The dissolution of old empires

 

 

More than 30 years ago, Sharad Pawar was a young stormy petrel who created history. He ditched the Congress party (then led by Indira Gandhi) and formed a government in Maharashtra with him as the Chief Minister. More than a decade ago, he rebelled against the ‘foreigner’ daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi and formed the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). During his second ‘revolt’, Sonia Gandhi became a persona non-grata; but only for a while. This time around, the ‘Maratha’ strongman’s party will again be in power as an ally of the Congress. But the grand dreams that Sharad Pawar had of upstaging the Congress are all but over. In the 2004 assembly elections, his party actually won more seats than the Congress. This time, it is way behind the Congress. And it does appear as if his daughter Surekha Sule will inherit the Pawar mantle even as she starts losing an Empire.

This has clearly been an election of hubris and déjà vu. Most pundits were of the opinion that the Congress led by Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda will sweep the assembly elections in Haryana since the opposition was badly fragmented. In the end, the voters ended up scaring Hooda who barely managed to scrape through with a narrow victory (At the time of going to press). The lesson for both Pawar and Hooda is stark and clear: Voters inevitably have a nasty habit of springing surprises if you become overconfident. Hooda will now be a much wiser politician while time is clearly running out for Pawar. In the future, Sharad Pawar and NCP have no choice but to play second fiddle to the Congress. He can’t form a government even if he now ditches the Congress and hitches up with the Shiv Sena.

There is yet another trend that the three assembly election results have reinforced. The era of anti-incumbency is rapidly receding and in danger of becoming a distant memory. Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Shivraj Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh, Sheila Dixit in Delhi, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, the late YSR Reddy in Andhra Pradesh and of course the Manmohan-Sonia team at the Centre have all defied anti-incumbency to get elected. Perhaps the only prominent politician who did succumb to anti-incumbency was Vasundhara Raje Scindia in Rajasthan. Does that mean that the average Indian voter is satisfied with the governance delivered by governments ­— both at the Centre and in the states? A straightforward yes would be foolhardy because even Congress insiders admit that the Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra has delivered appalling governance in the last many years. Take out Mumbai and Maharashtra slips to rank number 11 in terms of per capita income. The state leads in farmers’ suicides; power cuts have now become the norm and heavy rains now routinely cripple the city of Mumbai. Clearly, if just governance was the parameter, the voters would have decisively booted out the Congress-NCP alliance. But they have to thank a gentleman called Raj Thackeray for this latest victory. The once formidable urban bastions of the Shiv Sena and the BJP in Mumbai, Thane and Nasik have been demolished by Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. The party has also won an astounding number of seats. This has given a fresh lease of life to conspiracy theories that seem to suggest that the Congress has deliberately encouraged Raj Thackeray to cut the Shiv Sena down to size — just as it had encouraged the Shiv Sena many decades ago to cut the trade union movement down to size. Back then, the Shiv Sena had unleashed mayhem in the streets of Mumbai, just as the storm troopers of Raj Thackeray are doing at the moment. This is clearly a dangerous and worrying trend because the assembly elections do reveal that a considerable number of Marathi speaking voters seem to think there is something right with the divisive slogans of Raj Thackeray.

But the clear loser in all this is clearly the BJP yet again. It has not only lost the Maharashtra elections for the third consecutive time, the voters in Haryana have put paid to any pretensions that the BJP had about being a strong contender in the state. And from the way the BJP leaders seem to be reacting after this latest trouncing; their fascination for the ostrich seems to be growing by the day. They just refuse to see reality, accept it and do some 'real chintan'. There is a clear disconnect between the current central leadership of the party and both India and Bharat. Is the BJP hell bent on making it that much easier for Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections?