A rudderless Opposition

The Congress needs a credible competing narrative

Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar told his party’s state executive meeting in Patna early this week that the Congress alone was to blame for the current mess in the Opposition. This charge is likely to be intensely debated by leaders of the Congress, but what most of them may not be able to contest is the increasingly visible enfeeblement of the Congress, which is still the largest Opposition party in Parliament. Two recent events have exposed the Congress’ ideological bankruptcy. The first is the decision to field former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar as a Dalit opponent after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) nominated Ram Nath Kovind in the forthcoming presidential elections, a transparently reactive decision that demonstrated that the party had been wrong-footed again. The second is boycotting the launch of the nationwide goods and services tax (GST) from the Central Hall of Parliament over the weekend. The upshot is that the Congress is being increasingly perceived as an agenda-less entity that reacts to developments rather than shaping them. More damagingly, it appears to have lost ownership of some of its own big ideas that have impacted socio-economic policy. 

It was the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, for instance, that initiated the difficult work of forging consensus among states for the contours of a complex nationwide value-added tax that enabled the current regime to finally implement it. By staying away from the launch on grounds that the GST was flawed and the function took place in the Central Hall, the Congress has only helped the BJP to lay claim to this most significant of tax reforms in independent India. Indeed, the current BJP-led government has been extraordinarily pro-active in establishing proprietorship over several Congress initiatives, successfully parrying the accusations of “suit-boot ki sarkar”, the one genuinely impactful jibe from party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. The BJP government has since co-opted the concept of direct benefits transfer by distributing free cooking gas connections to poor women, presiding over the opening of no-frills Jan Dhan accounts for the poor, and leveraging and extending the UPA’s Aadhaar programme in myriad ways. Even the controversial move of demonetisation was marketed adroitly as a means of punishing the black money-accumulating rich against the hapless poor. Despite former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s spirited riposte in Parliament, the party was unable to frame a response that would resonate with the common man. 

Indeed, India’s grand old party and its top leadership would do well to heed Mr Kumar’s sage advice: The Congress needs to develop a credible competing narrative around which it can rally the Opposition. It has little time to do so. There are several Assembly elections due before the next general elections in 2019. In many of these states either the Congress is in power or is the main Opposition party. In 2004, its unambiguous pro-poor agenda and prudent choice of allies delivered a significant victory over the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance with its middle-class focused “India Shining” campaign. Instead of quibbling over personalities, as it has done in the case of the presidential election, the Congress needs to introspect and figure out if it can build a viable alternative to the BJP. It needs to clearly articulate the contours of such an alternative vision before it can expect regional parties like the JD(U) to join hands with it.