As of now it would be premature to say whether disqualified Congress member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi would get sympathy votes in 2024 Lok Sabha election or not, yet it is a fact that over-suppression of the political rivals by the ruling party generates a lot of goodwill for the victims, opinesSoroor Ahmed.
As of now it would be premature to say whether disqualified Congress member of ParliamentRahul Gandhi would get sympathy votes in 2024 Lok Sabha election or not, yet it is a factthat over-suppression of the political rivals by the ruling party generates a lot ofgoodwill for the victims. At the national level this factor worked in 1977 and 1980parliamentary elections as well as in West Bengal Assembly poll in 2011.
There is no dearth of political observers who are of the view that Rahul would not be ableto cash in on the sympathy factor simply because his party lacks wherewithal to do so.They are of the view that the then Congress (I) president, Indira Gandhi, managed to winthe 1979-80 poll because her party was still strong enough to capitalise on the MorarjiDesai-led Janata Party government’s move to arrest her for the excesses committed duringEmergency. In contrast, the Congress today is not in a position to play victimhood card, itis said.
This may be true. But it is also a fact that the rag-tag army of Opposition partiessucceeded in winning the 1977 Lok Sabha poll just because Prime Minister Indira Gandhiimposed Emergency on June 25, 1975, threw the political opponents in jail and silenced allher critics. Otherwise, the performance of her government was not so bad that the Congresswould have been voted out of power.
When Indira Gandhi on January 19, 1977 announced that election would be held, the Opposition was in a disarray. Their leaders and workers were still to come out of prisons.Yet within two months they not only joined hands, but merged to form Janata Party and won the election. The Congress itself got split under the leadership of Jagjiwan Ram, the senior-most Congressman who had been minister since the first Jawaharlal Nehru cabinet afterIndependence. Another stalwart who left the party was Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna. Theleadership question was soon sorted out and Morarji Desai took oath as the first non-Congress Prime Minister of India on March 24, 1977.
All this had happened when Indira Gandhi had much to highlight as achievements in her six-year tenure from the last election of March 1971 to March 1977. The most prominent werethe liberation of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971, nuclear test on May 18, 1974 andbringing out the country from the serious economic meltdown after the famous global oilcrisis following the October 1973 Arab-Israel War. Within a matter of some weeks the oilprice jumped four times leading to great economic hardship across the world. In fact, thestudents’ movement of Gujarat and Bihar of December 1973 and March 1974 respectively hadmuch to do with huge rise in education fees and hostel charges as well as big increase ininflation.
The Emergency was imposed within a fortnight of June 12 Allahabad High Court rulingdisqualifying Indira Gandhi’s 1971 election from Rae Bareli. May sound unthinkable now,the verdict was given by a single judge bench of Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha, who alsodebarred her from contesting election for six years. Indira got panicked and imposed Emergency. What one tends to forget is that a large number of people in India then feltthat the ruling was a bit harsh against her.
But since she ordered crackdown on her political opponents, Indira lost the sympathy whichgradually shifted towards the latter. Thus, notwithstanding some good work done duringEmergency and even before during her rule she lost the election to thitherto dividedopposition. Neither the achievements of Indian army in Bangladesh nor the country joiningnuclear club could become an election issue. The whole electoral battle was fought on theissue of excess committed during the dark days. The Prime Minister herself was defeated inher own constituency, Rae Bareli, by the same Raj Narain, whom she had trounced last time. Herson Sanjay Gandhi too lost from Amethi. The Congress failed to open its account in thethen undivided Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Similarly, at the state-level, the example of West Bengal can be cited where the Left Frontwas humbled after 34-year long rule because of, among other things, its overbearingattitude. Mamata Banerjee emerged from the tattered Congress Party simply because thepowerful Left Front machinery went too much against her. She was even physically targetedand her supporters brutally killed and assaulted on a number of occasions. All this hadhappened when her earlier party, the Congress, was in a shambles. She broke away from theparty in late 1990s and emerged as a leader in her own self.
Though she reached the low-point of her career in 2004 when her party, Trinamool Congress,as a National Democratic Alliance constituent, could win only one seat, yet she soon madea comeback. This was once again because of the mishandling of the Nandigram and Singuragitations of farmers in 2007-08 by the Left Front government. Its bullying tacticbackfired and by 2011 the strong Marxist citadel crumbled. Had the latter not adoptedhigh-handed approach, Mamata may not have bounced back.
She was undoubtedly a street-fighter, but it is also a fact that after Bharat Jodo Yatra,Rahul Gandhi is a different politician. The ruling party needs to be cautious at themanner in which all Opposition parties, including Trinamool Congress, Aam Aadmi Party andBharat Rashtriya Samiti, had rallied behind him at least on this issue.
As in West Bengal, so in Bihar non-stop raids and interrogations by the central agenciesagainst ailing RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his family members have not only played a keyrole in keeping him politically alive but at the same time making his party stronger.The way in which the youngest son deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav’s wife, who was in herfinal stage of family way, had to undergo the trauma just days before the birth of baby onMarch 27, certainly evoked a lot of sympathy even among the political fence-sitters. Thequestion doing the rounds in Bihar is: why Lalu’s eldest son Tej Pratap Yadav, also aminister in the Nitish Kumar cabinet, has been spared when most members of his family arefacing the unpleasant music of CBI, ED and Income Tax? If the whole family is reallycorrupt, how can the name of the eldest son not figure in any charge? Is there any designto divide the family for political reason?