Ten straight years in power at the Centre in the coalition era is no mean achievement, but it has left the Congress fighting on all fronts, especially when it comes to repairing public perceptions before the Lok Sabha poll. Thus party president Sonia Gandhi’s reported eve-of-battle message couldn’t be more apt: “We will swim or sink together.” Just when finance minister P. Chidambaram, sensing that it might be an uphill task for his party in Tamil Nadu, his home state, bowed out of the race, Mrs Gandhi’s exhortation looks aimed at stopping others from following his example.
Thus, on a signal from on high, senior leader Ambika Soni is rushing to the Anandpur Saheb constituency in Punjab, where the Akali-BJP combination should be on a good wicket, if the last Assembly result is a pointer. Former Chief Minister and scion of the Patiala royals, Capt. Amarinder Singh, is taking on high-profile BJP leader Arun Jaitley in Amritsar, it has been announced.
Top-flight Congress names such as these were not thought of to begin with, but evidently Mrs Gandhi wants the battle to be well-fought and to not throw in the towel. (Capt. Amarinder Singh has clarified in an interview, however, that his party chief had alerted him to the possibility of contesting from Amritsar about a month ago when Mr Jaitley’s name had begun to do the rounds.)
To not run from the fray is a hallmark of leadership, and this had to be invoked as cowardice was seen aplenty. Fearing the worst if he remained in the Congress, Jagdambika Pal, briefly a UP Chief Minister, defected to the BJP to earn a nomination. A former nondescript bureaucrat in Madhya Pradesh jumped ship and joined the BJP after being cleared for the Congress ticket. But these are examples of small fry whose actions will have little impact.
On the other hand, having been finance minister in UPA-1 and UPA-2, Mr Chidambaram, by declining to contest, left his party open to taunts from opponents. If he was keen to engage in Gandhian work after 30 gruelling years in Delhi, as he professed in an interview, he could more appropriately have sought that option after taking guard for his party on his home turf.
Was he afraid to lose? He denies it. But his observations — that Congress was starting as an “underdog”; and that he was neither sad nor happy when the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister tried to release Rajiv Gandhi’s killers to court easy popularity — give him away.
The Congress campaign has picked up with its coordinator Rahul Gandhi shifting gear with a focused interview recently, but the party chief had to step in to hurry senior leaders to the front.
