The Erosion of Congress Over The Years

The New Indian Express writes:

The picture of Congress erosion:

• In Tamil Nadu, the last Congressman who took oath as chief minister was M Bhaktavatsalam. That was October 1963. It lost power in Tamil Nadu in 1966 and has not discovered the route to popularity ever since.

• In West Bengal, there has been no Congress CM since April 1977, since Siddhartha Shankar Ray.

• In Uttar Pradesh, there has been no Congress chief minister since December 1989, since N D Tiwari.

• Bihar has seen no Congress chief minister since March 1990, since Jagannath Mishra.

• Take Gujarat. No Congressman has occupied the post of CM since Madhavsinh Solanki in 1989.

• In Tripura, a Congressman was last sworn in as chief minister in February 1992. The Congress has been out of power since April 1993.

• In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Congress has been kept out of power by the BJP since 2003.

• In Odisha, Naveen Patnaik has rendered the Congress irrelevant since 2000. In 2014, the party scored 0/21 in the Lok Sabha polls and 16/147 in the Assembly polls.

The crux lies in an eroding leadership and corroding core, the idea of what the Congress is about. In power, the Congress does not stand up for what it claims to represent. Out of power, it can’t articulate what it stands for. The Congress is wracked by an absence of ideas and a void in its leadership. The singular Gandhi —the Mahatma—has been appropriated, and the plural—the Gandhi family name —has been rendered ineffective by a reluctant heir.

Politics cannot be conducted on blue-tooth connections sans ownership. To appreciate the value of leadership and ideas, one has to only look at the BJP before and after 2013. Narendra Modi took the remnants of the BJP in 2013 and converted it into a winning unit. He took ownership, redefined the core with his ideas and passionately engaged with the party and the people. The 2004 and 2009 victory afforded the Congress and its leadership an opportunity for renaissance. It was squandered when the leadership opted for the CEO-model, where power was shielded from responsibility, and authority was divorced from accountability.

Power may or may not be poison, but in politics the quest for power cannot be a part-time occupation. The dictum ‘shape up or ship out’ holds true in politics too. Congress needs new ideas and leadership. If survival is the imperative, the choice is binary: either the leadership finds new ideas or the Congress gets the idea and finds a new leadership.

There is, of course, always the Gandhian option of dissolving into oblivion.

Cleansing Hate Modi Effect

Analysts debate the stunning mandate Narendra Modi has got.Talk about the economic challenges of the country. Discuss the policy paralysis and financial deficits inherited from the UPA. Modi’s political challenges. How he is handling them or failing? What he has done or not done in first 100 days? But the debate has missed out the unprecedented challenge he still faces - to right the wrong imaging of him abroad and how he is doing it by deft and strategic geo-political moves.

Wrong image is easily created but to right it - especially vicious imaging in distant lands - is not easy. Wrong image robs a leader of legitimacy. For long, Modi has been a victim of intentional wrong imaging. Just compare the perception about Modi as he assumed office with how his equally or more popular predecessors, who had held offices for long, were perceived as they assumed office.

When Jawaharlal Nehru became the first Prime Minister of India, the whole nation idolised him and the world adored him. When Indira Gandhi won a massive mandate in 1971 the nation venerated her and the world admired her. And, even after being discarded in India for imposing the emergency and despised outside, when she won back in 1980, the nation accepted her and the world fell in line. The nation celebrated Rajeev Gandhi as ‘Mr Clean’  and the world was in awe of the 40- year-young baby-like Prime Minister. The people saw Atal Behari Vajpayee in the mould of Nehru and the world perceived him as a mature statesman. He ran the 24-party NDA coalition with such ease that won universal respect. All of them commanded respectable image within in the country and outside.

In comparison, Modi, with the demanding task of reviving the paralysed national economy in a highly integrated world on hand, has had a huge start-up deficit unlike his predecessors. That is wrong imaging of him abroad by his detractors to dent his legitimacy. See how Modi has begun strategically and is systematically undoing the damage they have done to him.

Save Indira Gandhi for a while after the Emergency, no Indian political leader had to face ceaseless hostility of the mainline media for over a decade like Modi did. The media in recent times has grown thousand times more powerful, equally less fair. The mighty media, aligned with the Opposition parties, powerful NGOs and even the intelligentsia, caricatured Modi as mass murderer of Muslims and hounded him, equating him even with Hitler. Even the judiciary dithered. Senior lawyers wouldn’t defend his government. The foreign media echoed its Indian cousin’s hate campaign against Modi and later multiplied the hate for Modi and fed the Indian political ecosystem. Parroting the media, the Left and ‘secular’ groups outside India networked as Coalition Against Genocide [CAG] and targeted Modi. They hit upon a brilliant strategy - to co-opt the US government against Modi. And succeeded.

On May 21, 2005, the CAG proudly claimed it got the US to deny visa to Modi, by charging that, under his leadership, Hindu nationalists killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. Was that true? Ten days earlier, on May 10, the anti-Modi UPA Government itself had told the Rajya Sabha that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the riots and police firing.

Years later, of course, the judiciary exonerated Modi. But, trusting the media’s version and CAG’s half-truths, the short-sighted US denied visa to Modi for violation of religious freedom - placing Modi in the company of Slobodan Milosevic, a war criminal, and an Indonesian Army General suspected of torture. From 2005 till Modi won the visa ban issue has legitimised the hate campaign against Modi. Even as late as July last year, 65 members of Indian Parliament appealed to Obama to deny visa to Modi. This showed how critical the US visa ban was for the hate campaign.

The hostility unleashed against Modi and legitimised by the US visa ban since 2005 re-manifested in the unprecedented campaign by the US media asking the Indian voters to defeat Modi in the 2014 elections. The Economist [April 5, 2014] wrote...there is much to admire [about Modi]. Despite that, this newspaper cannot bring itself to back Mr Modi for India’s highest office ... Ignoring  the fact that the Supreme Court exonerated him, the magazine faulted Modi for refusing ‘to wear the Muslim skullcap’ and for not apologising ‘for the riots’.

Months earlier, [October 26, 2013] The New York Times accused Modi of being incendiary instead of apologising and wrote that his rise to power deeply troubled ‘Muslims and other minorities.’ On April 18, 2014, a blogger summed up: “This week the hate campaign in the US-British media against Mr. Modi reached feverish proportions. We were struck by the consistency of hate across the media spectrum from the NYT-WashPost echelon to the lower more rabid level of Vox & Foreign Policy magazine... And yet the people of India rejected these sermons and elected Modi massively.”

And this put the US in a fix. The US which cut Modi’s visa in 2005 was supreme global power. But after 2008 its power declined. More. The US National Intelligence Council report [December 2012] perceived India as a rising global power along with the US and China by 2030. The US could no more ignore India. In February 2014, just two months before elections, the US made its first move.  US envoy Nancy Powell met Modi in Ahmedabad. Speculation was that the visa ban might be lifted. The US denied, promptly. Why? Earlier, in 2013, when the UK lifted the ban on Modi to travel to the UK, stiff opposition ensued, including a motion in Parliament to reinstate the ban! As two British nationals of Indian origin had died in Gujarat riots, some activists had even threatened legal action against Modi if he visited the UK. So it went beyond the power of even governments to undo the damage to Modi.

The CAG campaign would have burnt itself out like a lighted match. But the foolish action of the US connected the lighted match to a petrol refinery. Of course after Modi won, analyst Fareed Zakaria did call the US action ... foolish... But those who fooled the US into action quietly vanished. A dazed US still preferred to wait till Indian elections were over. With President Obama’s invite to Modi after he won, the issue of visa to him has become irrelevant. But for Modi that is just the beginning.

Even as Modi was on the campaign trail he must have been thinking where to begin to undo the damage to his legitimacy by the hate campaign.

Modi must have decided to right his wrong image where the damage is the gravest and most difficult to undo - namely outside India. His very first move, which shocked his detractors, outlined his strategy. He invited the Saarc leaders - the Heads of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Pakistan - to his swearing in. He met each of them personally but on his terms. While he ensured that Nawas Sharif would not meet the press or Geelanis or utter the ‘K-word’, Modi spoke to him on terror and Mumbai case. By this master stroke he sealed the mouth of those who questioned his desire for good relations with neighbours. Then began a queue of high dignitary visitors from the US, China, New Zealand and Singapore.

In less than two months some seven top US officials - including Secretary of State, Defence Secretary and Commerce Secretary - landed in India. While other Prime Ministers would first visit super powers, Modi first visited smaller neighbours “Bhutan first and Nepal next.

Later, emphasising his Look East Policy, he went to Japan and stayed for a day more! He underpinned cultural and civilisational impulses to geo-political relations. Then came Chinese President Xi Jinping Visit to India.

Modi looked into Xi’s eyes and raised the border incursions of Chinese Army in Ladakh. Forbes magazine reported, - Modi asked Xi to get his troops away - Xi acquiesced.. In contrast, for the last 10 years, India had only bent and crawled before China. On reaching China, Xi took action against those who attempted to sabotage the Sino-Indian relations and also to promote his loyalists to top positions in the Army. Like with Sharif, with Xi also Modi had had his way.

And now he is going to US to a red-carpet welcome. The people of India have made the US bow to Modi. He has some 35 engagements to partake in three days - including addressing a rally of 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden. The event, which is completely sold out, is expected to draw the largest ever gathering for a foreign leader on US soil. A live-streaming of the rally will be viewed throughout the US and the world.

This is how Modi is righting his image intentionally distorted by his detractors. Through well-thought strategy he is cleansing the global ecosystem of the hate Modi effect, which he could never have done from India.

S Gurumurthy

http://www.newindianexpress.com/columns/s_gurumurthy/Narendra-Modis-Strategy-To-Right-The-Wrong-Image/2014/09/26/article2449227.ece

BJP Needn't Slump Into Depression, They Are Poised to Win Coming Assembly Polls

While the loss of a couple of seats here and there in a by-election by a political party is understandable, the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in eight of the 11 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh should deeply concern the ruling party at the Centre.

After all, only a little over three months ago, it had swept the State in the Lok Sabha election, winning 71 of the 80 seats on offer.

What should be further worrisome for the BJP is that it has lost a majority of  the Assembly seats it had held, including that of Rohania which is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency.

For the party, this is not a good harbinger, given that it has set its sights on claiming the State in the Assembly election due in a couple of years' time.

Clearly, something is amiss in the party's organisation in the State which failed to capitalise on the wave of goodwill that Mr Modi has generated and the tremendous groundwork which BJP president Amit Shah did during the general election.

State party president Laxmikant Bajpai has taken the blame for the loss, but that is not enough. It is time for a complete overhaul of the set-up to restore confidence and enthusiasm in the cadre.

The BJP should be thankful that the jolt has come early enough for it to do a course correction and be fighting fit when the Assembly poll dawns.

While the party bigwigs will be deliberating on the reasons for the defeat, several explanations are already being touted by analysts, primary among them being that the people have punished the BJP for the ‘communal campaign' which some its senior leaders allegedly unleashed. This is the easiest available stick with which rivals of the party get to beat the BJP.

However, such a simplistic conclusion fails to take into account the various other local factors that could have determined the outcome. One such cause is the selection of candidates.

There is already rumbling that the BJP lost a few seats due to a wrong choice of candidates. Also, at least one defeated candidate has alleged that the local Member of Parliament did not whole-heartedly campaign in his favour, and was even antagonistic.

For now these are accusations and the party will be able to more accurately pinpoint the reasons once it thoroughly studies the result.

Meanwhile, it need not slump into depression, because all is not lost, though some political experts would like to believe otherwise by linking this defeat to the BJP's average performance in the recent by-election in Bihar and Karnataka and seeing an ominous pattern.

The party along with its ally, the Shiv Sena, is poised to dislodge the Congress-led regime in the coming Assembly election in Maharashtra, while it is on strong turf in Haryana, which along with Maharashtra votes on October 15.

The Samajwadi Party need not consider its victory in the by-election (it won eight of the 11 Assembly seats) as an endorsement of its governance in the State — which has been and remains pathetic.

Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav can smile for now, but the mood of the people of the State in general remains grim. The fear that, emboldened by the win, the ruling Samajwadi Party may turn even more indifferent to administration and stoop further in the politics of appeasement, is very real.

The Pioneer

BJP Pushes Marxists to The Walls In Kerala

Balbir Punj writes





The good news from Kerala is that the political wind in the state, which has for decades alternated the Marxist-led front LDF and the Congress-led UDF in government, is now in the process of choosing a new path. An HT report from Thiruvananthapuram read: “A bandh called by Sangh Parivar outfits on Tuesday in protest against the hacking of an RSS leader crippled normal life in Kerala.”

The intensity of the protest reflects the depth of sympathy of Keralites to the victim and his party in the changing political pattern there.

E Manoj of the RSS was hacked to death in the Malabar region where the Marxists have been running riot and the RSS-BJP was the only force resisting the communist diktat.

The pattern of the killing carried in every respect the signature of the Marxists. They don’t shoot their political opponents. They hit them hard and then hack them part by part using sharp local sickles or butcher knives. They do it in daylight and often in public places. The barbarism is meant to convey a message—crossing the Marxist line is inviting such medieval “punishment”. The Marxist ideology, like the Islamist one, authorises its followers to be prosecutor, judge and executor rolled into one. As in the badlands of Syria-Iraq or Nigeria, here too they would make a public show of their barbarism.

In fact, the Marxists followed the same procedure when they waylaid and cut to pieces one of their own, T P Chandrashekharan, two years ago after the man had left the CPM and floated a rival political outfit. Several leaders of the Marxist party have been convicted for the murder lately.

That was not the only murder that the Marxists committed in the state. We are not talking of the murders of RSS workers and leaders. The Marxists had put their own dissenters’ neck on the block. In the wake of “TP’s” hacking, another Marxist leader, one Mani, boasted that the party had drawn up a list and one by one the people in the list would be eliminated.

The boast led to his being booked for promoting hatred but interestingly, the party did not distance itself from the claim of one of its leaders even after the intellectuals of Kerala expressed horror at such boasting.
For several decades now, the RSS-BJP had emerged as the only force that came forward to stop the Marxists from imposing their diktat on the hapless people. The political rivals of CPM technically is the Congress party. But the party leaders sought safety in avoiding direct confrontation with the Marxists.

In the last 20 years, the Marxist party was getting cosy with the jihadi elements of Malabar. In the 2009 general elections, Marxist boss Pinarayi Vijayan publicly allied with the Islamic extremist party, PDP, and its leader Abdul Nasser Madani, an accused in the jihadi conspiracy to target L K Advani in 1999 by planting bombs in Coimbatore on the path the BJP leader would take to address a public meeting.
It was a case of brothers in arms using violence to seize power, embracing each other. The Marxists’ rout in that election was later attributed to the public disgust at the alliance.

The pusillanimity of the Congress in facing up to this combine of Islamist secessionism and Marxist violence was exposed before the people of Kerala when instead of opposing Madani, it competed with the Marxists in making a hero out of him through open sympathy for his person and fending off all attempts of national security establishment to nab him and his partymen.

Several incidents in Kerala where the jihadists were accused of murder and violence, procuring arms and conspiring against the state like the massacre at Marad, saw the Marxists and the Congress closing their eyes at the growth of the jihadi underground.

For the local Congress, the appeasement of minorities was part of its national policy and the Muslim vote bank, especially in Malabar, was needed to balance the Marxist grass roots in the region. The electoral alliance between the Congress and the Muslim League was decades old.

Malabar, with its Muslim population, was the only place in India where the political Islam that demanded the country’s Partition survived after Independence and had strong links with Pakistan through many families that had its members in both countries. Much water has flowed down the Pampa river since then. The major Hindu organisations like the SNDP and the NSS have publicly expressed concern over the growing clout of the Muslim League, the continued rise of jihadi outfits and the threat to Hindus in many incidents of “love jihad”.

The Christian parties, like the two factions of the Kerala Congress, are also watching with concern the rise of the League and its economic as well as political clout from the large number of Muslim workers in the Gulf and the money earned they are sending to the state.

The rise of the Sangh Parivar’s support base isn’t confined to caste Hindus. Many sections of Christians are also gravitating towards it. Cardinal Cleemis, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, has openly praised prime minister Narendra Modi. An influential Dalit outfit, Kerala Pulayar Maha Sabha has invited Modi to address the 151st birth anniversary celebrations of their legendary leader Ayyankali during Onam.

This organisation was for long with the Congress. Its shift in support to the BJP must have disturbed the Congress. Obviously, the Congress claim of being the saviour of SCs (the elevation of K R Narayanan as the president of India, the rise of K J Balakrishnan as the CJI, for instance) is now dented. Early this year, the SNDP invited Modi before the general election to address their meeting and visit the retreat of social reformer Narayana Guru at Varkala.

So, the events leading to the Marxist murder of RSS leader Manoj clearly indicate that a good section of the people in Kerala is getting tired of the two fronts and considering other options. The Marxists have sought to send a warning message to the people through the murder. And the Congress has a vested interest in not pushing the Marxists to the wall by unleashing the police against the CPM’s practised violence.

The Centre has to read the signs in this context as the state could expect both the Marxists and jihadi outfits to plan more strikes to scare the people against the shift of allegiance to the BJP and to claw into the state in the wave of Islamist movements in the Gulf and Pakistan.