Congress must correct course or perish

People in five states comprising one-fifth of India's population have delivered a devastating blow to the Congress party in the just-concluded Assembly elections. The political landscape has put the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at a disadvantage in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress faced a rout in India's biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, being reduced to the fourth position. This reverses the gains made in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, when it won the equivalent of 90-100 Assembly segments (of 403) and got an opportunity to rebuild its organisation.
The Congress lost in Punjab, where it was confident of winning. In Uttarakhand, it scraped past the BJP, but didn't win a majority. It suffered a stunning defeat in Goa. Its victory in Manipur in the Northeast doesn't compensate for this.
The Congress's leadership must reflect self-critically and painfully candidly on the party's poor recent showing in West Bengal, Maharashtra municipal elections, by-elections elsewhere, and in these five states.
The Congress is clearly on a downward course. If it looks for lazy, superficial solutions, it will only accelerate its decline.
The UP result has changed the political complexion of the Hindi belt. The Samajwadi Party won the largest number of seats bagged by any party in two decades in UP, pushing Ms. Mayawati's Dalit-based Bahujan Samaj Party to a distant second.
Some commentators have attributed the UP result to growing irrelevance of identities like caste and religion. They argue that a new kind politics is emerging, and voters are now choosing "the future over the past, performance over rhetoric, sincerity over cynicism."
Yet others say the result is explained by erosion of the BSP's social base. Not only Muslims and upper-caste Hindus, but many Dalits too moved out of its fold because they got nothing but symbolic patronage, not substantive empowerment, from her. Her arrogance and inaccessibility also contributed to her poor showing.
Another factor, they speculate, was Akhilesh Yadav's emergence as a suave and affable campaigner. He has tried to transform the SP's image by disassociating it from musclemen, and projected it as a modern party not opposed to the English language and computers. The SP, it's claimed, might have attracted some Dalit votes.
It's undeniable that many upper-caste Hindus who strongly supported the BSP in 2007 deserted it. Many Muslims too gravitated to the SP once they realised that the BJP wasn't a threat and the BSP was unlikely to win. Some were tempted by the SP's promise of 18% reservation in government jobs.
However, significant numbers of Dalits didn't move away from the BSP. Its estimated vote-share declined from 30.4 to 25.9%. This doesn't suggest much erosion of its Dalit base, which by most accounts got consolidated. It defies credulity that Dalits would rally behind the SP, a party of the Yadavs, their traditional oppressors.
The primary explanation for the SP's stunning victory is identity-related: consolidation of an anti-Dalit sentiment among savarnas (upper-caste Hindus).
This had little to do with Ms. Mayawati's "poor governance." In fact, she ran a passable administration by UP standards. She sent many notorious criminals to jail. Her last tenure saw less corruption than under previous chief ministers.
The savarna resentment arose from many class- and caste-related factors. The BSP's was not just a government led by a Dalit party; it was a Dalit government. The relative success of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has pushed up wages to upper-caste landowners' resentment.
Ms. Mayawati also started collecting electricity bills and the sales tax, which savarna shopkeepers rarely pay.
Governance under the BSP was certainly better than the goonda raj widely attributed to Mr. Yadav, with his links with shady businessmen and Bollywood stars. It's true that Ms. Mayawati splurged hundreds of crores on Dalit theme-parks with grand statues. But as I found out during a recent visit to Lucknow, this isn't necessarily resented by savarnas: they believe these monuments have brought architectural distinction to the city.
Draining the UP exchequer to favour business cronies isn't a BSP monopoly. It has long been practiced -- and with a vengeance -- by the SP. Certain business groups are salivating at the prospect of lucrative contracts under the SP.
Ms. Mayawati was loathed and resented because she is a successful Dalit woman leader and UP's first-ever chief minister to complete his/her term. She's too independent-minded and angular to be amenable to pressure.
The SP was well-placed to exploit the anti-Dalit backlash because it seemed best-geared to dislodge the BSP, and ran an energetic campaign. This, and the reconsolidation of the party's Muslim-Yadav core base, gave the SP a massive head-start.
The Congress assumed it could perform impressively on its own although it lacked a strong organisation and a platform to distinguish it adequately from the SP. Both targeted the BSP. But the SP reaped disproportionate gains from this because it had a well-defined M-Y core, and pitched specifically for Brahmin support.
The Congress's poor performance in the elections is closely related to UPA-2's failure to fulfill the promise of aam aadmi-oriented "inclusive growth," and its pursuit of pro-rich, pro-Big Business policies that dispossess the poor. Its government has become synonymous with loot of natural resources, elitist projects and corruption scandals.
That's why the Congress lost in Punjab and Uttarakhand the anti-incumbency advantage arising from the ruling parties' astronomical corruption, nepotism and dhakkashahi (winner-takes-all-style rule by force).
The BJP too fared poorly, except in Goa. It lost four seats in UP, seven in Punjab, and four in Uttarakhand. In UP, the BJP state president, and a former speaker, both lost.
The Congress must not fool itself that it has an ace vote-puller in Rahul Gandhi. Mr. Gandhi failed to convert sympathy for the party into votes. Nor can the Congress succeed in the next Lok Sabha election with the existing government leadership and policies. It must free itself of the Manmohan Singh burden and correct course. Or, it will perish.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.
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