It's ironic that when all political analysts have written off the Congress, the prime minister himself gives the impression that it constitutes the biggest threat to him and his party. On a day when opinion polls on the forthcoming elections in five states showed the Congress losing all but one small state, the prime minister devoted most of his reply to the Motion of Thanks to the President's Address in both Houses of Parliament to the grand old party.
What magnificent obsession drives Narendra Modi to constantly attack the Congress, dig out the sins committed by it since its origin, and fantasise about an India without it? Was it just Rahul Gandhi's speech in the Lok Sabha, or is it the ghost of Jawaharlal Nehru that haunts Modi?
This time, Modi's Congress-phobia led him into making a political faux pas. First, he credited the party with making decisions in a state where it is the smallest partner in a three-party coalition. Maharashtra's Congress leaders, who've often complained about being ignored by their coalition partners, must have been secretly thrilled at the pivotal role ascribed to them by the PM in sending back the state's migrant labourers during the lockdown, even paying their fare home.
In fact, there was little that Congress did during the lockdown. It was the chief minister, Uddhav Thackeray, who heads the largest party in the Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)-Congress ruling coalition, who repeatedly requested the Centre to arrange for trains for the restive migrants dying to go home. And he did this after appealing to these workers more than once to stay back.
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The Maharashtra government displayed a shocking callousness towards the poor during the first lockdown. Bureaucrats laid down lockdown policy; police implemented it with lathis so ruthlessly that one worker died in Mumbai after being beaten for flouting lockdown norms. Both the Centre and the state could have easily ensured that no one went hungry; neither did so. A small percentage of ration-card holders received rations; those without cards were reduced to standing in long lines for a packet of khichdi, supplied by NGOs who did the work the government should have. Ministers ignored suggestions by NGOs; MLAs and municipal corporators switched off their phones.
Yet, the government had one saving grace at that time: CM Uddhav Thackeray's repeated addresses to citizens on TV. Not because he came across as a super-efficient man in charge, but because he seemed to speak from the heart. He didn't talk down to citizens but addressed them as equals, asking for their cooperation in a difficult situation. In a major departure, the head of the Shiv Sena appealed to migrants in Hindi not to leave, reassuring them that they would be looked after in the state to which they had come to work.
Not surprisingly, a survey conducted three months into the lockdown ranked Thackeray the fifth most popular CM; currently, he's ranked fourth. Arvind Kejriwal, also blamed by Modi in his Lok Sabha speech for driving away migrants from Delhi, was ranked sixth; he remains at that spot. No Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister made it to the first six then or now.
In targeting these two governments, the PM was doing exactly what he accused Congress of using Parliament to further the interests of his party, not those of the country. He could have simply enumerated his government's achievements without contrasting them with the Congress' failures, but that's not Modi. "Sawaal neeyat ka hai," (it's a question of intention) he said of the Congress. But his own 'neeyat' came through when he accused the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of the "sin" of spreading the coronavirus (by sending migrants home) to UP, Punjab and Uttarakhand. The majority of Mumbai's migrants went to both UP and Bihar, but Bihar isn't going to the polls anytime soon, unlike the three states mentioned by Modi.
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Modi accused the Maharashtra government of viewing migrant labour as a burden. Yet, his own government's actions revealed the same attitude towards them. The Railways made penniless migrants, stranded far from home due to Modi's sudden lockdown, pay for their journey home. Migrants in BJP-ruled Gujarat and Karnataka reportedly paid the highest fares. Thackeray appealed to the Railways not to charge fares on humanitarian grounds; Sonia Gandhi asked her party units to pay the migrants' fares, but it was only on the Supreme Court orders that the Centre let migrants travel free, a month after the trains started.
The Congress, said the PM, has no connection with the public or ground reality, implying that he does. Yet, the picture he projected of the public during the lockdown had nothing to do with reality.
(The writer is a journalist)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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