By Tariq Hassan for TwoCircles.net
It is said that in politics a week can be as long as a lifetime. A lot of water has flowed in the river Ganga at Patna since Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made his momentous decision to switch his political loyalties overnight “on the call of his conscience”.
Nitish Kumar had, it seems, presumed that the BJP led government at the centre was invincible as far as the next parliamentary elections are concerned. Nobody knows what must be going through the mind of the Bihar Chief Minister at this point in time but with the passage of each week, it is becoming increasingly clear that it would be a gross political naiveté to assume that the 2019 parliamentary elections in India cannot spring any surprises.
Nearly three months back, I had written that there is a simmering discontent in rural India over the present government’s policies on the agriculture and allied sector. This noise, which was just a murmur a couple of months back, has now become a chorus.
There are three distinct factors which are causing this rural discontent to trickle across to urban India also. The first, of course, is the growing realisation that the note ban was an exercise in futility. Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha’s no-holds-barred attack on the government’s economic policy has done more damage to the Modi government than the half-hearted rantings of Congress leaders.
The clumsy manner in which half-baked procedures were structured within the GST implementation is hitting the BJP’s most loyal vote bank. This is the second goof up. The traders are reluctant to speak out because of fear and the lingering hope that it will lead to long-term gain. But the GST mishandling is now also impacting both the unorganized industrial sector and the farm sector in a big way.
The third issue interestingly enough is the “cow factor”. If you visit the countryside all over the North India, you see stray cattle stumbling all over the rural space, especially farmlands. After the fatal blow caused by Gau Rakshak attacks on the transport of all bovines, the small farmers who generally own not more than a couple of bovines, are now reeling under a severe economic crunch because their economic chain has been grievously impaired by their inability to sell off their non-productive livestock.
Driving through the UP heartland between Lucknow and Allahabad last week, this writer came across half a dozen carcasses of animals lying along the roadside. They had apparently been killed by fast moving vehicles during the night and there was no one even to remove these dead bodies for a long time. Farmers are complaining that the stray cattle have become a menace as they keep foraging in their fields day and night.
But the real question is, whether this rural discontent going to lead an anti-Modi wave in the next parliamentary elections? The answer to this is far from clear. Despite all the ammunition which the opposition parties have been bestowed with, there is still no direction and no counter-narrative and no personality in the entire opposition including the Congress Party, who can even remotely claim the mantle of a formidable leader of the opposition.So far it is the farmer’s lobbies and the citizen’s groups which are leading the attack on the Modi government.
Congress Vice President, Rahul Gandhi may have improved his rating in the western media by his new-found persuasive style of communication, but it is very doubtful whether he can translate this into some sort of advantage in the context of Indian political scenario.
The best way for Congress now seems to search out a non-controversial personality from outside the main political parties. The person should be chosen for his ability to garner greater acceptability amongst the different regional parties. This person can be a social activist, media person or even a retired government official like a Supreme Court judge who should, of course, understand the dynamics of the political process. This person can be projected as the Prime Minister and the Congress party and someone from the regional party can be projected as deputy prime ministers.
The political situation in the most important state of the country, Uttar Pradesh has gone through a sea change in the past few weeks. Here too, the opposition parties, in particular, former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, have failed to capitalise on growing widespread discontent against the Yogi government.
Some political analysts, with whom this writer discussed the UP political scenario, were quick to point out that Akhilesh appears to have missed a golden opportunity when the Chief Minister Yogi preferred to enter the state assembly through the upper house instead of seeking the public’s mandate by contesting for the Vidhan Sabha. According to these analysts, if, instead Akhilesh had asked one of his sitting MLAs to resign and could have announced that he was ready to face the chief minister in the people’s court, it could have electrified the political scene not only in UP but all over the country. Even if he would have lost by a narrow margin, the message would have been loud and clear that the party which had been claiming to win all the 80 seats in UP, is not likely to cross even a halfway mark if the present trend continued.
But this was not to be. A listless opposition in the country continues to languish in the oblivion losing one opportunity after the other, to present a united front against the ruling dispensation. According to some analysts, this could also be the result of a strategy to keep the pot boiling without interfering directly and then ride on the steam a strong people’s movement against the government.
One thing is pretty clear by now that the present government is riding on the crest of communal and caste polarisation. Any attempt by the opposition to attack the BJP-led government on its questionable credential on the issue of communalism will deliver no dividends and will only help in communal polarisation in favour of the Bhartiya Janata Party. Clearly, a strategy of the opposition has to be focused on economic issues and misgovernance.
In the weeks ahead, it is obvious that the ruling party in the centre is going to face a lot of trouble on the economic front. Some heads are bound to roll but the million dollar question is, Will the opposition wake up from its slumber?
[The author is a veteran journalist based out of Aligarh.]