Till seven years ago, the Congress was the undisputed lead political player in Delhi. Its three-term chief minister Sheila Dikshit was everyone’s popular choice. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had once considered Delhi as its fiefdom, made valiant attempts to dethrone the Dikshit-led Congress. But to little avail.
The Congress was eventually felled in 2013, not by the well-entrenched BJP but by newbie Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party, which had emerged from a two-year-long anti-corruption movement that also devoured the grand old party in the subsequent Lok Sabha election.
Today, as Delhi braces for another assembly poll on February 8, the battle lines are clearly drawn between the BJP and Kejriwal’s AAP. The Congress is not in the picture.
Both the BJP and AAP have hit the ground running. Their leaders and candidates are keeping a punishing schedule, going out on a limb to woo the voter. The BJP has drafted its senior ministers, present and former chief ministers and MPs for electioneering, with home minister Amit Shah emerging as the party’s chief campaigner. The BJP strategy is very clear: use the Shaheen Bagh agitation to polarise the voters, and paint the protesters as anti-nationals who need to be put down with a firm hand.
Battling hard to win a second term, Kejriwal is leading AAP’s cadres, making sure he does not fall into the BJP trap by getting involved in a slanging match with it on the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. He has, instead, kept the focus on his government’s achievements.
As the two parties slug it out, the Congress, once the dominant force in Delhi for 15 long years, is not even an also-ran in this election. The party’s Delhi unit is in disarray, it does not have a chief ministerial candidate, its campaign is virtually non-existent, while none of its senior leaders have deigned to put in an appearance in the field so far. It is perplexing that Rahul Gandhi has chosen to address public meetings in Rajasthan and Kerala, even as the Congress is battling for survival in Delhi. Congress strategists insist that the Gandhis will start campaigning from February 2, but it will be a proverbial case of too little, too late. It is almost as if the Congress has given up the fight, having realised there’s little hope for the party, and that its best case scenario is to insulate its star campaigners so that they are not held responsible for what appears to be certain defeat.
That the Congress had thrown in the towel well before the campaign got underway was evident when none of its senior state leaders was ready to enter the electoral fray, as suggested by Sonia Gandhi, who wanted them to lead by example. Former Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken, once projected as Sheila Dikshit’s successor, was the first to opt out of the race. He has since gone abroad and is missing in action.
After Maken took over the state unit from Sheila Dikshit, it was widely expected that the younger leader would rebuild the party organisation and groom a new set of leaders. But it was not to be, as Maken’s leadership only intensified internal bickering in the party. The Congress leadership was eventually forced to fall back on Sheila Dikshit once again, but by then, the damage had already been done. When she took charge of the Delhi Congress for the second time last January, the Congress vote share had plummeted from 24 per cent to 9.7 per cent, while its social base was severely eroded. Dalits, minorities, slum-dwellers and middle classes, who had once rooted for the Congress, had since shifted allegiance to Kejriwal who had successfully won them over by delivering on his promises by providing cheaper power, upgrading government schools, setting up mohalla clinics and introducing free bus travel for women.
The Congress found it difficult to recover from this loss. In fact, it did not even make a serious attempt to regain lost ground. To be fair, it was not an easy task. It is an acknowledged fact that the party flounders whenever there is a third political player in contention, while it is able to hold its own in a bipolar election.
The late Congress leader S Jaipal Reddy had once commented that a party can always recover from an electoral loss, but it is difficult, even impossible, to bounce back when it loses its social base. This is exactly what happened to the Congress in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where its support base of minorities, scheduled castes and upper castes showed a preference for regional players like the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal and a resurgent BJP.
As a result, the Congress has been languishing on the margins for the past three decades in these Hindi heartland states and, from all accounts, the party is going down the same road in Delhi.Nizamuddin Auliya’s famous words -- Dilli door ast – could well prove prophetic for the Congress.
Anita Katyal
The writer is a senior journalist.
This column will appear every fortnight