Rahul’s Kisan Yatra is an Attempt to Halt Congress’ Downward Slide

Is Rahul’s UP Kisan Yatra aimed at giving Congress a much-needed ideological profile?

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi at Kisan-Yatra in Azamgarh. (Photo: PTI)

Attempting to Arrest a Downward Slide

• The Congress’ ideology has been in flux since the early 2000s but to reinvent itself, it must convey what it stands for unambiguously.
  
• Rahul Gandhi’s UP yatra is perhaps an attempt to ‘show’ the electorate what its ideology is and what it wishes to be in the future.
  
• Visiting Hanumangarhi temple in Ayodhya or wooing Brahmins are simplistic explanations to suggest that Congress is pursuing soft Hindutva.

• Rahul is falling back on a past Congress strategy to build an umbrella coalition by targeting the secular constituency of farmers.
  
• He is trying to arrest a downward slide in the party’s UP vote share of slightly over 18 percent by taking a left-of-centre position.
  

Writing in 2003 in Seminar, veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar argued that “for the Congress to re-emerge as the natural party of governance, it is essential that it acquire an ideological profile, which over the turbulent nineties (and into the first three years of the 21st century) has grown fuzzy… To re-invent itself, the Congress has to face up squarely over the next few months to what it was and what it wishes to be – and convey this unambiguously and succinctly to the electorate.”

It was a time when the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had a high approval rating, the economy was about to take off, and things were looking up on the external front.

The Congress, on the contrary, was down and appeared to be out of the race.

The situation looks no different today. The Congress, in fact, looks to be in a far more precarious situation today than it was 13 years ago.

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi’s kisan yatra in UP is perhaps an attempt, for the first time after the crushing defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, to show the electorate what the party stands for and “what it wishes to be.”

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and Ghulam Nabi Azad at the launch of month-long Kisan-Yatra in Rudrapur of UP’s Deoria district. (Photo: IANS)

Pushing for Soft Hindutva?

What are the indications from the ongoing yatra? It is too simplistic to say that what the Congress is doing in UP is a kind of ‘soft Hindutva’.

The day Rahul visited Hanumangarhi temple in Ayodhya, he offered a chadar at dargarh Kichaucha Sharif in Ambedkarnagar district a few hours later. It indeed was a first visit by a member of the Gandhi family to the temple town in 26 years.

But don’t forget that he avoided a visit to the disputed site, which was just 500 metres away. If he wanted to make a ‘soft Hindutva’ statement, he could have made a visit.

Rahul Gandhi interacting with villagers during his Kisan Yatra. (Photo: The Quint)

That the Congress is trying to woo UP’s Brahmins is also seen as peddling ‘soft Hindutva’. When did wooing a particular social group become ‘soft Hindutva’?

If we use this logic, the likes of Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and even Asaduddin Owaisi will become proponents of ‘soft Hindutva’. Owaisi never tires of making reference to Dalits in most of his speeches.

Hindutva – soft or hard – in the Indian context stands for exclusion. It means one or the other. It does not mean one and several more.

What Rahul is doing in UP is not targeting one at the expense of the other.

“The choice for the Congress is not, as is often mischievously or maliciously projected, between secularism and soft Hindutva, but between soft and hard secularism,” Aiyar had argued in the Seminar article.

Rahul Gandhi (left) and Ghulam Nabi Azad (centre) seen interacting with the villagers during the month-long Kisan Yatra. (Photo: The Quint)

Building a Broad Coalition

The very first week of his yatra has been rich in symbolism – from visiting an upper caste freedom fighter’s family to meeting a Dalit family; from stopping at a roadside tea stall to have samosa and jalebi, to using khats to interact with farmers, mostly from the other backward classes.

He is trying to build an umbrella coalition by targeting the secular constituency of farmers. It is the kind of coalition the Congress had till the 1980s, especially in key battleground states like UP and Bihar. While the party lost support among the upper castes to the politics of mandir, Mandalisation cost it the votes of OBCs and Dalits. And it has been a free fall in UP since 1989.

Rahul Gandhi seen at a roadside tea stall having samosas and jalebis. (Photo: The Quint)

The 2009 Position

However, the Congress made a partial comeback of sorts in the state in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. An analysis by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) shows that the party got a third of the Brahmin votes, nearly a third of the Kurmi-Koeri (part of OBCs) votes and 25 percent of Muslim votes that year.

With a vote share in excess of 18 percent (more than the BJP’s 17.5 percent), the Congress won 21 of 69 seats it contested. It was due to the erosion in support among Brahmins and OBCs that the party fared badly in subsequent elections.

Rahul is perhaps attempting to arrest that slide. He is doing so by positioning the Congress to be left-of-centre, which explains the constant jibes at the NDA government with slogans like suit boot ki sarkar, Modi Mast, Kisan Past or aam janata se loot, kuch udyogpatiyon ko chhoot.

Rahul is trying to position the Congress to be left-of-centre. (Photo: The Quint)

Will Rahul’s Plan Work?

Will he be able to convey this message “unambiguously and succinctly” to the state’s electorate?

This will depend a great deal on what the follow-up action will be like. Rahul is known to relapse into prolonged phases of inaction after bursts of activism. The Congress would like him to change that if it harbours any ambition of making a mark in UP.