But the final test lies ahead

By any yardstick, it takes stupendous effort, extraordinary will, as well as a supple political imagination, to breathe life into a party written off by most. It was perceived to be in a state of secular decline.

In the last Lok Sabha election, Sonia had campaigned with her back to the wall, and managed to save the Congress from near certain death. Still, neither her party nor the country was fully persuaded she had it in her to get up and lead the Congress. She was not then the official leader of theparty, had no particular responsibilities and could not be held accountable for its final showing.

Naturally, there was no dearth of sceptics. Did she have the staying power or, for that matter, the skills, to overcome and lead a complex and tricky organisation burdened with ghosts from history? Indeed, did she wish to be Congress leader; or would she be content to perform, given her family moorings, the odd salvage act strictly in the capacity of a guest artist? Did she have the resources to stave off challenges from within the Congress? And, since the younger Mrs Gandhi was not a natural-born Indian, the mother of all questions was: would the nation really accept her as a leader even if she had what it takes to be in the first rank of politics?

The past eight months have answered these questions. Under Sonia’s leadership even the Sikhs, wounded by Operation Bluestar, have returned to the Congress, not to mention the other minorities and broad sections of the country’s poor. In golfing parlance, theassembly results have turned out to be a ‘hole in one’ for the Congress. Indeed, it is fair to say Sonia Gandhi has survived India’s first genuinely non-Congress rule with aplomb in her capacity as the country’s principal opposition leader. She performed this task with dignity and restraint. And when it came to electioneering, she demonstrated both verve and flair, reminding old hands of her famous mother-in-law.

Leading from the front, Sonia Gandhi has come through two crucial elections in a row, but her final test is still to come. It is this which will decide whether she can make the transition from being a major political figure to emerging as a durable national leader. And to achieve this she will have to take the Congress through a proper Lok Sabha victory to the portals of power. She will have to be the Tony Blair of Indian politics. Nothing less would do. It would not be nearly enough for her, for instance, to help the Congress manoeuvre its way into office in the life of the present Lok Sabha. Inthe end, like Blair, she would have to go on the stump and win a parliament election hands down to gain the stamp of authority. The British leader will go down in history for returning Labour to office after 20 years in the cold. That is one full generation. The Congress too has been a write-off for nearly 10 years, while its stock had begun to crash well before that. In this respect the two situations are strikingly similar. However, the recipes for success in Britain and India can hardly be the same, given this country’s vastness and large-scale rural as well as urban poverty.

In the end, it was the insensitivity to this calculus that laid the BJP low. So, when Sonia Gandhi pitches into her crucial election fray — and she is likely to have much to do with its timing though it cannot be entirely in her hands — she will have to convince people she means business. She need not make extravagant promises, but she will have to persuade them of her sympathies for the less privileged of all castes, faiths andregions and also of her ability to make the economy grow.

In the absence of this, the poverty of the underprivileged is often used by the vendors of spurious political merchandise to buttress their own unscrupulous agendas. The recent assembly elections were hardly about onions though onion prices became the catalyst for the unravelling of the BJP in the eyes of the electorate. In the final analysis, it is the BJP’s communal politics which took a beating as every section of the populace began to feel its vital interests were being willfully neglected by those in power. The only surprise is it happened so ridiculously early.

In the end, of course, the BJP was betrayed by its own class: the traders, who manufactured shortages of everyday items — from oil to vegetables and salt. They exploited the situation knowing full well the government would not dare touch them as the RSS-BJP had relied on their largesse for decades. The BJP’s inherent social base was much too narrow for it to invoke the sympathies ofany other strata when in trouble. It is nearly impossible to run a country this size on the benediction of any single section of the population.

To make matters worse for the government, in the day-to-day running of public affairs, the hardline RSS group made plain its antipathy to the Prime Minister personally from Day One, though he too springs from this Hindutva mother organisation. That had him completely bottled up. Vajpayee sought to regain the initiative by strengthening the Prime Minister’s Office as a countervailing force, but clearly not to much avail. This is a fascinating story and deserves an extended essay in its own right.

The contradiction between the Vajpayee government and the Hindutva hard core has thrown up the huge controversy over the question of entry of foreign entities into the insurance sector. Who knows, more divergences of this kind may follow. Until very recently it was unthinkable the Hindutva brigade would fight among themselves like Kilkenny cats.

While this, in general,may be good news for BJP’s opponents, the operating political climate in the country could become impossibly complex in the days to come as the RSS may pitch for its narrow nationalist agenda with fury in order to neutralise the effect of the recent electoral reverses. Sonia Gandhi is called upon by the Congress to devise suitable tactics precisely in this treacherous situation. If the tactics, which include manoeuvring the timing of the next Lok Sabha election, are unsuitable, the longer term objective of a clear victory in those polls may well become a casualty placing a question mark on Sonia Gandhi’s durability as leader.