NEW DELHI: When counting of votes in Maharashtra and Haryana take place on Sunday, the victor and vanquished will not be reacting in the manner expected. The exit polls projections, though still needing to be proved right, have taken the sting out of the results, pushing the story to the ‘what next’ level and an emerging bi-polarity.
“What needs to be seen is whether the Congress ends up second or third in the tally of seats (won),” said a senior Maharashtra leader. On it depends the gamble the two national parties played, particularly in Maharashtra, of going it alone, breaking up with their traditional allies, Shiv Sena and NCP.
Clutching at straws, Congress leaders are willing to believe that their party top brass has wilfully gone ahead with the agenda, with a tacit understanding with its main rival on the national stage, to “gradually convert Indian politics into a bi-polar contest”—not just in the Centre but in the states. For that, “reducing the clout of the regional parties” and coalition politics has to end.
The similarity of ambition and scale of affairs in the two parties, the Congress and the BJP, ends there. While BJP’s Maharashtra leaders are currently in the race for the chief minister’s job, the debate at the AICC is about the future of Prithviraj Chavan and Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Though no one is expecting Hooda to become an AICC general secretary, the same cannot be said about Chavan. The latter, however, has sent a strong signal—winner or loser, he wants to continue and rough it out in state politics.
Speaking to The Sunday Standard, one Rahul Gandhi acolyte said of Chavan: “This is how leaders are made, through their mistakes. He has a clean image and he’s been chosen for state politics.” It was on Rahul’s insistence that Chavan was not replaced as CM, some months ahead of the elections, when such a demand had been made. As for Hooda, his problems could multiply by the day especially if a new dispensation in Haryana, as expected, decides to pursue the various land deals struck in his regime. But his MP son Deepender, the party’s chief whip in Lok Sabha, and his proximity to Rahul and the Robert Vadra complications would ensure that he would not be targeted within the party, a source said.
But when party seniors, the general secretaries, meet on Monday, to discuss the organisational revamp and internal elections in the backdrop of the Sunday results, the issues of no-possible alliances and the fate of the leaders at loose ends will weigh on their minds.
In contrast, BJP under Amit Shah is scheduled to launch a massive membership drive for the party from November onwards particularly in states where regional parties are ruling the roost. The Congress organisational revamp has to factor in this onslaught.
Rahul Gandhi, who’s virtually taking over as the working president of the party, “is restructuring block level units with people not interested in electoral politics alone—we have to revive the party on ideological grounds not on hope of getting tickets for contesting polls,” said Madhusudan Mistry, one of his pointsmen.
The next electoral challenge is Jharkhand, but the real battle is in Bihar and Bengal. BJP wants to wrest power in one and make itself a political force to reckon with in the second, cashing in on the Modi wave. But the Congress is convinced that “it won’t be that easy (for the BJP) in Bihar where caste equations and regional outfits based on it are too entrenched and in Bengal, where the minority voters contribute the swing factor”.
The Congress will also focus on Punjab where it feels the Akali-BJP alliance will “go kaput’’ sooner than later. Rahul, apparently, is convinced that the party has a strong local leadership and “only unity is what is required” (which is a tall order). But Rahul, it seems, “is more comfortable playing opposition politics”, just as the party workers “are happier without allies.”