Monday , December 9 , 2013 |
Why two survived and two did not | ||
| RADHIKA RAMASESHAN December 9, 2013 | ||
New Delhi, Dec. 8: One puzzling aspect of today’s Assembly poll results lies in the way anti-incumbency worked. It reduced the Congress’s Rajasthan and Delhi governments to rubble but spared the BJP dispensations in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. If anything, Shivraj Singh Chouhan stepped into his third term in Madhya Pradesh fortified by 20 extra seats compared to his 2008 tally. Chhattisgarh’s Raman Singh scored one less than his previous count. So why did anti-incumbency stop at the Congress’s door and not invade the BJP’s gates? “Our chief ministers faced a double whammy,” a Congress source said, suggesting the Centre’s unpopularity had rubbed off on the party’s state governments. “Both Sheila Dikshit and Ashok Gehlot were saddled with the drawbacks the Centre suffers from: corruption scandals, price rise, an image crisis. On top of that, the Delhi government failed to live down the Commonwealth Games (corruption) stigma.” The BJP took advantage, clubbing the UPA’s failures with those of the Delhi and Rajasthan governments. “So each time Gehlot tried to hard sell his pro-poor schemes, people promptly asked, ‘But what about the shooting prices of onions and potatoes’?” the Congress source said. Several beneficiaries of Gehlot’s flagship scheme of free medicines and health care in state hospitals backed this up. They had other grouses as well, such as the quality of the free drugs provided. Even when these states had voted in 2008, the BJP had tried to connect national and state issues, particularly the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in late November that year. But that attempt flopped. A BJP leader admitted that the voters had then seen the anti-UPA grandstanding by L.K. Advani and Narendra Modi, just days after the siege of Mumbai, as “petty” and “destructive”. This time, the jury is out whether a more credible UPA could have helped Dikshit and Gehlot stave off the disenchantment with their rule. In Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh had started off with a disadvantage because of his government’s failure to stem the murderous Maoist attack on Congress leaders in May. “The chief minister’s development yatra was rolling all over the state under heavy security while he had left the Congress vulnerable,” a BJP source conceded. “When he initially expressed sympathy for the families of the dead, people asked, ‘But why could you not provide security to the Congress leaders?’ He had no answer.” The BJP had reconciled itself to losing a chunk of its seats in Bastar but Raman, sources said, thought on his feet and focused on places outside the region where the party had fared indifferently last time. He won over his critics, reworked caste equations and directed the administration to unleash his food security and other schemes with renewed vigour. Raman realised that his food scheme, which has earned him the nickname “Chawal Baba”, might not yield the electoral dividends it had in 2008, state BJP sources said. So he concentrated on wooing women voters by evolving schemes to empower them. He gave the women, and not the male members of their households, the statutory rights over holding and using ration cards. He formed all-women village committees to oversee the distribution of supplies under the food security law. Chouhan’s recipe was “constant contact” with the people. A man Madhya Pradesh journalists accuse of refusing to take questions at news conferences met ordinary people in his chief minister’s bungalow and toured the countryside to talk to villagers. For a time, Chouhan had pandered to his national ambitions by periodically positioning himself as Narendra Modi’s competitor. But once anti-incumbency threatened to catch up with him at home, where his ministers and MLAs were embroiled in serious graft charges, Chouhan abandoned his Delhi dreams and focused on Bhopal. Unlike the Congress, where Dikshit and Gehlot were forced to waste time and energy fighting off intra-party adversaries, the BJP closely guarded Chouhan’s and Raman’s flanks. Both had their share of enemies within their cabinets and the party, but the diktat from the Sangh was clear: the organisation would work for their victory, and no dissidence would be tolerated. The order was implemented in letter and spirit. |
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131209/jsp/frontpage/story_17659916.jsp#.UqUX79IW02cRude shock from freebie lab | ||
| MANINI CHATTERJEE December 9, 2013 | ||
New Delhi, Dec. 8: The spectacular debut of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party in the national capital may have robbed a resurgent BJP of an outright 4-0 victory this chilly December afternoon. But that was little consolation for the Congress which came face to face with its worst nightmare: not only had millions of Indians rejected its brand of politics in state after state just months before the 2014 general election but Sonia Gandhi’s favoured brand of welfare economics too had found no takers. For the last four days, the Congress had resolutely dismissed exit poll surveys that had predicted a 4-0 defeat for the Grand Old Party and sent the sensex zooming at the prospect. But as results poured in from the four key northern states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Delhi, it was clear that there was no place to run for cover. The actual results — after the glimmer of hope in Chhattisgarh was snuffed out — were considerably worse than what the pollsters had reckoned. The Congress did not just face defeat in Delhi and Rajasthan — it suffered a comprehensive rout. Just as Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s personal defeat in the Bengal elections two years ago signified the depth of the ruling Left Front’s fall from grace, the humiliation faced by Delhi’s till recently much loved chief minister Sheila Dikshit at the hands of this election’s “man of the match” Arvind Kejriwal in the prestigious New Delhi constituency symbolised the anti-Congress mood gripping the nation right now. In the case of Sheila, who had ruled Delhi for three consecutive terms with élan and transformed a parochial capital into a “world class” metropolis where Indians from every corner of the country found a home, the defeat could be attributed to events beyond her control. With Delhi being the seat of the central government, much of the ire against UPA II’s perceived corruption, policy paralysis and callousness crystallised in this city —drawing thousands of irate citizens out of their houses when Anna Hazare camped here for days and then again when the city erupted in unprecedented protest over the Delhi bus gang rape almost exactly a year ago. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which grew out of the Anna Hazare movement, succeeded in galvanising this “anti-politician” sentiment that lurks just below the surface of this “city of VVIPs” in a spectacular fashion through an innovative, grassroots campaign never witnessed before. The acute price rise of basic food items and the AAP’s promise of cheap electricity and free water among a host of other untested dreams helped expand its appeal among the poorer sections of the city. Although the BJP, with its traditional strongholds across Delhi, capitalised on the anti-incumbency sentiment to emerge the single largest party, the AAP’s dream debut has made it fall short of a simple majority. In Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot has no such excuse. In a 200-seat Assembly, the Congress has been reduced to a pathetic 21 — much less than what Kejriwal managed for his fledgling party in an Assembly one-third the size of Rajasthan’s. The defeat in Rajasthan must come as a particularly rude shock to Sonia, who used the state as a “laboratory” of sorts for her pet social welfare schemes. While the food bill providing highly subsidised grains to 75 per cent of the population is yet to roll out, Rajasthan was the first state to provide free medicines to the poor. Yet, the culture of freebies clearly did not work in a state where Narendra Modi campaigned extensively and effectively sold the dream of turning Rajasthan into another Gujarat by unleashing the entrepreneurial energies of the people rather than handing them doles. In fact, the much-debated Modi factor may not have worked too well in Delhi (where Kejriwal made deep inroads not only into Congress bases but also attracted the youth who otherwise chant “Namo”) or in Chhattisgarh (where Raman Singh revels in being a Sonia-style dispenser of largesse), but it certainly helped Vasundhara Raje record a resounding victory in Rajasthan. The Congress’s efforts to clutch on to the “anti-incumbency” straw may have worked in the case of Delhi and Rajasthan, if it were not for its dismal performance in Madhya Pradesh and less than impressive outcome in Chhattisgarh. In both states, the BJP had been ruling for two terms and given the new impatience of the post-reform “aspirational” India, they were ripe for the picking. That Shivraj Singh Chouhan managed to turn that incipient anti-incumbency mood, especially against many of his ministers and MLAs, into an emphatic pro-incumbency verdict is not just a tribute to the “inclusive” political skills of the wannabe Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the BJP’s current pantheon but also an indictment of the pathetic state of the Congress organisation and leadership in this key heartland state. The Congress’s problem, as always, was the refusal to give charge to one leader and instead divide the state between various “satraps” — Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath, Suresh Pachouri, Ajay Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia et al. That most of these leaders are based in Delhi, and none carried out a sustained campaign in the state except in the run-up to the elections, may be one reason that the party has faced its third consecutive rout. Like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are among a handful of states where the Congress and the BJP are in a direct bipolar contest. In Gujarat, the Congress has been out of power for nearly two decades. Unless the Congress radically changes its style of functioning in keeping with the utterly changed expectations and aspirations of the Indian electorate and builds up strong state leaders as was the norm in the pre-Indira Gandhi Congress dispensation, its erstwhile bastion of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh could go either the Gujarat or (if third forces emerge) the Uttar Pradesh/Bihar way. Congress spokespersons tried to make light of today’s rout by citing the precedents of 1998 and 2003. In the winter of 1998, the Congress won (then united) Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi but that didn’t stop the Vajpayee-led NDA from winning the Lok Sabha elections a year later. In 2003, the reverse happened. Buoyed by the victories in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, the Vajpayee government advanced the Lok Sabha polls by a few months — and then faced an unexpected defeat in the summer of 2004. But the summer of 2014 may not offer such solace. Well before this round of elections, the UPA dispensation was looking and behaving like a lame duck government, retreating into a shell of silence even as a rampaging Narendra Modi barnstormed across the land. Today’s results are certain to give a bigger spring to his step, even if the assortment of regional parties may take heart from the AAP performance to fashion a “non-Congress, non-BJP” alternative that can only fructify after the general election, not before it. Rahul Gandhi, for some time now, has been talking of transforming his party structure to give voice to the “common man”. With Kejriwal actually implementing that on the ground, Rahul today admitted that the newest kid on the block was the role model for the oldest party in the arena. “We are going to do even better than that,” he said, and added for good measure: “We are going to transform the party in ways you cannot imagine.” The Congress vice-president, two decades younger than Modi, may not be in any hurry to carry out that promised transformation, and may be eyeing not 2014 but 2019 or even 2024, for all we know. The question is: in this age of instant everything, will India wait that long? |
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131209/jsp/frontpage/story_17659963.jsp#.UqUVa9IW02c