Every election is a battlefield of ideologies, and the upcoming 16th Lok Sabha poll is no exception. To counter Narendra Modi’s development campaign and wrest away its traditional underprivileged support base from AAP, Congress Vice President and poll campaign chief Rahul Gandhi is looking at the party’s Socialist past as it faces a grim future. Rahul has now directed his party units to connect with local NGOs, a sector that has been ignored by the UPA singing the reform tune. Rahul is not only in the process of meeting members of various NGOs and other social interest groups, he is also demonstrating a verifiable link with high-level policy interventions. Budget 2014, which was crafted by Finance Minister P Chidambaram, amply illustrates Gandhi’s neo-Socialist vision of wooing the underprivileged and women to garner electoral sympathy.
Shobha Oza, the Mahila Congress chief from Gujarat—Ground Zero of the Modi hurricane—has been told to liaise with women’s groups of various hues and get the Congress into the centre of coordinating public action around gender debates. For this, the near dysfunctional NGO Co-ordination Committee of the party has been resurrected with the appointment of five nodal persons: Indira Iyenger for Madhya Pradesh, Jija Hari Singh for Karnataka, Sonal Mehta for Gujarat, Anita Karnavar for Kerala and Bimla Saroha for Haryana.
Rahul has been interacting with non-political interest groups regularly the last few weeks. He recently met a body of ex-servicemen and promised them action on their long-pending demand for ‘one rank, one pension’, for which defence personnel had been moving heaven and earth for years. Sure enough, Chidambaram made the announcement agreeing to this long pending demand in his interim budget. One rank one pension would be “implemented prospectively” from 2014-15 and would cost the exchequer Rs.500 crore in the current fiscal year.
Rahul has also met through NGOs, representatives of street vendors and those working for their welfare and security. Last Wednesday, Rajya Sabha passed the Street Vendors Bill that had been gathering dust. He followed up by meeting with more NGOs on Thursday.
On February 17, it was the turn of the physically challenged to meet Rahul. At a connect exercise at Talkatora Stadium, hosted by Sports Minister and Rahul loyalist Jitendra Singh, the 42-year-old met sportspersons from all disciplines, present and past. The Mahila Congress, which had raised the Modi stalking issue dubbed ‘Snoopgate’, had also met President Pranab Mukherjee in the company of 26 women’s organisations, including Left-affiliated ones.
In his budget, Chidambaram upped the allocation for Minorities Affairs by 12 per cent (Rs.3,511 crore). He also increased allocation for scheduled castes and tribals to Rs.41,561 crore and Rs.24,598 crore respectively. As a sop for farmers, Chidambaram set a target of Rs.8 lakh crore of agriculture credit for 2014-15 fiscal. The interest subvention scheme will reduce rate of interest on farm loans to 4 per cent.
So what’s the deal? When AAP icon Arvind Kejriwal is wooing Rahul Bajaj and the rest of the corporate captains at CII, why would Rahul be going the opposite way and spending a lot of time talking and listening to NGOs?
The answer is not that complicated, says a senior Congress leader who works with Rahul. Kejriwal needs to now reassure corporates about his intentions, especially after filing the FIR against Mukesh Ambani on gas prices because he has the other side all sewed up anyway. As for the Congress, it’s a long trudge from the reforms platform of the last decade to reclaim its back-to-the-grassroots project, which it had lost mid way.
It was Sonia Gandhi who gave the pro-poor creative turn to Congress politics in the first term of the UPA. The party sees an “outsider” in the form of Kejriwal aiming for high stakes in the 2014 general election using this weapon. AAP systematically gathered talent, opinions and worldviews brimming in the voluntary sector and advocacy groups feeding into the process of policymaking with the much-vilified National Advisory Council.