More than BJP success, Delhi polls underline Congress leadership failure

How does the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) defeat in Delhi affect national politics? At one level, it advances the consolidation of power by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), adding one more administrative jurisdiction to those already controlled by it. At another level, it adds to the dissonance in the INDIA bloc, bringing down the Congress party’s trust quotient as an alliance partner – after all, it had refused to take the INDIA grouping into Delhi’s electoral fray, and potentially diverted to itself some anti-BJP votes that might have gone to the AAP. Both spell advantage to the BJP.

Of course, the Congress could also have attracted some anti-AAP votes that could have gone to the BJP, reducing the BJP’s victory margins. The Congress vote share went up by two percentage points – only. This reveals the fundamental flaw in current Indian politics: there is virtually no party to rally the democratic opposition to the majoritarian politics of the BJP and its larger Sangh Parivar.

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AAP and BJP

The AAP never presented itself as an ideological opponent of the BJP. It has steadfastly refused to confront either the violation of minority rights or the weakening of democracy by the use of minority rights to defend blatantly undemocratic discrimination against women or pander to religious radicalism. It is the party that would ask the people to look the other way as the Sangh Parivar and its stormtroopers make life with dignity difficult for members of the minority communities, even if it would not launch such attacks by itself.

Electoral battles are not won by ideology alone. Parties need to show they are capable of delivering effective, imaginative governance that would improve lives by promoting policies that produce social and physical infrastructure, and businesses generating jobs and incomes. In the age of social media, performance must be accompanied by publicity that counters the discrediting of performance by political opponents.

UPA era

The Congress failed, during the tenure of the UPA government it had led, to own and defend the government’s sterling achievements ranging from the unmatched decadal compound growth rate of 6.8 per cent over 10 years it secured, steady increase in rural real wages over 2008-14, massive investment in infrastructure via public-private partnership, key legislation such as the Right to Information Act, the Forest Rights Act, the Employment Guarantee Act, securing release from global technology denial via the Indo-US nuclear treaty, laying the foundations of India’s digital public infrastructure through a steep rise in telecom penetration, including in rural areas, and the creation of Aadhaar, paving the way for the India Stack of APIs that enabled the subsequent rollout of UPI for payments, the DigiLocker and the consent layer for sharing data on financial activity at the discretion of the data subject.

Infant mortality and maternal mortality fell to record lows. Primary school enrolment covered the entirety of the relevant population. The National Rural Health Mission rolled out health insurance for the poor. The National Food Security Act guaranteed universal access to low-cost food. It made skilling a national priority, trained and placed over a million young people in new jobs.

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Congress failures

It allowed the world’s largest private-sector-led telecom revolution to be damned as a scam, but defeated stiff opposition from the BJP and the Left to the Indo-US nuclear deal and to Aadhaar. It would have implemented the Goods and Services Tax, but for the BJP’s refusal to cooperate, but succeeded in opening up additional sectors of the economy to foreign investment and competition, whether organized retail or defence production. The Sensex rose more than five-fold, from 4,300 to 22,340 over the UPA’s 10 years.

Yet, weak, incompetent leadership led the Congress to allow its 10 years at the helm of the government to be etched in the public imagination as nothing but a corrupt disaster in India’s history.

Incompetent leadership

That weak, incompetent leadership continues to lord over the party, appointing mediocre leaders with little acceptance among the party’s rank and file to lead state units, continues to undermine and hobble the party and thwart its emergence as the national alternative to the BJP. It keeps accusing the BJP of manipulating elections, but fails to place trained polling agents in every polling booth, whose vigilance can abort many kinds of electoral malpractice. This incompetence has let the BJP gain from the anti-incumbency against the AAP, instead of pushing popular support towards the Congress.

The Delhi electorate has preferred the BJP in parliament elections in 2014, 2019 and 2024, demonstrating it has no ideological distaste for the BJP. Therefore, the Delhi Assembly election results mark administrative, rather than ideological, gains for the BJP.

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Narcissistic leadership

More than the BJP’s success, the Delhi election results demonstrate the failure of the Congress under its current narcissistic leadership. When ordinary Congressmen refuse to rise up against the leadership killing the party and harming Indian democracy, they expect all champions and well-wishers of democracy to keep supporting their dear leaders, notwithstanding their antics and inanities. Many might, but most would not.

If anyone expects the decline of the AAP to automatically lead to regeneration of the Congress, they should think again. Opposing the BJP calls for reimagining the democratic agenda, not waiting for the BJP’s mistakes to hatch popular rejection.