oppn parties Congress & BSP: It Would Have Made No Difference

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oppn parties
Congress & BSP: It Would Have Made No Difference

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2022-04-10 15:08:42

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

After a crushing and demoralizing defeat in the UP elections when the Congress party could win just 2 seats, got only 2.5% votes and 97 percent of its 403 candidates lost their security deposits, it is funny that Rahul Gandhi is taking potshots at the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) and Mayawati. Rahul claimed that the Congress had offered to make Mayawati the chief ministerial face if she had contested the elections in alliance with the Congress, but she never replied and did not meets Congress leaders.

Does Mr Gandhi realize the reason for the snub? The Congress is a spent force in UP. It was already down in the dumps and after the 2022 elections, it has been totally marginalized. Mayawati is a shrewd politician. She knew that the Congress had lost the Muslim voters long time back to the SP and the BSP. Its Dalit voters had also shifted camp ages back to the two parties as per their caste loyalties, before the BJP cut in through its social engineering from 2014 onwards and made it a three-way drain on the Congress. Except for some old-timers, no one votes for the Congress in UP. Hence, Mayawati knew there was no point in allying with the party and snubbed its overtures.

As Mayawati said later, the Congress had never been well disposed towards her party and had always tried to defame the party. She said even now the Congress was saying that she had refused an alliance and was low key during the UP elections as she was afraid of the numerous cases filed by the Centre against her through agencies like the Enforcement Directorate, the CBI and others. But Mayawati said that she had won most of these cases in the Supreme Court. She advised the Congress to set its house in order instead of raising such issues.

The Congress should follow Mayawati's advice. It should set its house in order. The way the last elections played out, it seems that UP will increasingly have bipolar elections where the BJP and the SP will contest against each other by having a rainbow alliance with smaller parties. It will be an uphill task for the Congress, or for that matter even the BSP, to make a meaningful comeback if the SP does not lose steam. But there is hope for the Congress in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. It must get to work otherwise there too the Aam Aadmi Party will elbow it out, like it did in Punjab. It will have to realize that no political strategist or fancy campaign will help it win unless it presents itself as a credible alternative with a strong regional leader. 

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