Cong trying to rejig caste, class arithmetic

Imagine the plight of the English-speaking Indian liberal. They’ve spent seven years out of power, and their only hope, Rahul Gandhi, reeks of rank ineptitude. It’s not that his heart is not in the right place. He is the only one who stands up for woke issues. And, he also knows how to distinguish his Parmesan from his Pecorino. Yet, he infuriates the liberal by taking the most inexplicable and immature political decisions.

What else can explain the Gandhi scion’s inability to keep the Congress party’s star faces within the fold? Why is it that he could not hold back a former confidant Jyotiraditya Scindia, or Jitin Prasada? Why did he let his ego come in the way of realpolitik and force Captain Amarinder Singh out of the party? In the liberal’s mind, Punjab was a sure bet, and the only thing that they were looking forward to, with hopeful agitation, was Uttar Pradesh. Now, even Punjab appears to have been handed over on a platter to either the AAP or the BJP.

The Indian liberal’s frustration gets expressed in newspaper columns, social media, and every now and then, through that group of political correspondents, called the G-23. No not correspondents of the journalistic type, but habitual letter writers. Even now, in the wake of the Punjab imbroglio, stalwarts of the G-23 have written letters to Sonia Gandhi asking for an organisational shake-up.

But underneath the headline grabbing drama of Sidhu’s public sulking and Kapil Sibal asserting that he is not a courtier, there are tectonic shifts taking place in the Congress. It’s a shift that is not readily visible to the liberal eye, trained to see power in terms of personalities and political parties. What is happening is a fundamental alteration in the class and caste alliances that make the Congress party.

Historically, the Indian National Congress has been seen as an amoeba-like coalition that could shift shape and engulf seemingly disparate interests within itself. Often, these interests were opposed to each other, and this opposition showed up as ‘factionalism’. It was the job of the top leadership to manage these factions and ensure that no specific interest breaks out and moves into the opposition.

This ability to accommodate various class, caste and regional interests, at times inimical to each other, made the Congress the ‘party of rule’. All other parties defined themselves in response to what the Congress was doing. And it was state power that worked as a cement to hold the Congress together.

From the mid-1980s, the rise of private capital complicated this stable political equation. India’s mercantile castes had always had a love-hate relationship with the Congress party, and have been partial to political Hindutva. The rise of the mercantile castes over the past 35 years has coincided with the nationwide consolidation of the Sangh’s politics. The Congress party’s surprise return to power in 2004 had less to do with what it represented or Sonia Gandhi’s leadership. The party’s numbers were boosted by unexpected sweeps by regional leaders.’ Without that aberration, the Congress had already been replaced by the BJP as the ‘party of rule’, which defined the core agenda of the nation’s polity. Today, the BJP led by Narendra Modi, and organised by Amit Shah, represents a winning coalition between capital and the poor. The BJP ensures that India’s mercantile and capitalist groups get a higher share of national income, while the government subsidises the bottom 30 per cent of the population through various schemes, to keep them surviving at a basic subsistence level. This, along with a compliant corporate media, is enough for the party to be the nodal point for nationwide electoral coalitions.

The BJP today is the magnet for disparate ruling elites in different parts of India. I have already mentioned India Inc. To that, one can add, big farmers in specific states, private sector professionals, networks of Central and local bureaucrats and judicial officers, and of course, traders, who have largely backed the party, even in its Jan Sangh days. This overwhelming support from the elite makes regional parties prefer to have electoral alliances with the BJP. It is only a very small fragment of the ruling groups — the English-speaking ‘old’ liberal elite — who still back the Congress. The BJP’s brand of ‘cultural nationalism’ has no space for them.

Unfortunately for them, the Congress is in no position to win back the other ruling groups to its side. It has to forge a new alliance, of small farmers, the self-employed poor, non-dominant Dalits and Adivasis. It has to make inroads in pockets within the upper castes who might be fellow travellers of the BJP, but might be unhappy with the dominance of mercantile and martial castes. And along with that, the Congress needs young state leaders, who are willing to play second fiddle to powerful regional parties, which the old guard would not accept.

None of this can be achieved without a series of dramatic ‘purges’ in the party. Rahul Gandhi has thrown down the gauntlet by saying that he will not let a prince decide Punjab’s politics, even if that means losing the state in 2022. Charanjit Channi’s elevation might appear as a token gesture to counter the SAD-BSP alliance, but it also means that Rahul is willing to hand over a part of the Jat Sikh vote to the AAP, to make inroads amongst the Punjab’s poor. The decision to induct two young leftists, Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mevani, into the party’s fold, is another indication of the direction Rahul has decided to take.

The G-23 can have no significant role in this new version of the Congress. More importantly, the moves indicate that Rahul is being advised to hunker down for a long, protracted battle. This is not a politics to win elections in the short run, only to lose them within a few years. It is a strategic shift to create new micro-coalitions on the ground, which can one day return the Congress to power as the dominant party.