With the first phase of polling in the Lok Sabha elections only a few days away, let it not be said that the Congress—the country’s main Opposition party and also its oldest political outfit—has not been doing enough. In fact, demonstrating remarkable farsightedness by anticipating its defeat, it has readied a list of alibis to explain the coming loss.
Not just that, off and on, it has been harping on those reasons. The need for adopting such a tactic is simple. If it had unleashed all those causes after June 4 (result day), it would have been accused of giving excuses post the loss. By its querulous complaints in the run-up to the elections, the Congress is preparing the ground for the ‘I told you so’ moment once the outcome is known.
Consider some of the ‘reasons.’
The first is the Congress party’s ire against the electronic voting machines (EVMs). Since its massive 2014 electoral loss, and again in 2019, senior leaders of the party (and a few more from other Opposition ranks) have been condemning the use of EVMs, for they believe that the machines played a role in their previous defeats. In their opinion, EVMs are suspect for two reasons: one, they are susceptible to malfunctioning; and two, they can be manipulated in the BJP’s favour.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has repeatedly given detailed responses to show that the fears over the EVM are baseless, but the Congress refuses to be convinced. More recently, its senior leader Jairam Ramesh wrote to the ECI, seeking an appointment with the poll body to discuss the matter and the connected issue of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). The ECI replied that the literature on everything that the leader raised was already in the public domain and that the material included 85 frequently asked questions on the machines and VVPAT.
It reminded Ramesh that the rules governing VVPAT had been introduced by the Congress-led government in August 2013. The ECI further said that issues relating to tampering, hacking, micro-controlling, end-to-end verifiability, technical competency, manufacturing, source code, etc, had also been earlier addressed.
Given the large margin of seats that the BJP won in the 2014 and the 2019 general elections, a paranormal effort would be required to manipulate the EVMs across the country. Consider the following: there are 968 million registered voters, more than a million polling booths, and 5.5 million EVMs to be deployed in the coming general elections. How can a party, even as large as the BJP, fix so many machines across the country, and more so when elections are to be held in several phases on different dates?
More recently, the Congress has cried foul over the arrest of some Opposition leaders who are part of the INDIA bloc, which has taken on the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The bloc partners held a joint rally in Delhi on March 31 against the government. The Congress says that the BJP, scared of losing power, has got these leaders arrested on trumped-up charges. With the Opposition behind bars, the BJP will have snuffed out the challenge to its win-at-any-cost plot. This is the second excuse.
Let’s look at three main INDIA bloc leaders arrested in recent weeks: Arvind Kejriwal of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Hemant Soren of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and K. Kavitha of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). Neither of them can influence electoral results pan-India. Kejriwal’s area of influence is primarily Delhi and Punjab, Soren’s is limited to Jharkhand, and Kavitha is barely known to voters outside of Telangana. It is difficult to imagine how they can, free from prison or otherwise, take on the BJP and Prime Minister Modi across the country.
This brings us to the third argument the Congress has forwarded. Which is that investigations agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are being misused to target important leaders opposed to Modi, and thus discredit them and clear the arena for an easy BJP victory. If the ED and the CBI are indeed misusing their powers, the courts will take them to task. If the charges they have levelled against the leaders are false and without evidence, the courts will exonerate the accused with honour. As for countering perceptions, the Opposition parties have as much space as the BJP to ‘correct’ the impression, and they have been using that opportunity.
The Congress and the others have pointed out an extraordinary situation where only Opposition leaders have been found to be allegedly involved in corrupt deals, while none from the BJP or its allies — even though there may have been cases of wrongdoing against them — has been acted against. This is a conversation that can be had separately. That said, the what-about-them argument cannot shift focus from the accusations that have resulted in the leaders mentioned earlier, finding themselves behind bars, and being denied bail by the courts.
The Congress party has most lately discovered another excuse for its impending defeat. It claims that the action by the Income Tax Department to ‘freeze’ its bank accounts, was plotted by the ruling BJP to cripple its election campaigning and disrupt the level playing field. The facts of the case tell a different story—that of an arrogant party which refused to follow the law of the land and consequently landed in a soup.
This, in a nutshell, is what happened in a recent case (there is more than one case): The Congress party had sought a stay on the collection of tax demanded for the assessment years 2018-19. The matter went to the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, which dismissed the party’s request because the latter failed to present a convincing reason for its appeal. Various opportunities were given by the IT authorities to the party to clear the amount. At one point, the tax authorities offered the party an option to deposit 20 per cent of the disputed amount involved in the pending appeal, but the Congress refused to comply with this reasonable suggestion. Finally, the matter reached a crisis point, leading to the so-called freezing of the accounts. The Congress went to the court against the move, but received no relief. Incidentally, they have reportedly now been slapped with more fresh cases.
While the Congress and other Opposition parties have presented several more, similar sounding excuses, the one that cannot miss the mention is the following: The BJP is using the double whammy of money power and the threat of probe agencies to lure away several senior Opposition leaders to its side, to ensure the Opposition party’s defeat. This analysis is problematic because it’s not absolute.
What money power or the threat of agencies prompted someone of the like of Jyotiraditya Scindia or RPN Singh or Jitin Prasada or Captain Amarinder Singh to quit the Congress and join the BJP? Why did Milind Deora leave the grand old party and come to the Shiv Sena’s (Shinde) side? Why did Baba Siddique quit the Congress and go over to Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party? A few days ago, a horde of Congress leaders from Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan made the BJP their new home. Congress veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad, having been with the party since the 1970s, had earlier left to launch his own outfit. Was it money or the threat of investigation agencies that prompted him to rebel?
The fact is that the Congress party, because of its insipid leadership, lack of fresh, forward-looking ideas and concepts, and driven by a negative mindset, has been unable to retain many of its stalwarts. It is these drawbacks that have led to the erosion of public trust in the party. Instead of addressing the inherent problems, the Congress is busy concocting excuses in the garb of ‘saving democracy’ and ‘saving the Constitution.’
The writer is an author and a public affairs analyst. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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