A different strategy

Mohammad Adeeb 

The state of incumbency and misrule of the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh, the construction of huge statues and parks in the name of development and MLAs devoid of any real power and merely acting as slaves of Mayawati; this was the state of affairs when Uttar Pradesh went to the polls.

 

As such, a new government was more than expected. In an attempt to cash on the situation, Congress heir apparent Rahul Gandhi launched ‘Mission 2012’. Under this mission, non-Hindi speaking observers were sent to search for Hindi-speaking candidates. This nonsensical scheme was run for over two years. Rahul Gandhi had tea at Dalit homes, spent the night there hoping to make a dent in the Dalit vote bank, without realising that the strongest Dalit leader Mayawati was around, as were her committed followers.

 

The strongest community presence were Muslims, a section which still does not have an independent leader. Muslims have accepted leaders from Nehru, V.P Singh right up to Mulayam Singh Yadav over the years. However, Rahul Gandhi’s mission did not give the desired importance that this section deserves.

 

Leaders like Digvijay Singh kept trying to appease the Muslims by harping on issues related to the Batla House encounter and the grave of Osama Bin Laden, thinking this will please the community but what he failed to grasp was that the thinking of the 1948 Muslim and the 2012 Muslim are now drastically different. He also did not allow a Muslim leadership face to emerge in the Congress. Instead of developing one from the pool of present Muslim leaders, he projected himself as one.

 

In fact the role of Muslims needs to be stressed. The Muslim electorate demonstrated extreme maturity and at no point of time appeared to be carried away by emotional issues and stood firmly for the positive vote. They remained cool throughout the campaign and stood strongly behind the SP and its young leader Akhilesh Yadav.

 

During the campaign I pursued a line very strongly - Muslims should not split their vote because it would only help the BJP and BSP. But the Muslims, by voting in favour of SP, took the right decision. So when we talk of the leadership qualities of Akhilesh we should also keep in mind that Muslims in Uttar Pradesh showed great vision.

 

Akhilesh Yadav, on the other hand, thought differently. After the defeat of his wife Dimple in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, he realised that the real strength of the party lay in the youth and the villages. He covered the entire state on his cycle yatras and rath yatras. He became a part of the masses and was hugely accepted by all communities in the rural areas as he was one of them.

 

It should be noted that his father wa. Akhilesh took the advice of his father, who was always a popular leader of Muslims and backward classes well and consulted senior SP leaders to chalk out an effective game plan.

 

In contrast to this, Rahul Gandhi with all his pomp and show surrounded by security, media and educated ‘babas’ who have no clue about the rural psyche, ended up not being able to be accepted in the true UP culture.

 

When the elections were around the corner, Akhilesh Yadav was already accepted by the masses because of his continuous interactions with the ‘aam aadmi’ and this made Rahul Gandhi nervous. As a result, on the advice of his coterie of advisers, he decided to pick candidates from every party but the Congress on the basis of their ‘winability’ factor.

 

In the process, 288 tickets out of 400 were given to outsiders. Annu Tandon, MP from Unnao who had won by a margin of three lakh votes, was unable to secure a single MLA seat. On the other hand, Beni Prasad Verma, who had distributed tickets to more than 40 people could also not salvage a single seat. Also to be noted is that even the Muslim faces of Congress which include Saleem Sherwani and Rasheed Masood could also not secure a seat.

 

This series of electoral defeats for Congress which started in Bihar does not seem to end and will continue till Congress party accepts that the main blame should be taken by Rahul Gandhi itself. It was a one- man show. He controlled everything, right from organisation to the selection of candidates and management of election campaigns. All district organization people (such as the minority cell and backward cell) were treated like office bearers and were never consulted and taken into confidence. If Akhilesh goes on to display an administrative capability similar to his leadership, then there is little chance for Congress to flourish in Uttar Pradesh in the years to come.

 

(Views expressed by the author are personal)