Congress is coming back to power. In fact, Rahul is beginning to reconcile himself to the possibility of the Congress scoring its worst-ever tally in Parliament, lower than the 114 it won in 1999. But Rahul is also increasingly of the view that the BJP, his party\u2019s principal rival and the favourite of the opinion polls to form the next government, is going to be disappointed. And that in the BJP\u2019s failure to score enough numbers would lie the chance of the Congress.
\nFirst, why Rahul has begun to accept that a third successive term in New Delhi is too uphill for his flamed-out party. \u201cWe have allowed the grass to grow under our feet for too long,\u201d rues a key adviser of Rahul\u2019s, wiser on hindsight. Yes, the quarterbacks of India\u2019s most famous dynast concede, he should have been projected as the party\u2019s prime ministerial nominee long ago. \u201cWhen Rahul says he isn\u2019t interested in power, he actually speaks the truth,\u201d says an insider wryly. \u201cBut that\u2019s also why he appears to have no killer instinct.\u201d
\nAides now say Rahul should have played on the front foot far more, aggressively dominating the government\u2019s agenda instead of keeping a polite distance from PM Manmohan Singh, whose insipid leadership of the past four years has made his UPA-2 regime too toxic to defend. Aides also accept Rahul has no credible answers on why he didn\u2019t act on corruption charges against his party\u2019s governments and leaders, at the Centre and in Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh.
\nAides and advisers have been especially foxed by Rahul\u2019s refusal (and of his mother, Congress party president Sonia Gandhi\u2019s, too) to directly attack the BJP\u2019s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi even though the Gujarat chief minister himself has been barbecuing them in his public speeches. Surprising aides, Rahul has turned down suggestions that he debunk Modi\u2019s claim of having given good governance to Gujarat since taking charge of the state 12 years ago. He has even put a lid on attempts by the cadres to investigate and expose some of Modi\u2019s claims of development as false. \u201cRahul has an aversion to dirty politics,\u201d an insider says unhappily.
\nAnother aide, however, insists Rahul is in no torpor and that it is political calculation rather than morals that is shaping his approach. For better or for worse, the Congress vice-president reckons that challenging Modi aggressively on economy and development would be counterproductive, given Gujarat\u2019s rather upbeat economy that appears brighter compared with the national average as well as those of the Congress-ruled states. \u201cThe trouble is that Rahul is defensive about his party-led government\u2019s performance, especially its inability to revive the economy and push back the charge of corruption,\u201d he says. \u201cRahul wants to focus more on his party\u2019s economic prescriptions for the lower classes that are above the poverty line but still outside the middle class.\u201d
\nAnother reason Rahul is reconciling to a Congress downgrade in this summer\u2019s parliamentary election is that nearly the entire rung of the party\u2019s senior citizens has abandoned him. The top guns are alienated by Rahul\u2019s obstinate push for inner-party reforms that aim to break up the old boys\u2019 club and force a culture of transparency. Naturally, this has alarmed the hitherto deeply entrenched interests who are quietly digging in for a prolonged entrenched warfare once the election is over. Since most satraps, and their second-tier leaderships in the states, control the party apparatus in their backyards, Rahul has become a lone ranger in his quest. Old-timers recall how his father, former PM Rajiv Gandhi, had tripped in the 1980s when he tried to radically overhaul the party. A failure to win for his party the forthcoming election would further erode Rahul\u2019s capital, already much depleted in public imagination from losing a string of state elections.
\nFar-fetched as they may appear, the eerie prospects of an implosive takedown of the Congress party\u2019s original dynasty in case of an electoral rout are real. In fact, the process of choosing candidates for the Lok Sabha election is presaging that later battle, as the old guard and the traditional factions are girding up to fight for Lok Sabha seats for themselves and their factotums. It is increasingly becoming a no-win for Rahul, who realises that while he may need to embrace compromise in distributing nominations, he alone would be blamed for the party\u2019s loss.
\nHalf that battle would be salvaged, though, if the BJP were to fall short of forming the government. That would require the largest Opposition party to be stalled at around 160-odd seats or less, a good deal short of the 272 it would need for a majority in Parliament. Some opinion polls this month have suggested the Congress could get around 100 seats and the non-Congress and non-BJP parties around 180. Rahul believes it would then be opportune for his party to back a Third Front government as it did in 1996 to keep the BJP out. The scenario is now prompting a new thinking in the Rahul camp on how to defeat the BJP. And the answer is the \u201cMuslim voter\u201d model, which suggests that Muslims vote for any candidate that they think is best suited to defeat the BJP.
\nThe argument goes that the Congress should field lightweight candidates in constituencies where it does not have much scope to defeat the BJP, so that the anti-BJP voters consolidate behind a candidate from a third party. The proponents of this tactic are especially suggesting its application in Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress is unlikely to forge an alliance with either of the state\u2019s two biggest parties, the ruling Samajwadi Party and former CM Mayawati\u2019s Bahujan Samaj Party. The return of former Karnataka CM BS Yeddyurappa to the BJP has also thrown up the idea of either a tactical or unspoken alliance with the Janata Dal (Secular) of former PM HD Deve Gowda.
\n\u201cThe fact is that if Modi fails to bring the BJP to power, his political power would be hugely dented,\u201d a Congress leader told TEHELKA. Having been out of power for a decade already, the BJP would then run a risk of falling into disarray, he said, which would give Rahul enough time to reshape the Congress party and be ready for the next election. In any case, in a scenario wherein the Congress party backs a minority Third Front government, Rahul would have the advantage of pulling out the support at a time of his choosing that would trigger a mid-term election, he suggested.
\nThe Rahul camp is also making a distinction between Modi and the BJP. \u201cModi as PM would be unacceptable to many political parties that cannot win without Muslim votes,\u201d says the Congress leader. Several such parties, including West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee\u2019s Trinamool Congress and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar\u2019s Janata Dal (United), would be otherwise willing to join the BJP if Modi is kept out. For this reason, the Congress would be happier if the BJP is unable to shake Modi off after the results are out, which would then automatically bring a Third Front to coalesce.
\n\u201cThe funny thing is that over the past two decades, the Congress has lost Lok Sabha polls when it expected to win and won when it expected to lose,\u201d says another leader with a chuckle. As a newly-installed president of the Congress, Sonia had led herself to believe she was well placed to lead her party back to power in 1999, which the incumbent BJP-led coalition unexpectedly won. In 2004, few had given the Congress even an outside chance to topple the NDA government, but the latter unexpectedly lost it.
\najit@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rahul Gandhi is betting on the BJP\u2019s failure to win the Lok Sabha polls so that even a reduced Congress can play kingmaker to a Third Front, reports Ajit Sahi <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":209653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,453,236,9022,316,579,9023,7865],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209648"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}