NEW INNINGS OF CONGRESS

                               

After the merciless thrashing at the hustings in the last parliamentary election, the Congress leaders sat together for a post-mortem of the defeat and make necessary changes to come back in power. An important and honest acknowledgement was that the continued ignorance of the majority had boomeranged.

So far, the party has not adopted any open strategy on this front, but indications are there that they mean it. In the days of Nehru, the party harvested the unstinted support of the Dalits and Muslims which saw them through for almost half a dozen of terms. Though this policy continued during Mrs Gandhi’s time also, but erosion started getting perceptible. As an astute politician, she wore the garb of socialism and trumpeted the vote catching slogan of ‘garibi hatao’. Despite the draconian Emergency, resulting in her defeat, she bounced back quickly. Later Mrs Gandhi’s as well as Rajib’s assassinations created a sympathy wave and Sonia Gandhi, in the wake of sympathy wave boldly held the fortress and brought much needed victory.

Particularly during the second stint of Dr Manmohan Singh, equations changed. Local satraps in different states like Bihar,UP, West Bengal, Odisha,Tamil Nadu etc emerged strongly and ate away Congress vote banks. Most of these local leaders played caste and community games. Even the Congress loyalist Muslims shifted their allegiance to above parties and groups.  It resulted in a decisive defeat for this oldest national party.In this light, the party has learnt a lesson hard way that no more it could afford to ignore and antagonize the majority.

If this fact is taken into account, no political observer will have any problem to decipher the sudden decision of Rahul Gandhi to turn a Sanatani. Yesterday (April 24) when the doors of Kedarnath reopened after the winter hibernation, he took trouble to trek to the shrine to be present on this sacred day. I am surprised over the undue media coverage. Rahul got so much footage that the deity as well as the holy occasion were relegated to the background and he grabbed lime-light. Even if we leave aside this point, one will agree that the trump card of the game of appeasing the majority has been put on the board.