State Polls: People Want Leaders, Not Promises

The state elections results have thrown up some searching questions about people's wishes and the way politics is conducted in the country. Perhaps the clearest mandate people have given is for leadership. A two-year, high-profile campaign by Rahul Gandhi could swing only 4 per cent votes for the Congress alliance. Whatever his promises to the people of the state, it was plain to them that he was not the one who was going to deliver them. It would have been some proxy and they did not know who it would be.

The results have also shown that people do no have faith in parties that do not have credible leaders and a clear indication where the buck stops. The Congress can claim to have done decisively well only in one state – Manipur – and that is more because of Okram Ibobi Singh. Manipur was the only state where the party had a clear chief ministerial candidate and it won there. And Manipur did not need a Gandhi to win it for the party.

In Uttar Pradesh, both the Samajwadi Party, which is on the cusp of forming the government, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the runner up, had clear chief ministerial candidates. The two national parties, Congress and the BJP, did not project any leader to govern the state.

In the past few days national leaders of the Congress have been hard at work to apportion credit for victory and blame for defeat. If it won, the victory would be Rahul Gandhi’s and if it lost, the defeat would belong to the party organization that did not follow on the dusty trail left by Rahul’s choppers. The defend-Rahul strategy has continued on national television as the results began to unfold. The strategy of ring-fencing the Gandhi family from political harm has been the bane of the party, and consequently the country, in the past few years.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh has been taking the brunt of it for a while as he struggles to viably fuse the party’s agenda with national economic priorities. As journalist Prabhu Chawla commented on television, `Manmohan Singh would be laughing now because he has nothing to do with the election results.’’

Where does it leave the government and its policy agenda? It is highly unlikely that the government would be able to push ahead with reforms easily. The Congress will not be able to take on Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress which has been stalling the few reforms it wanted to implement such as foreign investment in retail and the National Counter-terrorism Centre. With the Congress increasingly being accused of undercutting federalism in the country and since it cannot implement many of its pet schemes and other economic reforms without the states’ cooperation, the Parliament is likely to see a Budget session of compromises. Any tough decisions are likely to be postponed.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.