Tags:
Journalism of Courage
After the 2004 Karnataka assembly elections, the Congress walked into Deve Gowda’s parlour, professedly to keep the BJP at bay. The wily old fox led the grand old party on a merry dance. On Gowda’s insistence, the Congress meekly exiled S.M. Krishna, who it had once projected as its poster boy chief minister, to Maharashtra as governor. Gowda, a Vokkaliga, did not want any political rival from his own community in Karnataka. In the one-sided power sharing arrangement, Chief Minister Dharam Singh constantly danced to the tune of Gowda’s son H.D. Revanna. The Congress’s progressive image took a beating. Revanna as PWD minister blocked several prestigious development projects.
On Sunday, Dharam Singh lost from his pocketborough constituency, Jewargi, which he has represented eight times. Nevertheless, the Congress continues to ignore the lessons of history. In the early hours of the vote counting, when it seemed there was a possibility that the Congress and JD(S) together might get a few more seats than the BJP, Veerappa Moily hinted at a JD(S)-Congress alliance. Jayanti Natarajan explained how the country looked to the Congress for stability and keeping the communal forces at bay. The party would not flinch from rising to the challenge, she said. Only an ashen faced Krishna ruled out such a tie-up.
It is perhaps little consolation for the Congress that, in Karnataka, the former ally who bit the hand that had fed him has also come a cropper. After all, it is the BJP, not the Congress, which has benefited from the shrinking of the JD(S). This would suggest that the Congress could learn a lesson from the BJP in dealing with an alliance which turns sour. The BJP too supported a JD(S) chief minister and was in turn also ditched by Gowda. But the BJP made this an election issue, playing it as a sympathy factor by projecting B.S. Yeddyurappa as the man who had been unfairly robbed of his chief ministership. In contrast, the Congress did not seem to know what to do with Krishna. It brought him back to Karnataka, but then simply left him stranded. It did not name him its chief ministerial candidate for fear of upsetting others in the party. He was not even permitted to contest the election.
One reason why the ground is slipping from under the Congress’s feet in the states is the party’s obsession with projecting itself as the only truly national party that does not pander to regional interests. The party functions like a major corporation which rules from the head office and does not give local units too much say in management. Outsiders, usually clueless about local conditions, are arbitrarily air-dropped to settle matters between feuding local chieftains. Rather than taking a clear-cut line of action, the approach is one of piece-meal adjustments. Patchwork unity is preferred to allowing regional leaders to flourish. The party avoids selecting a state leader till after the poll.
In fact, the whole concept of regional leadership is frowned upon in a sycophantic culture which believes that the only real leadership and direction can come from the “high command”. Contrast this with Nehru’s time when regional satraps like B.C. Roy, K. Kamaraj, Ravishankar Shukla, Mohan Lal Sukhadia and Pratap Singh Kairon flourished. Today’s Congress chief ministers have to work with the handicap that their own party leadership perennially undermines their authority. The high command in Delhi — a euphemism for 10 Janpath and the coterie surrounding Sonia Gandhi — ensures that its nominees in the states do not become too popular or too independent. If the Congress continues with this short-sighted approach, it may wake up one day to discover that it has very few state units of significance left.
coomi.kapoor@expressindia.com
