Valson Thampu

Valson Thampu

It is customary to hail the successful and belittle the vanquished. It is not my intent here to do either. I leave that to those better endowed than me. My purpose here is to consider the recent Kerala assembly elections in light of what the Congress Party could learn from it.

It is beyond doubt that Pinarayi succeeded flatteringly in gaining the trust of the people. What makes this all the more creditable is that this has been achieved despite widespread media hostility. People frown upon his PR skills, but what are you to do when most instruments of opinion-making are hostile you? Ashok Gehlot in his former innings as the Chief Minister of Rajasthan did exceptionally in governance; but he lost the next elections because he assumed that his deeds would do all the talking. They didn’t. That’s the sort of people and society we are. When hardly anyone cares to find out the good that’s happening and everyone goes by hearsay, how is one to survive in politics, if he doesn’t notify the good work he does?

The point to note is that the Congress is ailing, has been failing, to gain people’s trust. That goes nearly for all opposition parties. Consider the farmers’ struggle. Why is it that the leaders of this most remarkable people’s resistance movement in recent history do not allow the opposition parties to share their stage? They do not trust these parties to deliver. Why is that so? The reason is simple. Many issues critically relevant to people’s welfare and the best interests of the country have come and gone. None of these parties has been able to make any difference. If Modi and Shah today function like ‘elected autocrats’, the disarray in the opposition ranks is to blame for it. Surely, it is not Modi’s responsibility to create and sustain an effective opposition!

The present plight of the Congress party is hardly conducive to remedying this situation. Rahul is a man of good intentions. But, in public life, good intentions are not enough. One must deliver on them. The fact is that he hasn’t, in respect of any issue in the last several years. Congressmen claim the Gandhian legacy; but they do not know the way of Gandhi; the way of self-purification, which includes the acceptance of the need to suffer. They want to succeed, without having to pay the price for it. This phoney culture has been incubated in the Congress over a period of time. Election after election has been won by the charisma of one family. Congressmen have come to equate personal appeal with success, and success is understood as the licence to gain profit and to form factional power-centres.

Today the national situation is more receptive than ever before to the emergence of an authentic alternative leader. The Modi magic is clearly, and deliberately, exaggerated. I have been an avid player of tennis for decades. I know that how well I play depends on who I play against. I could beat several of my colleagues hands-down; but, pitted against a member of the college tennis team, I looked pathetic. Thanks to Mamata, we know that Modi is not the last word. It is time for the Congress to cease to behave like some nondescript families of yester-year prestige that boast of much, but have nothing to show for it. The party has to make up its mind, once and for all. Does it want an effective opposition to Modi-Shah to emerge; or does it want to fondle unrealistic, irrational ambitions of returning to power and glory? If it is serious about preserving its national relevance, it has to be humbler and acknowledge the critical significance of leaders like Mamata and Sharad Pawar. If a trifle humiliation has to be swallowed in the process, it must be willing to do so with dignity and grace. The renunciation of pride may well be the seed of hope for the future.

This easy conscience in selling oneself to the highest bidder has come to characterise the Congress party as the necessary outcome of the personal-charisma-based electoral power-brokering to which the party got habituated. Most Congressmen love the power, not the party.

Regrettably, the party still refuses to recognize that this breeds a negative political psychology. Remesh Chennithala is the best illustration of it, as I have pointed in my several previous writings. He attacked Pinarayi with gusto. He unearthed issues and non-issues with which to pommel the CM. Emerged the sharpest gutter-inspector in the history of Kerala politics. He reminds me of Feuerbach’s ‘unhappy foundling’ who, ‘even in looking at the loveliest flower could pay attention only to the little black beetle which crawled over it, and who by this perversity of perception had his enjoyment in the sight of flowers always embittered’. But the people of Kerala know why; and that’s the problem. He did what he did, not out of love for them or concern for the state; but out of his itch to be the CM. To gain this end, he was willing to take help from the very devil himself, if the need arose. When a man has, driven by ambition, allowed all his energies to be shaped entirely in the negative mode, it is foolish to trust the affairs of a state to him. He is all right as an evening entertainer through militant press conferences, but he is a dangerous custodian of the affairs of a state.

Sir! This won’t work. The Congress needs to die to itself and be reborn as a new, credible, purposive force. It has the potential; but the will is lacking. The will is lacking, because the party has compromised its commitment to the people. People and profit are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other; not both, as the BJP too will realize in the not-too-distant future. Suffering for the sake of the welfare of the people is the most unambiguous stuff of a party’s, and leader’s, authenticity. This is the essence of strength in politics; not the size of one’s chest. Rahul has a faint intuition of it. But he lacks the sort of clarity that comes only out of committed action: the willingness to struggle and to endure so as to take issues to their logical conclusions. As in nature, so politics: light is inseparable from fire.