By Kalyani Shankar
The Congress party is getting ready to face the 2014 Lok Sabha polls with the much-expected organisational changes and cabinet reshuffle that happened this week. The bigger thing was the changes in the party, while the cabinet rejig is only secondary. In essence, the government is now in the party mode. This exercise was expected soon after Rahul Gandhi took over as the vice-president, but it has taken six months and the resignations of a few ministers facing scams as well as some important allies like the DMK leaving the government. The Team Manmohan Singh and the Team Rahul Gandhi are now ready to counter the onslaught of the BJP mascot Narendra Modi. However, there was no real shake up, as much more could have been done with more imagination and pragmatism instead of just tinkering.
What is the message that comes out of this exercise? First and foremost, the Congress is trying to put its best foot forward. These are part of its efforts to put its house in order and contrast the chaos in the main opposition party. The Congress has shown a united face at this point of time when the BJP is struggling to clean the mess and also to manage the now-truncated NDA.
Secondly, there is a clear Rahul stamp in the organisational and cabinet shake up. Sonia Gandhi seems to have left it to her son and the vice-president of the party giving him a free hand. After all, if it going to be a Na Mo versus Ra Ga (Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi), he should be allowed to choose his generals to fight his battle. He has chosen his lieutenants – good or bad – and he has to prove his leadership now.
Thirdly, there is not much surprise in Rahall’s new team, as he has chosen people considered to be close to him to fill up important positions. The spin-doctors in the Congress claim that more importance is given to those who can get elected and also to show that there is a gradual change from the old guard to the new. The number of spokespersons and secretaries has increased now. The election committee and the general secretaries are in place. Rahul has put his faith in people like CP Joshi, Madhusudan Mistry who is emerging as Rahul Gandhi’s man Friday and Mohan Prakash. A classic example is the new general secretary Ajay Maken, who had been asked to quit his minister’s post on Saturday to become the Congress party’s communication in-charge. The changes are significant as Digvijaya Singh is in charge of Andhra Pradesh, Mistry will be overseeing Uttar Pradesh, which is very important, and Ajay Maken is to head the party’s communication department. It is these people who will counter Modi publicly.
Fourthly, the Congress leadership has realised that its future is in the organisation and not in the government, as there is only so much the government can do in the remaining few months, but the party has a chance to salvage its image. The party has, more or less, written off the government. Moreover, the options for experimenting with some new faces have run out and it is just accommodating few individuals ahead of elections on caste and other considerations now. The Manmohan Singh team will just complete its term by pulling on with the new and old faces in the team. P Chidambaram has emerged as the real troubleshooter and spokesman for the government and the rest of the ministers will simply while away their time for the rest of the term. The focus is on a few states like Andhra Pradesh which contributed 33 seats to the Congress kitty in 2009, Karnataka which brought the party back to power in recent Assembly polls and Rajasthan which is poll bound in the next few months are focused. The new cabinet does not give any indications about pro reform faces. It is a likely that the reform process will slow down in view of so many factors including running a minority government.
However, the most important challenge before the Congress is the arithmetic to perform a hat trick. It was Sonia Gandhi who took lead in 2004 to form the UPA and it was Sonia Gandhi who was in charge of its political management all these years. The problem for the Congress is that it is a truncated UPA, which is ruing now. Two most important allies like the Trinamool Congress and the DMK are out of it. Before the 2014 polls, expanding the base of the UPA by getting more allies is very important. The party has to go out of the way in luring more secular allies, which is where the problem lies. There are visible signs of the Congress wooing the JD(U) in Bihar, which has severed its connections with the NDA. For the Congress, UP and Bihar are two most important states where the party is yet to pick up its lost strength. It is not clear which way the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar will go – whether he will have some understanding with the Congress or he will opt for a proposed Federal front. Secondly it should also explore the possibilities of luring back the old allies who have left the NDA with some give and take approach. This may be difficult but it could be tried. The party also has to keep the present NDA allies together. This is where the focus should be.
The next few months are going to be politically interesting because the players are contemplating the moves and countermoves and new political equations as well as new alliances. How it shapes will be a fascinating phenomenon. (IPA)