Joker : An outburst and something more : Winner takes it all
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: June 04 , 2014 -

The winner takes it all while the loser is left to pick up the thread and the bits and pieces and try to sew back the patches. In as much as this is true in life, so is it in politics.

While the stock of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on the upswing, especially on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the All India Congress Committee and the face of the oldest political party in the country in the run up to the recent Parliamentary election has been dubbed a ‘joker’, not by one but two MLAs.

By extension, this is a pressure on the top leadership of the AICC, particularly Sonia Gandhi to look beyond the present crop of leaders and effect some real meaningful changes.

Bhanwar Lal Sharma, a three time Congress MLA from Rajasthan and TH Mustafa, a Congress leader from Kerela are not political heavy weights and there is no doubt that they would not be in a position to rally the other Congress leaders or workers around them and raise the banner of revolt.

But it is a pointer to the fact that discontentment is brewing within the Congress party, a point which the AICC leadership cannot overlook.

Suspending the said two Congress leaders from the primary membership of the party may at best be described as some sort of a damage control exercise or more precisely a warning to the others to fall in line and not go public with their grievances.

It is also not surprising that disgruntled voices have already started doing the round within the party’s fold and why not ?

This is by far the worst showing by the Congress in any Parliamentary election, winning only 44 seats, while the BJP successfully rode on the Modi wave and crossed the magic mark of 272, a feat achieved by the Congress in the 1984 election when it crossed the 400 mark. But then circumstances are different.

It is not without reason that many political pundits pointed to the sympathy wave, in the backdrop of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own body guards, for the stupendous showing put up by the Congress then.

This time there was no such thing as sympathy wave, but more and more it has become clear that it was not only a pro-Modi wave but also an anti-Congress wave.

Perhaps it is in realisation of this that the two Congress leaders mustered the conviction to dub Rahul Gandhi a ‘joker’.

Only the coming days will tell whether the Congress leaders have learnt any meaningful lesson from the drubbing they received at the hands of the BJP.

But it would however do them wise not to take the ‘outbursts’ from the two Congress leaders as mere ‘outbursts’.

It was an outburst no doubt, but it was also something more.

It was a cry or a demand that the Congress go in for a complete overhaul or else it will only continue to sink into the abyss of ignominy.

The BJP has already started the spadework for the upcoming Assembly elections in Maharastra, Delhi and Haryana later this year.

Elections are also due in Jammu and Kashmir at the latter part of this year and while the BJP may not have a presence in Jammu and Kashmir, the same may also be said of the Congress.

The second test is being lined up and the ‘joker’ tag, however distasteful and crude it may be, should just be the call for the Congress leadership to come to reality and acknowledge that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.

Looking beyond the Gandhi family may be too tough a call for the party, which has had to rely on the all India appeal of the Gandhi name, but this should be no reason why changes cannot be made within the party’s hierarchy.

India cannot afford to have a weak Congress at any cost, given the fact that there is no other party which can give the BJP a run for its money.

Joker or not, this is the right time for a post mortem and see where they went wrong.

It is a pity that the party which gave Nehru, Patel, Tilak and others to the Nation is today reduced to such a state, that it is uncertain whether the Speaker of the Lok Sabha will name any of its MPs as the Opposition leader in Parliament, given its number of 44.