Confident Congress not looking beyond nose

Neerja Chowdhury | New Delhi | 2 February 2009 |

Its election time again. And political parties have started to boil and toil the cauldron of coalitions. The Congress has declared no pre-poll national alliances, leaving the option of choosing its bed-fellows once the numbers come in after election results. Maybe we are looking at a new Congress avatar.

The Jan 29 meet of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) is in some ways a watershed, in so far as it ruled out a national coalition before the elections. It is not going to traverse the path the BJP took in 2004. The saffron party had forged a pre-poll National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with regional parties and a clear National Agenda for Governance. Since the BJP came a cropper in 2004, maybe the Congress is superstitious about going the BJP way.

At one level, tough talk by the Congress -”We do not have an alliance at the national level. We have alliance partners and seat adjustments at the state level”-shows a new found confidence in the party which was missing last year. All of 2008, it seemed that the country’s Grand Old Party had given up on the 2009 polls.

It also underscores the party’s assessment that it should bargain harder with its regional allies, since they need it more than the Congress needs them.

That is certainly true in UP and Bihar where the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) have higher stakes than does the Congress, which is a junior partner. So also is the case in Tamil Nadu, where the DMK, notwithstanding its Thirumangalam victory, needs the Congress – and whoever else it could get — to beat back Jayalalitha. The Congress is tying up with Vijay Kanth’s DMDK on the one hand and with the DMK on the other because the DMDK will not go with the DMK. If the arrangement with the popular Vijay Kanth goes through, the Congress will be adding value to the alliance.

However in Maharashtra, the Congress’ stakes are as high as of those of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The NCP was the first party to react sharply to the Congress’ tough talk.  Spokesperson DP Tripathi made it clear that “if the Congress breaks this coalition, we are free to take our own stand.” Pawar said his party was open to new allies and met  Prakash Karat recently following the CPI(M) general secretary’s expressed readiness to talk to the secular parties in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The NCP would like the UPA to fight elections as an entity.

The truth is that neither the Congress nor the NCP can do without each other in Maharashtra. If they decide to part company, both are going to suffer. Sharad Pawar knows this only too well and so does the Congress. By hardening its stance, the Congress is also expressing its unhappiness with the NCP’s projection of Sharad Pawar as a prime ministerial candidate and the NCP’s demand of 26 out of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra and 15 seats in other states. But at the end of the day, both are indulging in pre-poll brinkmanship, which they are not expected to take beyond the precipice.

That however may not be the case with the Samajwadi Party. Going by what happened at the CWC, the Congress is yet to make up its mind about an alliance with the SP. For a start, Rahul Gandhi took a hard line and so did a host of other leaders from UP like Devendra Dwivedi, Mohsina Kidwai, Satyavrat Chaturvedi and Janardan Dwivedi.  Digvijay Singh, who is in charge of UP and is known to have reservations about the alliance, left the decision open, striking a “lets wait and watch” note.

Given the way the Congress functions, it is highly unlikely that senior Congress leaders would express their views so forthrightly unless they thought the High Command wanted them articulated.  They would have thought many times if they believed Sonia Gandhi or Rahul had made up their mind in favour of an alliance. Some leaders even went to the extent of saying that since the SP had decided to leave Amethi and Rae Bareilly uncontested, in a gesture of goodwill, the Congress could reciprocate by leaving a couple of seats uncontested for the SP.

Those opposing an alliance with the SP essentially made three  points. One, they took objection to the SP leaders’  “attitude” and “demeanour” towards the Congress.  Two, to the number of seats the SP was offering the Congress, which was no more than 15 or 16. The SP has come to this figure on the basis of the seats the Congress had won and the seats on which it was second, to the either the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and not to the SP. This adds up to 15 and the SP was willing to be “generous” and give the Congress an additional seat to take the total to 16.

And the third was the Kalyan Singh factor. The Congress is of the view that the return to SP of Kalyan Singh, who as the UP Chief Minister had presided over the demolition of the Babri mosque, has not gone down well with the Muslims and could be costly for a Congress-SP alliance.

Incidentally, this is a calculated risk Mulayam Singh has taken to shore up his OBC base, right from Bullandshahr to Hamirpur, where the Lodhs are a factor, in the hope that the Muslims will vote tactically anyway and go for the candidate in a position to defeat the BJP. Mulayam is better placed to fight the BJP – and the BSP – with the Lodh vote in his kitty.

Muslims want power in UP, and they are not likely to go en bloc to Mayawati nor will they go to the Congress, if it de-links from Mulayam.

Clearly, the Congress is trying to drive a harder bargain with Mulayam, using the Kalyan factor. Kalyan Singh also wants legitimacy which the alliance would give him. But if the Congress is offered only 16 seats, and if seats like Farrukhabad are not left for its important leaders like Salman Khurshid, then it may not be worth its while to go ahead.

The party had won nine seats last time essentially on the strength of its candidates, and therefore there are only a handful of seats at stake. That is why if push came to shove, the Congress could go it alone.

In any negotiation, it is a case of who blinks first.  But there are many in the Congress who feels the time has come to start rebuilding the organisation from scratch and one of way of doing it is by fielding candidates in all constituencies, something the party would have to do at some point.

The alliance, on the other hand, could make a substantial difference to the SP. For a lot of water had flown down the Ganga between 2004 when it had got 35 Lok Sabha seats and 2007 when it came a poor second to the BSP.

The Congress’s new confidence was summed up in the comment of a CWC member: “I told a leader of the SP that your association with us will give you a national legitimacy and Mulayam Singh Yadav will become one of the half a dozen national leaders in the country as a result, like Lalu has become in the last five years.  For that you should be ready to place 40 seats at our feet.”

At another level, Janardan Dwivedi’s words have an import which goes beyond warding off “unreasonable” pressure from regional parties for seats outside their states.  Implicit in it —”An alliance is basically a game of numbers. It depends on who gets how many seats. This will be clear only after the elections.” – is the admission that power, not programmes, will be the basis of the alliance the Congress opts for after the elections.

Over the years the Left Front has been successful because of its programmatic cohesion. Other alliances have come apart because only power cemented them.

That centrist alliances have been held together by the principle of power over the last two decades is no secret. But it is the first time that the India’s Grand Old Party has admitted it so blatantly.

Janardan Dwivedi may defend the continuing existence of the UPA by arguing that “there is UPA, but the UPA does not fight elections.” But the upshot of what he said points to the demise of the UPA as we have known it. It will be there only till the elections.

With the Congress opting for bilateral arrangements with regional parties only at the state level, there is no concept of a multilateral entity which will rule the country, with ideological and programmatic underpinnings, if the Congress and other secular parties form the government again. It will be a new avtar of the UPA, depending on the arithmetic of the next Lok Sabha.

Clearly such an entity will be cobbled together only after the elections — no party is expected to get a majority on its own – and some kind of a common minimum programme will be hammered out. And subsequently be open to varying interpretations, as happened with the Left. The Congress may be feeling more confident today but it is making a case, again so openly, for a short-termism in politics.