Post-poll: night of the long knives
If BJP had won well in Rajaasthan, Punjab, Gujarat and MP, we would be writing a different political story.
Mamata has shown what a determined individual can achieve in politics, devastating a ruthless monster like the CPM.
It is time for every non-Congress party to introspect and decide on what they can do make the nation vibrant for the future generations.
Older people who have failed should quit gracefully and hand over the deepam to the youngest nation on the globe. It is the night of the long knives. Leadership which has failed should quit to allow the younger generation to cope with the revived chamcha-giri.
I agree with Kanchan. The battle is lost for non-congress people, but not the war for creating a hindusthana resurgent in the comity of nations.
Kalyanaraman
L K Advani steps into sunset of discontent
17 May 2009, 0204 hrs IST, IANS
NEW DELHI: The L K Advani era has set. With results derailing BJP's power bid, a change of guard in BJP is inevitable. Advani is expected to step down as Leader of Opposition soon though an unclear pecking order could delay matters for a while.
After a long career in politics, during which he pitched Hindutva as a mainstream political thought, Advani's shot at the top job has fallen way short of target. BJP will soon have to address a generational change in the party — a fraught task given the competing claims.
Buzzing with activity till the morning hours, BJP prime ministerial candidate L K Advani's residence wore a deserted look as news of NDA's poor showing in the Lok Sabha polls trickled in. The scene reflected the exact mood in the party, which expected to make it as the single largest over Congress, even if there were doubts on whether it could cobble up enough numbers to form the government.
If the defeat five years ago hurt because it came as a surprise, the party was shocked on Saturday by the scale of Congress's victory which has settled the debate as to which is the country's number one political formation.
Typically, it will raise debate on the merits of ideological purity and pragmatism, with Hindutva hardliners backed by their comrades in the RSS pinning the blame on dilution of the brand under Advani. Many in the party fear that the dispute is going to sap the organisational energy and keep it from functioning as the main opposition.
The shrinkage carries with it the risk of the leadership being unable to forge a majority agenda because of the pressure from hardliners to cater to the biases of the base and protect the coherence of the brand. Coupled with this is the problem of succession and renewed factional bloodletting.
By afternoon, Advani had decided to step down as Leader of Opposition and asked the party's parliamentary board to choose a new leader. This exercise in itself is bound to start a war among second rung leaders in the party as seniors such as Jaswant Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Murli Manohar Joshi have all been elected to the lower House.
The problem is deeper and goes beyond who takes over as Leader of Opposition. Even as Advani fades into the political sunset, there is no automatic successor in sight. Narendra Modi's claim to be the natural successor was never acceptable to many. But the resistance will increase because of Congress's success in averting a mauling in Gujarat and Modi's failure to translate his Hindutva warrior image into votes outside Gujarat.
There was also the issue of unsettled dynamics between party president Rajnath Singh and his colleagues, including Advani. The party president lacks acceptance with many, but is sure to insist on hanging on now that the exit of Advani is imminent.
A blame game was already on with party strategists suddenly acknowledging that that projection of Narendra Modi as a future PM in the midst of electioneering was an "error of judgement". "It is a collective failure," BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley said.
http://timesofindia
| Narcissistic CPM leadership should step down, says Somnath |
| JAYANTH JACOB |
New Delhi, May 16: Somnath Chatterjee, who was expelled by the CPM for refusing to step down as Speaker, today said the "narcissistic" CPM leadership should step down in the wake of the poll debacle.
Asked about the CPM's performance in Bengal, Chatterjee said: "If he (Prakash Karat) has a conscience, he should consider it (stepping down". But, soon enough, Chatterjee added that he was speaking of the "leadership in general".
Speaking at his house, Chatterjee's mood swung from despondency — that many of his Bengal comrade friends lost the elections — to gratification — that he conducted the House "without any fear or favour" — to virulent — when it came to the CPM leadership.
"Time has to come to take a new look at the leadership," Chatterjee said, adding that he was not a "party member now". But there was a rider: he "didn't leave the party, and will never apply to re-enter".
He blamed the leadership for stressing on "self-importance", being "imperious" and obsessed with its "own importance in Indian politics".
"The leadership has to be mature, ground-oriented, and reality-based. Its a very serious situation," Chatterjee said.
He lambasted the CPM leadership for their efforts to cobble up a third front on a "negative" plank. "What was the use of a third platform without putting policies and programmes in place? It was a negative approach. Has it helped the Left any way? The leadership should introspect," he said.
At the same time, Chatterjee added that the "Bengal government has had good policies and programmes within many constraints of the federal system in the country".
Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had recently said that he missed "Somnathda" and was trying in his own way to bring him back into the party fold.
Chatterjee today said he believed that the "CPM leadership still failed" to foresee and stem a rout.
Chatterjee's subsequent references made it clear that by "leadership" he meant the party central command in Delhi, not those at the helm in Calcutta. He blamed "the leadership" for turning against the UPA citing the nuclear deal and failing to make it an "election issue".
"I never espoused the nuclear deal. I didn't study it in great detail to either support it or oppose it. But the CPM didn't even make it a poll issue, and, of course, I am saying it based on the newspaper reports about the election campaign."
What about the loss of his former colleagues from Bengal? "Hannan (Mollah) lost, Rupchand (Pal) lost. The party even lost in Purulia. It's unbelievable. Once a person got a CPM nomination from seats like these, his or her victory was ensured. But look at what has happened. This situation didn't happen even in 1984. The party has to introspect about it."
What about Mamata Banerjee, who had made her electoral debut by defeating Chatterjee in 1984, pulling off her most stunning coup yet just when he appeared to be preparing for his political retirement?
"It's the people's mandate, so she deserves congratulations. Then she drove out the Nano, stifled industry, then went on to win the election! The party has to introspect about this defeat," he said.
Any chance of his joining a political party now? "I haven't left the party (CPM)," Chatterjee said, adding in jest: "My wife told me she will divorce me if I join a political party."
Then as an afterthought, he added: "You should write about this. The Indian politician does retire."
http://telegraphind
| Manmohan wind in sails, Mamata tide engulfs Red fort |
| ASHIS CHAKRABARTI |
A Left debacle in Bengal was not wholly unexpected, but few had predicted it would be on this scale. What was anticipated to be a seasonal storm has turned out to be a massive tsunami.
As in all post-mortems of major poll upsets, there will be hindsight discoveries of false techniques and hidden undercurrents. The CPM will try to find self-justifying rationalisations. Mamata Banerjee attributes her huge victory simply to her campaign slogan "Ma, Mati, Manush", with its obvious reference to the land question that her Singur-Nandigram crusade made the centrepiece of this poll.
The anger against the Left, others would argue, perhaps has less to do with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's policy on development than with the CPM's arrogance and insensitivity to dissenting opinion. That would make it more a negative vote against the Left than a positive one for Mamata and her stand on different issues, including land and industrialisation.
All these would be valid arguments. But the Bengal results this time suggest that the Left's massive defeat was largely because of an even more significant political phenomenon.
This is the first time that the mood in Bengal was matched and reinforced by the national political mood. It was the combined force of Manmohan Singh and Mamata Banerjee that trounced the Marxists.
The wind from the rest of India met and merged with the wind rising in the Bay of Bengal, turning it into a fierce gale that swept the CPM off the ground all over the state except in the shrunken Red belt of Burdwan, Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore districts. The collapse of other Red bastions such as Dum Dum, Barrackpore, Birbhum, Uluberia and Hooghly show how deep and wide the seismic tremor was.
It wasn't simply the coming together of the Congress and the Trinamul Congress. True, the alliance made for an arithmetic of hope for the alliance. One has to contrast the two parties' alliance this time with that in 2001. Even if one added up the two parties' votes in the 2006 Assembly polls, when they fought each other along with the Left, they would have been ahead of the latter in 116 Assembly seats.
The big difference between the alliance in 2001 and this time is that the Congress then was in decline and an NDA government was in power at the Centre. As the results all over India prove, it is an ascending Congress that made the Bengal alliance this time both numerically and politically a much superior force to what it had been eight years ago.
Manmohan, though not the kind of party leader that Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi is, became the public face of this resurgence of the Congress. As all surveys showed, his record as Prime Minister had a high rating among voters, both in urban and rural areas, and he was also far ahead of others as the choice for the next Prime Minister.
That's how the rest of India saw the Congress and Manmohan. In a marked departure from the past, Bengal did what India did — trust Manmohan and the Congress and whoever went with them.
Contrast this with the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, when, despite the sympathy wave over Indira Gandhi's assassination, the Left could hold its fort in Bengal even after losing 16 seats. Then too, Bengal did go India's way, but only half-heartedly. Also, in 1984, the Left's reign in Bengal was only seven years old; 32 years on, it's a different story.
This trust in Manmohan and the hope of a more stable government under him may explain why even in Calcutta, where Mamata's agitation against the Tata car factory in Singur was supposed to swing some middle and upper-middle class votes away from her party, the Left did as badly as elsewhere in the state.
Of course, the trust in Manmohan would not have been enough to batter the CPM in Bengal. That task was done primarily by Mamata. The battle over land and its effect on the rural poor and the Muslims was essentially her handiwork. But a Mamata in battle mode benefited from the nationwide swing of public mood in favour of the Congress.
If the Muslims in Bengal had been upset by the fear of losing land to the government's industrialisation moves and by the Sachar Committee report, they were also part of a national trend, as suggested by the Uttar Pradesh results, of a general switch of the community's loyalty to the Congress.
From here to the Assembly polls in 2011, when Mamata will launch her offensive for the "final", as she is fond of putting it, this combined Congress-Trinamul resurgence, both in the government in New Delhi and on the ground in Bengal, will be a formidable force for the CPM to fight. But two years is a very long time in politics.
http://telegraphind
A battle is lost, but not the war
Kanchan Gupta
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was given to moments of jocular frivolity at times of great stress, for instance on the eve of election results. At the fag end of the 1999 election campaign, a senior journalist asked him what would rate as one of the most banal, if not asinine, questions: "Mr Vajpayee, who do you think will emerge winner?" Without batting his eyelids, Mr Vajpayee replied, "Of course the BJP." That was contrary to what opinion polls, including one commissioned by his party, were saying: The Congress, according to pollsters, had an edge over the BJP. Later that evening, I made a passing reference to the ease with which he was predicting a BJP victory in the face of a concerted Congress assault. Mr Vajpayee laughed it off and then said, "Nobody can predict the outcome of an election, never mind what politicians and pollsters say." Placing three fingers of his right hand face down on his left palm, he added, "Any election is like a game of 'teen patti' (three-card game). Till such time you turn the cards and see them, you can only guess what has been dealt to you. Similarly, till the votes are counted, nobody can say with any certitude what lies in store for the contestants."
On the face of it, such wisdom may appear commonplace. After all, veterans of electoral wars would be the first to agree that no battle is won or lost till the last vote is counted. Yet, come election time and every politician and pollster tries to outguess the voter, more often than not coming to grief. The 1999 opinion polls, including the one commissioned by the BJP, turned out to be way off the mark. The BJP and its allies were returned to power with a majority of their own; the Congress had to eat humble pie. So also with the exit polls that were telecast 72 hours before the results of the 2009 general election were declared on Saturday — they didn't quite forecast such a stunningly stupendous performance by the Congress and the BJP's astonishing failure to meet its own expectations, fuelled by internal assessments that failed to reflect the popular mood. Whoever predicted on the basis of an 'exit poll', and thereby made the party look silly on Saturday, that the NDA would get 217 seats compared to the UPA's 176 owes more than a mere explanation.
The Congress, no doubt, has won a splendid victory; not to accept this fact would be sheer cussedness. Having said that, it would be equally incorrect to subscribe to the view that at the moment the Congress is riding the crest of a tidal popularity wave which in the coming days will turn into a tsunami of support for the party. Yes, the Congress has made stupendous gains, but a close scrutiny of the results will show that they are not entirely at the expense of the BJP. Nor have the gains accrued to the Congress on account of either policy or programme. For instance, the Congress has picked up a large number of seats in Kerala and West Bengal for reasons that are entirely different. In Kerala, the Left has paid a huge price for infighting within the CPI(M) that has spilled into the streets: A divided cadre couldn't get their act together. In West Bengal, the Left has been decimated because popular resentment with the CPI(M) for the various sins of omission and commission of the Marxists reached tipping point in this election, helped in large measure by the alliance between the Trinamool Congress and the Congress.
In States where the BJP has lost seats to the Congress, the credit largely goes to saboteurs within the party. It is no secret that a section of the BJP worked against the party's nominees in certain constituencies in Madhya Pradesh. In Rajasthan, the reasons that led to the BJP's defeat in last year's Assembly election remain unresolved. In Uttarakhand, infighting has led to the BJP's rout. In Jammu & Kashmir, the BJP could have won in Udhampur and Jammu if the local party units had not abandoned the candidates whom they saw as 'outsiders'. In Maharashtra, the BJP failed to correctly assess the strength of Mr Raj Thackeray's MNS which has turned out to be a spoiler in Mumbai's urban constituencies where the party stood a good chance of winning. By default, the Congress has benefited on account of the BJP's deficiencies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Uttar Pradesh where the BJP clearly failed to sense the shift in voter preference and ended up under-estimating its ability to pick up additional seats which have now gone to the Congress, swelling its national tally.
These reasons apart, at the end of the day what emerges is that the Congress has reached where it has on account of four factors whose impact could not have been predicted at any stage during the campaign when popular mood is palpable. First, the 'Chiru factor' has put paid to the TDP's hopes of staging a comeback. The Congress has gained in the process. Second, the 'Vijaykant factor' has spiked the AIADMK's electoral prospects. The 'Black MGR of Tamil Nadu politics' has turned out to be a classic spoiler. Third, the 'Mamata factor' was never seriously factored in, especially by the Left, while calculating the possible outcome of this election. Ironically, the amazing collapse of the Left has worked to the detriment of the BJP. Fourth, the 'urban factor' continues to elude logical interpretation. If the voting trend is any indication, we must come to the conclusion, and regretfully so, that India's middleclass is no longer guided by the moral compass. Nothing else explains why corruption should cease to be an election issue and the brazen exoneration by the Congress of those who have looted India fetch no more than a cynical, couldn't-care-less response. It is equally surprising that the middleclass should have chosen to overlook the mishandling of the national economy by the UPA Government and the pitiable state of internal security. We would have thought that these are concerns that agitate the middleclass the most since they shout the most about corruption, price rise and terrorism.
There is, however, no percentage in looking back. The BJP remains a national alternative to the Congress, more so after this election which has pushed regional parties and their identity politics to the margins of national politics. The BJP's tally is nothing to scoff at. There is no shame in sitting in the Opposition and preparing for the next battle. Elections come and go, but parties remain. It is for their leaders to use the interregnum to reflect on mistakes, regain organisational strength and revive hope among the faithful. There are, after all, no full stops in politics, and life does not come to an end with the declaration of results.
-- Blog on this issue at: kanchangupta.
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