A face for the Congress
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Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram has set the cat among the Congress pigeons with his unequivocal opinion that the party needs to make its stand clear on its choice of Prime Minister candidate for next year’s parliamentary election. Mr Chidambaram made the point that granted that recent electoral contests in India—Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh specifically—had been personality oriented, the Congress Party would only be hurting itself by not projecting a leader for Lok Sabha 2014.
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The country’s finance minister’s views on the leadership issue would find resonance even with voters across the country. The Congress has traditionally clung to the “parliamentary democracy” argument to avoid projecting a leader for the elections hoping that one would emerge from consensus among the lot of elected MPs after the electoral process. In 2004 and 2009, the “democratic consensus” within the Congress meant literally that the decision of a single party leader—Sonia Gandhi in this case—prevailed to anoint Manmohan Singh as the chosen one.
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Though UPA1 did manage a success of sorts with its pro-poor agenda following the failure of the NDA’s India Shining campaign, much has changed in the last five years with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s lacklustre leadership doing little to pull the UPA2 out of its state of stasis. Much more has changed in fact in 2013 since Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s third-time victory in his state helped catapult him to the race for Delhi, and the Aam Admi Party’s rise from a motley group of civil rights protestors to an overnight political phenomenon.
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What was being seen as a clear battle between a Congress on the decline and the Modi-led BJP, has now turned into a far more nuanced fight for the Lok Sabha 2014 stakes. After the initial hiccups of getting himself nominated as the party’s PM candidate, Narendra Modi has largely directed his election rhetoric at the Gandhi family, most notably Rahul Gandhi. This though seems rather ironic, because apart from the Congress (read Sonia) moving just a notch up to elevate Rahul to the post of AICC vice president, there’s no word out yet on whether the reluctant heir to the Congress throne is willing to take on what seems to be turning into a crown of thorns.
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But Chidambaram is right. Without a face to project in the battle, the fight could be lost even before it begins. Which voter—even a diehard Congress one—would want to risk voting for a party that can at best offer another Manmohan Singh? A Narendra Modi that invokes admiration in some, fear in others and loathing in many, versus a Rahul Gandhi full of good intentions but unproven in leadership at least offers the voter a choice.
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Until last month it seemed but inevitable that Modi would lead the race to Raisina Hill. But the emergence of AAP and Arvind Kejriwal has compelled even the most ardent of Modi fans to revisit their predictions. The “third alternative” has thrown the spanner in the works. And contrary to early analyses that like in the Delhi election, it was the Congress that stood to lose the most from the AAP presence, the Modi campaign too has been somewhat dimmed by the Kejriwal factor and the 20 kilolitres of free water a month being pumped out to 900,000 families in Delhi effective January 1, 2014. Delhi, one might argue is only a fraction of India. But don’t forget it gets all the media coverage.
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