It is increasingly looking like the Congress has given up on the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. At a time when the party should have been finalizing seat sharing details with its allies, zeroing in on candidates, and implementing its election strategy—provided it has a strategy—Rahul Gandhi, the de facto boss of the Congress, is busy with his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. The response to his Nyay Yatra is not that scintillating to justify its continuance just days ahead of the most important election political parties face every five years. Even his “allies” are refusing to participate in the Yatra. First it was Mamata Banerjee in Bengal and now it is Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, who has made it clear that he would not join the Yatra until the seat sharing with Congress is finalized—this after he had accepted Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s invitation to join the Yatra. The SP is believed to have offered the Congress 15 seats to fight from in UP, scaling up from the earlier 11-odd seats that it had decided on its own. Given that Congress’ presence in Uttar Pradesh is negligible, and its cadre base non-existent, it is not known if it can even find any credible candidates for the seats that the SP will offer it. In fact, there are reports that even in states such as Madhya Pradesh, where it won 66 out of the 230 seats in the Assembly elections last year, the Congress is finding it difficult to find candidates who can put up a fight. No wonder the Samajwadi Party is unlikely to offer it more than 15 out of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats.
Even with SP support the Congress is unlikely to emerge victorious in these seats. In UP, the Congress has lost its acceptance on the ground. The SP realised this in the 2017 Assembly elections, when it offered the Congress 114 seats, but the latter won only 7. In 2024, there is no guarantee that the Congress will win even the Gandhi family bastion of Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat, now that Sonia Gandhi has decided to go to the Rajya Sabha. One Telangana or a Karnataka does not make a summer. In fact, in less than a year of coming to power in Karnataka, the buzz is that trouble is brewing between Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar that may even destabilise the government there. As for the other state that the Congress is in power, Himachal Pradesh, there is no guarantee that the voters will opt for the Congress as their default choice in an election where an immensely popular Prime Minister like Narendra Modi is asking for votes for himself, unlike in the Assembly elections where local issues and faces come into play.
The I.N.D.I Alliance is increasingly in tatters and the only place there might be a semblance of an “alliance” is where the Congress is already a junior partner with the regional parties, primarily in Bihar, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Until even a few months ago, there was a buzz that the Congress would be focusing on the 200-odd seats that it would be in direct fight with the BJP; that Mallikarjun Kharge had identified around 250 seats where work would begin at the grassroots. Around 50-odd days away from the general elections, there is no mention of that any longer. All that we hear from Rahul Gandhi is about an extremely divisive issue like caste—about what caste the Prime Minister does or does not belong to, of what caste the invitees to the Ayodhya Ram temple were, apart from the attacks on specific industrialists. What is worse for the party is that even when Rahul Gandhi speaks of issues of national importance, no one pays him any heed. Rahul Gandhi promised a lot of things recently—ensuring a law on MSP; conducting a caste census; removing the 50% cap on reservations; implementing the Old Pension Scheme (OPS), etc. All fiscally irresponsible, ruinous and divisive promises, most had been rejected by successive Congress governments at the Centre earlier. But that his promises did not create any ripples, shows how the Congress has lost control of the narrative.
In the pecking order, an extremely seasoned politician like Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress president, apparently comes third, behind Rahul Gandhi and Organisational General Secretary and Rahul’s Man Friday, K.C. Venugopal. Is this why Kharge is looking like a token party president, somewhat similar to the token Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh?
To return to the initial question: Has Congress/Rahul Gandhi given up on the 2024 elections? Does he believe that it is better to prepare the ground for the 2029 elections, when a BJP government, if it comes to power in 2024, will face the burden of 15 years of anti incumbency? In such a scenario, the Congress, as a national party, becomes a default choice for the electorate. But then does Rahul’s own track record inspire such confidence among voters? Is his Yatra actually focused at connecting with the people keeping 2029 on mind? However, without a complete overhaul of the party, specifically its decision making apparatus, it just might become a case of—to paraphrase Scottish poet Robert Burns—“the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.