New Delhi, India – A little more than two months ago, India's largest opposition party, the Congress party, seemed to be on track.
Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Mahatma Gandhi Party, the country's oldest political movement, drew large crowds at marches across the country and offered hope to the Congress, which has been struggling for relevance after a series of political setbacks. I rekindled it.
In May, the party won parliamentary elections in the southern state of Karnataka, home to startup hub Bengaluru, unseating a seat from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. And polls had predicted that the party would win in four of the five states that voted for state assemblies in November: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram.
Party veterans said these predicted victories would have provided ballast for the Congress to field Mr. Modi in the general elections that are just weeks away.
Just the opposite happened. The polls were wrong. Congress won only in Telangana.
“According to all the polls, the Congress was leading with 2% votes in the Madhya Pradesh elections, but we lost by 8% votes. How do the final results compare to these polls? Did it go against it?'' asks senior party leader Digvijay Singh, a former chief minister of India's central state.
An immediate answer to this question and similar questions related to the gulf between the party's hopes and recent results could set the stage for a showdown with Mr. Modi in the upcoming national polls, analysts and analysts said. It is said that it has the potential to become the center of the 138-year-old party's potential. Congressional leaders.
A good performance in these state elections would have vindicated Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodho Yatra. The march took 150 days to cover more than 4,000 km (2,485 miles) from Kanyakumari in the southern tip of the country to Indian-controlled territory. Kashmir in the north. In most states that went to polls in November, the Congress went head-to-head with the Bharatiya Janata Party, siding with the opposition in hopes of benefiting from anti-incumbent voter sentiment against the ruling government. .
What went wrong?
A Congress leader from Madhya Pradesh, on condition of anonymity, claimed that he had warned the party leadership that mobilization efforts needed to be focused on the state's 21% tribal vote, but attempts to persuade had failed. . “Congress was very happy,” the party leader said. According to him, the BJP has gained by focusing on the tribal community and securing their votes. Many of the seats won by the Congress in the 2018 parliamentary elections went to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The same scenario played out in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, where the Bharatiya Janata Party won most of the tribal-dominated seats, reversing what happened in 2018.
Party insiders have also raised the idea of a smaller regional party like the Samajwadi Party, which is based primarily in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, but also has a small presence in Madhya Pradesh. He blames the arrogance of leaders who refuse to do so.
Some, like former state premier Singh, see a more sinister conspiracy at play. He alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party was able to contest the polls in recent elections through rigging of electronic voting machines and mechanisms that kept paper voting records.
But there is little hard evidence of systemic fraud in these elections, and critics of Congress say they use the same process they criticized when they lost and quickly accept the results if they win. He points out.
Many Congress leaders disagree with Singh's claims. One of them said it was clear that the party was losing in Madhya Pradesh. This was not because of any wrongdoing, but because the “management of both parties” was insufficient. This refers to the practice of party officials to ensure that voters show up and cast their votes every time. voting station.
The Congress is trying to rebuild its fortunes by accepting regional parties into a national coalition called the Union of India. This move forced the Bharatiya Janata Party to rethink its strategy.
But since then, the Bharatiya Janata Party has succeeded in gradually breaking down the Indian alliance. Nitish Kumar, chief minister of the northern state of Bihar, left the state and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA coalition. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has also left India, but it is unclear whether she will join the NDA, which she once joined 20 years ago.
Many Congress allies face the wrath of Modi's government-controlled law enforcement in New Delhi, including former chief minister of the central state of Jharkhand Hemant Soren, who was arrested on corruption-related charges in January, but he denies it. are doing.
However, party insiders admit that the Congress itself is to blame for the party's withdrawal from the alliance. One reason? They allege that they refuse to properly accommodate their partners in seat sharing, a concern raised by Kumar from Bihar as well.
Sanjay Kumar, a political analyst and professor at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, said the challenges facing Congress lie at the heart of that failure. At the moment it wants to work with smaller parties, but in the long term it wants to compete for every seat in parliament on its own.
“The Congress party is struggling with a dilemma between the short term and the long term,” Kumar said.
In an attempt to sway public opinion in favor of the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi attempted a repeat of his earlier long march. In his latest “Bharat Jodh Nyay Yatra” (March for a United India through Justice), he promises to cover 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles) from east to west of India.
But experts question whether it makes sense for the party to focus on grand philosophical questions when the country is in the midst of a winner-take-all election campaign.
“The timing of the yatra is strange. On the Lok Sabha, political analyst Harish Khare said the party's attention and imagination should have been fully focused on the Indian Assembly polls, but it has turned into a distraction. “Rahul has not been successful in taking the narrative away from the Bharatiya Janata Party and has not been able to enthuse rank-and-file members of the Congress.”
Many of the states through which the new march passed, including West Bengal and Bihar, were then ruled by Indian affiliated parties. West Bengal Chief Minister Banerjee publicly questioned the intentions of the march through the ally state.
Critics have questioned whether the march is part of Rahul Gandhi's efforts to build his own brand.
However, former Indian finance minister and veteran Congress leader P. Chidambaram disagrees. “Rahul is not power-hungry. If he had wanted, he would have become chief minister long ago,” Chidambaram said.
Chidambaram pointed out that the majority of the 543 seats in India's parliament will put Indian Union members in a direct fight with the BJP and its coalition.
But while the Congress maintains that the upcoming elections are essentially a battle for the survival of India's democracy and portrays the Bharatiya Janata Party as an authoritarian-minded force, analysts say The Bharatiya Janata Party says it is struggling to convince voters of such a narrative.
“There is no positive agenda in Congress,” said Kumar, the CSDS analyst. “The public is not really convinced even on the issue that the Bharatiya Janata Party is a threat to democracy and freedom of expression.”
Anxiety within the party has increased in recent days. Ashok Chavan, a senior leader and former chief minister of Maharashtra, which has the most seats in Congress after Uttar Pradesh, left the Congress to join the BJP. He was soon appointed to the Senate of Congress.
On Friday, the National Congress party claimed that its bank account had been frozen over suspected tax arrears.
Chidambaram, who is part of the party's manifesto drafting team, said the public is concerned about inflation that has remained above 4% for almost the entirety of Prime Minister Modi's current term and the unemployment rate that has hovered around 8%. He said he is doing so.
But the party acknowledged that for the Congress to be “in a position to beat the Bharatiya Janata Party”, it needed to channel public anger in its favor. And there isn't much time left.