Sonia Gandhi has stepped back from the Prime Ministership and pulled the rug from under the feet of her violent opposition. They have been stumped. We have a squeaky clean Prime Minister in Dr Manmohan Singh. Three cheers! Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh make a great team. The chatteratti are hailing her but more important than their superficial turnaround is the fact that her party workers are stunned for the moment.
They must try to understand the political skills of their leader. Politically, the Party is of prime importance and to keep it together, to inject it with energy, will require much hard work. Hopefully, as Congress President, Sonia Gandhi will lead her karyakartas, the backbone of the Congress, taking the message further and further into the hinterland. Next time, it could well be a decisive mandate.
Planned and active manipulation of the stockmarket over the last few days by those whose position had been undermined by the mandate of the people, brought the stockmarket crashing ? everyone in the know knows who and how. Is this their version of desh bhakti? Is this the respect they have for the democratic framework of governance or do they not believe in democracy at all? As patriotic Indians, were they so removed from the truth and reality that they did not even have an inkling of the rumblings on the ground?
Can Atal B Vajpayee not control his flock and compel them to be dignified in this transition period? Are these men and women who ruled until very recently going to take to the streets? Is it not better to do a serious assessment of what went wrong for them, and work on the correctives for their future? Where is the leadership in all this? Where is the fourth estate?
Yes, it will be a tough period ahead. The new ruling dispensation will have to rationalise the myth of India Shining, policies will have to be re-adjusted, institutions that were tampered with will have to have their problems addressed and it will be hard work all the way with the alliance partners, inside or outside government. Alliance partners, whether inside government or not, will be consulted on all major policy decisions in an attempt for a consensus. Thereafter, it will be the maturity of leadership in Parliament that will determine the life of the government. With some senior leaders in the BJP behaving the way they are, addressing the priorities as they see them, it makes one shudder about the role they will play as opposition members.
Many supporters of the BJP believe that the BJP itself is to blame for the victory of Sonia Gandhi who took her party to become the single largest. Very few can get over the shock of where the BJP, on its own, ended up ? under 140 seats. The chatteratti, in their western garb, drinking their fancy wine, were betting wildly that the Congress would descend to double digits; that the Vajpayee-led BJP would gain ground and would be let down in numbers, only marginally, by their NDA partners; that they were all feeling good that India was on the move; that the Americans had finally admitted us into their club.
But when Vajpayee, despite asking for votes day in and day out on television, could not deliver this time, this same tribe of super-educated people realised somewhere deep down that there were others in this country who are poor but more powerful than them, who pulled the plug on hollow rhetoric. Someone referred to it as a silent revolution. It is this real Indian who will check and balance the game played out by the privileged that have, over the years, become disconnected with their own country. Ironically, the party that professed to believe in ram rajya for Indians, betrayed the poor and left it to the Congress to become their messiah again!
The pools of India Shining, the metros, voted out the BJP and their allies. But the swings in those constituencies, for the Congress, came from the urban poor. They had seen through the rhetoric. I recall the Sangh Parivar once making their claim on three religious sites Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathur. They managed to pull down the Babri Masjid and have been since agitating for the Ram Temple, (alas, instead of for ram rajya). This election saw the BJP defeated in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. Is this a symbolic assertion of the secular soul of India? Is the message ?Get on with the basics and stop the neo-nationalist irrelevancies??
It is eventually the confidence of the people, despite their poverty and decades of sheer neglect, which dislodges the arrogance that comes with insecurity. Pluralism and diversity are strengths, not weaknesses and those whose overriding ideology is to force all into one primary stream, will never rule the subcontinent as a whole. The Congress survives, even in a battered form, because it represents all the strains that make India, India.