As the election season nears, with the assembly elections in key northern states set to follow the Karnataka poll early this month before the general election next year, politics is bound to get far more noisier, far more embittered than it has been these past four years. An early glimpse of the shape of things to come was available at the Congress Party’s Jan Aakrosh rally at the capital’s Ramlila Maidan on Sunday. Speaker after speaker hammered away at the Modi Government, with the party chief Rahul Gandhi mentioning the PM’s name in his 32-minute speech for a record 38 times.
Neither plans or programmes of the Government nor an outline of what the Congress intended to do in the unlikely event of it returning to power drew the attention of the speakers. It was an unbridled attack on Modi and, to a lesser degree, on the ruling party president Amit Shah. Which was proof enough that the once mighty Congress holds the Modi-Shah duo responsible for its current woes with the party having been reduced to a minor player in much of the country. Of course, as an Opposition party the Congress leaders were fully justified in pinning the blame on the Government for various problems facing the country. Gandhi was right in pointing out that Modi rarely shared information about his talks with the foreign dignitaries. For instance, the Modi-Xi two-day summit in Wuhan, though informal and unstructured, did not yield concrete details aside from the press statement issued by the Foreign Secretary at the end of the meeting.
Modi could do with being a lot more communicative with the opposition rather than merely speaking to the people directly through his popular Mann Ki Baat sermons through the public broadcaster. However, the Congress leadership was wrong in believing that by simply criticising the Modi Government it can win back the trust of the people. Indeed, it is admirable that Rahul is valiantly trying to speak extempore, shedding his ingrained hesitation and stage-fright, but the content of his speeches leaves no one in doubt that what he says is scripted and rehearsed.
The naturalness of an Atal Behari Vajpayee or a Narendra Modi, or even an Indira Gandhi, a much poor pubic speaker, no doubt, is missing. He is still learning on the job, though he has been formally anointed the party chief by a doting mother who herself never went beyond reading from prepared scripts and spoke in a distinctly foreign accent. Of course, his ascent to the top party post is an accomplished fact, the galaxy of senior Congress leaders in the audience paying obeisance affirming that none has the gumption to stand up to the head of the family firm.
But how and when the Congress will regain its old mojo cannot be clear unless Gandhi sheds his ingrained hauteur and behaves as one among equals in the Opposition ranks and not even as a first among equals. Leaders of quite a few regional parties command far more political and electoral heft than the boss of the Congress Party whose influence is widely but thinly dispersed in all parts of the country. It is good to periodically hold rallies, oil the party’s organisational structures, rant against the ruling party, but for winning elections what is required is a leader who commands peoples’ trust and confidence and has a convincing programme. On all these counts, the Rahul Congress continues to be most deficient.
