SUNDAY, JUNE 30, 2024
Radharao Gracias
Never before did I savour a Congress victory as I did the win of Captain Viriato Fernandes over Pallavi Dempo in the Lok Sabha elections. Never before did I canvass so strenuously for the Congress. Neither was I the only constant anti-Congress activist to have tilted at the BJP windmills. Actually, the campaign team was a gathering of perennial foes of the Congress, ironically, pushing for its victory. I was pretty actively involved backing the Congress, which I have opposed most of my activist life.
Oddly, what thrust me into an active campaign was the economist Parakala Prabhakar, husband of Nirmala Sitaraman the powerful Union Finance Minister, who in a video claimed that “if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wins the upcoming Lok Sabha polls and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is re-elected again in 2024, then there will never be elections in the country again. PM Modi himself will give a hate speech from the Red Fort and a situation like Ladakh-Manipur will arise in the entire country”. I thought if that be so, why must I not do my bit to stall such a scenario? After all, I may not get another chance, if the husband of the BJP minister is proved right. The electors too seem to have heeded his message and voted to deny Modi the sort of majority needed, to do what Prabhakar had feared.
As I look back, I can say that the desertion of the Congress by senior leaders it had bred and fed, over the years, made the Congress stronger. Once the Congress was freed of the unwanted baggage, well-meaning citizens rushed to its rescue. And in particular, the telephone call made by Francisco Sardinha, the four-term Congress MP to his supporters, belittling the naval hero Captain Viriato, recorded and circulated by an alert activist, which reverberated in cyberspace, showered revulsion on Sardinha and sympathy on the Congress.
As the BJP maintains, there indeed was polarisation of voters, mostly as a result of a shrill BJP campaign. The voters were polarised into the secular and non-secular camps. To its great credit, the secular camp won. The Congress secured 2,17,836 votes which were possible since more than twenty percent of the majority community voted for it. Because of this across the board support, at no point in the counting, did Captain Viriato trail. The BJP got 2,04,301 votes, almost all from the polarised right. So polarisation did occur, but worked against the BJP!
The BJP’s objections against involvement of priests in the campaign are based, perhaps, on its own experience. We have seen how Yogi Adityanath, the Mahant of the Gorakhnath Mutt who is the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, led the campaign for the BJP. The voters largely rejected his priestly pourings and gave a majority of the seats to INDIA. The BJP even failed in Faizabad, which includes Ayodhya, where the Ram temple was inaugurated months earlier, with great expectations. Clearly the message to the BJP is to keep religion and the priests in the temples. I trust, the message will sink in.
The Congress MLAs have in the recent past become free range cattle, left to graze upon, devour and destroy their own pastures, then move to greener pastures, only to return at election time, to repeat the process ad nauseam. The Congress is fortunate that its Augean stables have been cleansed of the pile-up of filth (without even the need to divert the Mahadei!); it must now bring in younger and sturdier horses to pull the Congress chariot to its ultimate destination on Porvorim hill, three years hence.
There are lessons to learn from its rout in the North and success in the South.
The Congress has thirty-seven seats without sitting MLAs, which is an opportunity to draft fresh talent free of the contagion of corruption, thus not susceptible to ED raids. The main reason for defections is the propensity of the Congress to allot tickets to dubious “winnable” candidates, who upon winning become satraps, dictate terms and in case of resistance defect, with their entourage. The need is to build up a cadre and make the party winnable on its ideology alone; the cadre must have a role in selection of candidates.
Before that, the issue of GFP and Vijai Sardessai must be sorted out. Vijai played an immense role in the campaign of Captain Viriato and his presence in the Congress will give the party a further fillip.
Despite so many handicaps, the Congress campaign in the South was extremely well marshalled. The catalyst was the fresh faced candidate with a proven record of patriotism capped by the young and “raw” President Amit Patkar, clearly signalling the presence of the right men in the right place. The absence of senior MLAs pushed the burden on two young first-timers, Yuri Alemao and Altone D’Costa, who stepped forward to happily over-perform. These three, along with Carlos Ferreira, provide the steel framework around which the Congress can rebuild itself with a real-life Captain as the link to Delhi.
Now in my waning years, I do hope that a chastened Congress may seriously take up issues I had fought for, against its earlier stubborn avatar. Do I see light at the end of the tunnel? Or do I see a power failure (as is frequently the case!) as one nears the end?
Victory was achieved after a vicious fight against dark forces, that had unlimited financial resources and the full might of the State to back it. No electoral win ever tasted more delicious. The sanguinity of the win is certainly the icing on the “bhakri”!
(Radharao F Gracias is a senior Trial Court Advocate, a former Independent MLA, a political activist, with a reputation for oratory and interests in history and ornithology)
