|
Maharashtra setback for Congress |
 |
B.I. Saini
The Congress rout in the Lok Sabha by-elections in Maharashtra has lessons for the party, not only at the state level, but also at the national level. There are also lessons to be learnt by other political parties on how to run coalitions and on meeting the aspirations of the people.
The drubbing for the Congress comes in the wake of less than satisfactory performance in the civic elections in Mumbai, Pune and other cities of Maharashtra, as well as the Municipal Corporation of Delhi elections. There are both local factors and broader reasons for the setback suffered by the party.
Emboldened by many leaders of the Shiv Sena deserting the party over the past few months and years, the Congress appeared to be thinking that it could take over the Sena base and deal it a blow from which it could not recover. That is perhaps why it welcomed several deserters from Balasaheb Thackeray’s party, who changed colours after falling out with the Shiv Sena supremo and his heir-apparent Uddhav Thackeray. Narayan Rane was the most prominent of the lot, who actually encouraged his supporters in the Shiv Sena to follow him to the greener pastures of the Congress, heading the coalition with the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra.
Narayan Rane brought about the defection of several MLAs of the Shiv Sena to the Congress and actually succeeded in getting five of them re-elected to the Assembly after they resigned from the House and the Shiv Sena to contest again on the Congress ticket. His ambitions grew and he thought that the same experiment can be tried for the parliamentary election also.
While trying to enlarge its base with the help of Narayan Rane, the Congress forgot to protect its turf, with the result that several original Congressmen such as Ranjit Deshmukh, one time Pradesh Congress president, became dissidents and were forced in due course to leave the party. Ranjit Deshmukh played a stellar role in ensuring the defeat of the Congress in the prestigious Ramtek Lok Sabha by-election in Vidharbha region, to fill the vacancy caused by Subodh Mohite’s resignation from the Lok Sabha on his quitting the Shiv Sena. Deshmukh polled over 79,000 votes which was much more than Shiv Sena candidate Prakash Jadhav’s victory margin over the Congress nominee Mohite.
Of the two other constituencies which had by-elections last week, the BJP retained the Jalgaon seat while the Nationalist Congress Party wrested the Erandol seat from the BJP.
The Congress bigwigs have routine excuses to offer for the party defeat in the by-elections, especially in Ramtek. Party general secretary in-charge of Maharashtra, Margaret Alva has alleged that coalition partner NCP actively worked against the Congress candidate in Ramtek. Narayan Rane, who had made Subodh Mohite’s re-election a prestige issue and had organised his election campaign, says that he was fighting the election alone. He squarely blamed his colleagues in the Congress for the Ramtek defeat. In his words, “Some people in the party were disturbed by my growing strength, and some Congress leaders had more interest in checking my might than in the party’s victory.”
The Lok Sabha by-election defeats are also an indicator of the declining strength of the Congress in urban areas as well as disillusionment of the rural voters with the special economic zones (SEZ) policy. A party leader from Vidharbha admitted, “It is not only the SEZ issue that we mismanaged. We equally messed up the issue of farmers’ suicides.” Continuing farmers’ suicides in Vidharba region are a sad reflection on government policies.
The Congress will have to do serious soul-searching to see where it has gone wrong. Otherwise, the only gainers will be the BJP and its allied parties, who on their own would not have been able to stage the type of comeback witnessed in the last few months, as evident in the results of the Assembly elections in Punjab and Uttarakhand and local bodies elections in various parts of the country.
|
