Antidote to all formulas
Balbir K Punj, The Pioneer
December 28, 2007

It seems the issue of development is a greater devil for the Congress to fear than Mr Narendra Modi or the BJP. Well, that is the lesson the Congress is repeatedly underlining in its post-election breast-beating. If the people of Gujarat have voted for development, the Congress should welcome it. As the ruling party of the country for almost half a century, it has to go back to the people sooner or later with its list of achievements. If the lesson from Gujarat is that the people do appreciate development, what explains the breast-beating?

The Congress analysts have reportedly found that their leader has painted herself into a corner in Gujarat. The party strategists had planned before the Gujarat Assembly election that Mr Modi should not be allowed to campaign solely on the basis of his development record because he was not vulnerable enough on it. So, they persuaded their leader to provoke him to speak on the communal issue and invented the phrase "maut ka saudagar". They were in for a shock.

Mr Modi could easily call the Congress's bluff on the security issue as Gujarat had witnessed no terrorist incident in the past five years. If Mr Modi's audience roared in approval of his speech at every public meeting when he replied to the Congress the State's record in security, it was because they really felt secure under his Government's no-nonsense approach in handling of anti-social elements, even if that meant hurting a few innocent people occasionally.

What is the Congress's own record in the States ruled by it? Trains bombed in Mumbai, blasts in the Malegaon Masjid, Mecca Masjid and elsewhere in Hyderabad. Even the Congress's tears for the minorities appeared contrived as the victims of these blasts included Muslims in large numbers. Predictably, there is now nobody to own up the formula that the Congress president used in her Gujarat campaign.

The grand old party stands exposed in the battle of the ballots in Gujarat. All these years it was trying to drumbeat the post-Godhra riot issue, but when it was time to strike the final blow, it switched to caste-politics, hoping the rift among the Patels would split the voters loyal to the BJP especially in Saurashtra. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Congress prided itself in hammering out the K-H-A-M (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) combination to monopolise the State.

As against this, Mr Modi had no specific caste combination in his electoral strategy. In fact, when the so-called Patel rebellion broke out, he ignored it. He neither relied on caste nor on religion throughout his campaign. What he repeatedly painted was the picture of the State as a whole, people as a whole - not piecemeal.

Finally, Mr Modi's was a convincing performance rising above pettifogging caste and communalism. His record of development ensured that he could afford to get patronage seekers thrown out of his court. Enforcing the law that makes electricity bill payment default an offence meriting imprisonment, he had several thousand influential farmers sent to. No Chief Minister would dare to do this in an election year. This was in striking contrast to local Governments pandering to farmer's lobby in almost all other States -- notably in neighbouring Maharashtra where, despite power theft tearing through the industrial belt, the Congress doles out free power year after year. This even as the Union Government has strongly advised States against such freebies.

Mr Modi could ensure a 24-hour power supply to farmers but insisted they pay for what they use or else face penalties. That was a tough posture. His rivals thought that this 'anti-farmer' stand would undo him. The result of the Assembly election showed that wherever merited, the people appreciate a tough ruler.

The Gujarat election results have put paid to the politics of sectional patronage -- giving some caste a percentage of the development pie; the 'minorities' a special privilege, anointing a community with the oil of permanent grievance, building a party structure based on patronage for certain individuals either from an industry or a family, and all that. This was the Congress's grandstand. The DMK had offered free television sets to those who did not have them. The Congress followed in its footsteps in Gujarat. The Gujaratis replied that they were not at the Congress's doors for alms.

On the contrary, Mr Modi took the tough path of rejecting all requests for patronage. No doubt he made many enemies in the process. But the people as a whole could see that there were no favourites in his regime.

The culture of patronage has led to competitive bidding for vote-banks. The SP and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress and the Left Front in West Bengal and Kerala, the Congress in Andhra Pradesh and the DMK in Tamil Nadu -- all are competing to be seen as benefactors of minorities, going to the extent of supporting the Muslim orthodoxy and religious extremism behind the façade of being 'progressive'. But the more they give, the more the beneficiaries want to extract. It finally leads to a stage where the ark of patronage collapses on its perpetrators and the state is on a permanent siege. The vote-banks transform into instruments of vote auction, if not vote blackmail.

The Congress is bemoaning that it did not have a local leader to match Mr Modi's charisma. The party refuses to ask itself the obvious questions. One, why does it fail to create even one such State-level leader not just in Gujarat but also in other States? Two, why does it fail to discover the inability of its chosen 'Prince of Wales' to capture the imagination of either Uttar Pradesh or Gujarat? The answer to both is the same: The Congress has deviated from its roots. Under the Mahatma, it threw up leaders at all levels from a dozen national-level leaders to panchayat-level ones. The party now lives on the charisma of a single family.

How can leadership grow at the grassroots and rise in stature nationally when the top slot is invariably reserved for one single family? The Congressmen are too weak to ask that question. Till they don't, they will have to depend on anti-incumbency of the previous regime, which may not always exist. It didn't in Gujarat.