Has Congress painted itself into a corner with North-South controversy?

A large section of Congress leaders from the country’s Hindi heartland has implored party president Mallikarjun Kharge to censure their southern colleagues who alluded to the recent assembly poll results as being indicative of a widening “north-south divide”, The Federal has learnt. Overzealous proponents of the north-south divide rhetoric included All India Professional Congress chief Praveen Chakravarty and former Union minister P Chidambaram’s son, Lok Sabha MP Karti Chidambaram.

“The south-north boundary line is getting thicker and clearer," Chakravarty, a close associate of former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, had posted on X, as the assembly poll results were declared on December 3; a post he later deleted but not before it triggered a raucous backlash from BJP leaders such as BL Santhosh.

North-South rows

The BJP had scorched the Congress throughout the recent assembly polls campaign over ally DMK’s anti-Sanatana Dharma remarks and, arguably, benefitted from the resultant religious polarisation it caused in MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Many Congress leaders from the states that fall north of the Vindhyas believe that this “imaginary and absurd” north vs south flashpoint, coupled with DMK MP Senthilkumar’s ‘Gaumutra states’ slur, made against Hindi-speaking states in the Lok Sabha (he later apologised for the expunged remark), newly sworn-in Telangana CM Revanth Reddy’s 'Bihari genes' jibe at his predecessor, BRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao, and the still raging Sanatana Dharma row, will help the BJP to further swerve voter sentiments against the Congress in the vast Hindi heartland.

“Celebrating the Telangana result or the earlier win in Karnataka is one thing and everyone in the party acknowledges the importance of these victories but why must we do it with a negative mindset. Are there not enough divisions in the country under (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi’s rule on religious, regional, economic and linguistic lines that we have to create another divide between the north and the south,” a senior Rajya Sabha MP and Congress Working Committee member told The Federal.

The MP added, “What are we trying to achieve with this narrative; do these people not understand how easy it would be for the BJP to use this to incite voter anger against the Congress in the Hindi belt where we are already struggling.”

Party of the south

Recalling a similar controversy that Rahul Gandhi had triggered in February 2021 by asserting during a public meeting in Thiruvananthapuram that he found Kerala very “refreshing” because, unlike the north which has a “different type of politics... the people of Kerala are interested in issues”, a Congress office bearer said the fresh north-south row shows “we just don’t learn from our blunders”.

The senior party functionary said, “the underlying message of this line is that the people in the south are good because they have voted for a Congress government while those in the north are fools for electing BJP governments... kya aise harayenge hum BJP ko Hindi patti ke rajyon mei (is this how we will defeat the BJP in the Hindi belt?); how can you expect the Hindi-belt voter to vote for you when you insult him like this”.

Several Congress leaders The Federal spoke to said that there was already growing unease within sections of the party over the “decreasing representation from the Hindi belt” in the highest echelons of the Congress organisation since the 2019 Lok Sabha rout, which had strengthened the perception that the GOP “had surrendered the north to the BJP and become a party of the south”. This line had begun gaining momentum after Rahul Gandhi successfully contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Kerala’s Wayanad but lost his traditional seat of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh.

In the years since 2019, the party’s leadership and that of its frontal organisations became visibly dominated by southerners such as KC Venugopal (organisational general secretary), Jairam Ramesh (communications head and chief whip, Rajya Sabha), Suresh Kodikunnil (chief whip, Lok Sabha), Srinivas BV (Indian Youth Congress chief), Netta D’Souza (Mahila Congress chief) and, finally, Mallikarjun Kharge, who was elected last year as Congress president and is also the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha.

BJP's hold over Hindi heartland

The BJP’s comprehensive victories in the MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan polls shows that the saffron party’s stock in the Hindi heartland is consolidating ahead of the 2024 general elections in the region that, along with other states north of the Vindhyas such as Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Delhi, etc., sends 171 of Lok Sabha’s 543 MPs. This tally doesn’t include the 26 seats of Gujarat where Modi and his BJP practically have no challenger or the Opposition-ruled states such as Bihar and Jharkhand, where despite strong regional rivals, the saffron party had won a lion’s share of constituencies in the past two consecutive Lok Sabha polls, riding on Modi’s popularity.

The Congress, in contrast, has either consistently lost ground or is already a fringe outfit in these states. In the south, where the Congress currently boasts of an imminent revival of fortunes, it is directly pitted against the BJP only in select seats across states like Karnataka and Telangana, while remaining an uninspiring alternative to dominant regional parties like the BJD, YSRCP and TDP in Odisha or Andhra Pradesh. In Kerala, where the BJP has no presence, the Congress has to face off against the Left parties while in Tamil Nadu, its electoral performance is largely at the mercy of the DMK.

Congress in a corner

Congress leaders peeved at the rhetoric over a north-south divide maintain that the party would do better to aggressively rebuild itself in the Hindi heartland instead of alienating the voters further in this region and giving the BJP more ammunition to attack it. “A simple enough thing that some of our talkative colleagues with delusions about this talk of a north-south divide helping the Congress consolidate its numbers in the south do not seem to understand is that even if we were to perform exceedingly well in the south, we will at best win 40 odd seats from the region because barring Kerala, Karnataka and now Telangana, we aren’t a dominant party in any of those states,” a Congress Lok Sabha MP from one of the Hindi heartland states said.

The Lok Sabha MP added, “The BJP, on the other hand, is talking about winning 180 or 185 seats from the Hindi speaking states alone, which isn’t a tall order for it as the 2014 and 2019 results have already proved. To this you can add a majority, if not all, seats from Gujarat and Assam and also a chunk from Maharashtra... and don’t think that the BJP will not win anything in its ‘weak’ states like Bengal, Odisha, Telangana or Karnataka... the question then is, what are we celebrating? Do we have a glide-path for reducing the BJP’s tally in the Hindi heartland other than untested ideas like the INDIA alliance or this fanciful north-south divide?”

The MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan victories have burnished Modi’s aura of the country’s preeminent vote-magnet and bolstered the BJP’s electoral prospects just four months before the Lok Sabha polls are called. Modi and the BJP’s formidable poll machinery, already on an overdrive to brand the Congress and its INDIA partners as a divisive front detrimental to the country’s unity and progress, can be relied upon to use the north-south narrative to whip up a jingoistic frenzy in the Hindi heartland in the days ahead and they have the Congress just where they want it to be – in the firing line.