Why the loss in Madhya Pradesh will hurt the Congress the most

Of the Hindi heartland states where the Congress was decimated in recent Assembly polls, the rout in Chhattisgarh may have been the most shocking but it is the defeat in Madhya Pradesh that must worry the party the most.

This is not for the scale of the BJP's massive victory in MP or because, barring the momentary uptick in its fortunes in the 2018 polls, the Congress has failed to win the state decisively for two decades. The cause of worry isn’t the Congress's vote share either, for the party has largely succeeded in retaining its 2018 voter base, polling 40.40 percent of all votes cast, as against the BJP's nearly 48.55 percent.

The results show that MP's voters simply do not trust the Congress party to lead them. In fact, if the Congress's narrow 2018 win is seen as an aberration, the December 3 results show that the state has emerged as the BJP's formidable bastion across India after Modi's Gujarat.

The massive mandate for the BJP indicates that it mattered little to the electorate that the saffron party had not projected Shivraj Singh Chouhan, or anyone else, as its CM face. The voter also did not respond positively to the Congress’s big Caste Census/Survey push, touted to be a revolutionary reform for OBC, ST and SC emancipation, though over 80 percent of MP's population can be clubbed into the caste matrix of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Backward Castes.

Ugly mimicry of BJP's Hindutva fails

The deafening cacophony over an 18-year anti-incumbency against the BJP or the visible public anger on issues of unemployment, rising prices, atrocities against Dalits, tribals and religious minorities or even the undermining of the people's pro-Congress mandate of 2018 were not, individually or collectively, enough to turn the voters away from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's saffron brigade. The Congress's ugly mimicry, under Hanuman-bhakt Kamal Nath's spell, of BJP's Hindu identity politics too, failed spectacularly in making any impact.

Modi will now decide who will lead the BJP's newly minted government in the state. The party's bench strength of 163 MLAs in the 230-member Vidhan Sabha against the Congress’s 66 MLAs means that, unlike the prematurely and unethically toppled Nath government, the BJP will, yet again, give the state a stable government for the next five years.

This also means five more years for the Congress to sit in Opposition, keep the government on its toes, rebuild itself from the grassroots and be battle-ready for the next assembly polls, due in 2028. On each of these counts, the Congress also has its task cut out in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan – the other two states it lost to the BJP. Yet, it is in MP where the party's challenge to deliver on these fronts is the toughest.

Dislodging the BJP a formidable challenge

To take on a mighty electoral beast such as the BJP, any political party requires a formidable and sustained combination of enormous resources, grassroots mobilisation, alternative narrative, Machiavellian poll strategies and, most importantly, to operationalise all of these in tandem, a leader or, in her/his absence, a collective leadership that can work as one and not at cross-purposes.

In Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, the Congress still has the likes of Bhupesh Baghel – the party may have lost the polls on his watch but he can't be written off just yet – Deepak Baij, Sachin Pilot and some others, young or not too old, leaders to hot-wire a 5-year plan of reform and revival. In MP, though, the party is woefully devoid of any credible leader it can bank on to deliver the state five years on.

No pan-MP Congress leader in sight

The Congress’s tallest leaders in MP, presently, are Nath and former CM Digvijaya Singh, both 76 years old. The mess that the duo, particularly Nath, who is defiantly holding on to his role as MP Congress chief instead of voluntarily resigning, has left the Congress in need of no elaboration. The Congress can draw some solace from the fact that by the time MP goes to polls next in 2028, the two leaders will be over 81 years of age and, hopefully, out of the race to lead the party electorally. Similarly, by 2028, other satraps – none of them with any pan-MP influence – such as former chief minister Arjun Singh’s 68-year-old son Ajay Singh ‘Rahul’, 71-year-old former Union minister Suresh Pachouri, former Leader of Opposition Govind Singh (72) and former Union minister Kantilal Bhuria (73), would also be in the last lap of their political innings.

A fact is that the Nath–Singh duopoly has prevented the party from establishing any alternative leadership in MP and the Congress high command has willingly or per force allowed them to run the party in the state as their fief. Until 2020, the Congress had hoped that Jyotiraditya Scindia would carry the leadership baton once Nath and Singh had sung their swan song. However, the insecure Gwalior royal made a hasty switchover to the BJP in March 2020; he may not have replaced Nath as CM as a reward for bringing down the Congress regime, but he is now one of the saffron party's many second-rung leaders waiting their turn to someday lead the government in the state.

Keeping it warm for heirs

The Congress has made it clear that its doors for Scindia are now closed forever. The question for the Congress then is who can it turn to from its current lot of leaders to rebuild and revitalise the party. It is also a fact that neither Nath nor Singh, as long as they remain active in politics, will willingly allow the party high command to clip their influence over the state unit.

There have already been enough rumours of the two septuagenarian leaders working towards a plan that sees their mutual understanding of over four decades extending to their political heirs in a way that the party remains tied to them. While Singh would want his son Jaivardhan Singh, who narrowly won his family seat of Raghogarh by over 4500 votes this time, to be the party’s face in MP in the foreseeable future, Nath fashions the same role for his son, Chhindwara MP Nakul Nath, at the central level on matters concerning the state.

Jaivardhan and Nakul have neither shown any credible signs of being mass leaders nor do they exhibit the political understanding and heft of their respective fathers. The party surely has no dearth of second-rung leaders, but none of them have, thus far, displayed the leadership qualities that, for instance, Telangana CM-designate Revanth Reddy or Himachal CM Sukhwinder Sukhu, showed in their respective states against many odds.

No credible face to lead the party

Besides Jaivardhan and Nakul, others whose names have done the rounds for possible contenders to lead the Congress to a better future once Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh bow out are former Union minister Arun Yadav (49), who, in his previous stint as the state unit chief has already proved to be utterly uninspiring; Congress Working Committee member and the party’s new OBC poster boy Kamleshwar Patel (49), who lost his Sihawal seat by over 16000 votes; Rahul Gandhi’s aide and former MLA Jitu Patwari (50), who also lost his Rau seat by over 35000 votes and tribal leader Kantilal Bhuria’s son and newly elected Jhabua MLA Vikrant Bhuria (39), who as the party’s MP youth wing chief has earned a reputation for being arrogant and self-obsessed.

Another name often debated is Gandhwani MLA Umang Singhar (49), the nephew of former deputy CM and tribal leader late Jamuna Devi. Singhar is already learned to be lobbying for the post of Leader of Opposition in the state assembly and has tried to bury the hatchet with Digvijaya, who shared a bitter rapport with Jamuna Devi too. However, while Singhar is a combative leader who also shares a good rapport with Rahul Gandhi, his influence even on the state’s own tribal community is limited and his equation with most of his contemporaries in the state Congress is, at best, frosty.

The BJP, on the other hand, can still depend on strong and influential satraps such as 64-year-old Chouhan (provided he has Modi’s blessings), 67-year-old Kailash Vijayvargiya, Narottam Mishra (63), Prahlad Patel (63) or even the 52-year-old Scindia, among at least half a dozen other probables from across politically and socially influential caste and community groups, to keep the party’s bastion secure in the foreseeable future.

In need of a new leadership

The Congress, as is its wont, is likely to choose its next PCC and legislature party chiefs based on the overrated and slippery plank of seniority and on inputs from its old and jaded leaders such as Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh, say party insiders. If this is the case, the party’s choices may give the organisation some stability in the immediate aftermath of its recent poll debacle, but it would not bring any new life into the moribund organisation that has to ward off now the BJP’s infamous politics of vendetta for another five years.

The Congress needs to identify a new leadership in MP, let it seize the organisation’s control from the lot that calls the shots now and then back it to the hilt to lay out an aggressive, out-of-the-box reform and revival plan. But for this to happen, it needs to first identify who it can bet on. Unfortunately for the Grand Old Party, none of its current options looks good and this is why the party’s defeat in MP must sting its high command much more than the shockers that came from Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.