NEW DELHI: The party is over for Brahmins and Thakurs, the ruling clique in the 108yearold history of the Congress. A detailed analysis of the fractured election results, carried out in the highest quarters of the Congress, has concluded that the party has no option, but to share power with the lower classes.
Alarm bells were ringing in the Congress Working Committee meetings this week not just over the “social engineering” effected in Uttar Pradesh but in far-off Maharashtra, the traditional Congress stronghold, For this is where the BSP leader Kanshi Ran) has: next threatened to set up camp.
An informal , confidential assessment conducted by the Maharashtra leadership suggests that if the Lok Sabha polls were to be held today, the Congress would get no more than eight seats out of the 48 at stake. The figures reflect the constitution of the electorate under which an overwhelming 70% are lower classes, And this grim prophecy comes after Maharashtra was one of the first states where the party has consciously sought to share power with the backwards,
In UP, the stark reality of the results is that, if the Congress had entered into an alliance with the secular parties, it would not have Slumped to 28 seats in the assembly. While its share of the popular vole continued the downward slide to 15%, the decrease was just 3% from the 1991 figure of 18.2%. However, in terms of seats, the Congress fell from 46 in 1991 to 28 now. Senior leader Sharad Pawar who had advocated an alliance a couple of months ago thus stands vindicated.
However, as Congress spokesman Vithal N.Gadgil points out, of the 28 seats in the party won, 20 are in new areas including some from where it has never won in the last decade. “This is the encouraging trend,” he says adding that the party think-tank would conduct detailed analysis. Besides, in Faizabad district the BJP has been able to win only one out of the eight seats at stake, he points out.
For the congress, the Ayodhya verdict can only provide vicarious pleasure. For its own part, the Congress in purely statistic terms, is on a dangerous descent into oblivion in UP, falling from 39, 3% in 1985, to 28% in 1990, to 18:2% in 1991 and finally to a low of 15% in 1993.
The Congress think-tank has simultaneously begun probing into the election results in Madhya Pradesh where the BSP while emerging as the third largest party (11 seats) has fallen far short of its dream of sharing power, on the pattern of UP, Congress strategists, visibly pleased with the success in MP, now concede that they had. feared the BSP would be a spoilsport in 50 seats.
In part as Sitaram Kesri points out the Congress gave tickets to 80 backwards, a substantial increase over previous years,“ i1LWas not enough, but it was still a marked improvement on previous years.” The results speak for themselves: of the 11 seats which the BSP won, four were snatched from Janata Dal, two from BJP and one each from Congress and CPI.
In Rajasthan, the overriding conclusion drawn by the Congress is that the “voter has said no to relations and defections,” as one senior leader put it, Nearly 20 seats were lost because of the relative factor, while all 10 JD (Digvijay Singh) defectors who were granted, Congress tickets in preference to party workers lost including their leader.
The results in Rajasthan have caused Concem on other. counts as well. The BJP share of the popular vole rose from 29.44% in 1990 to 38.65% while the Congress share actually fell from 38.45% in 1990 to 38.27% in 1993, “Some mistakes were made” as all a senior AICC functionary would say.
However figures put out by the Congress managers including Ahmed Patel, Vithal N.Gadgil show that the Congress wrested: 26seats from BJP, 21 from JD and retained 24 seats. Additionally i is pointed out that the party three seats for the first time is 1967, and that the margin of v! tory in2Sseatsis more than 10,00 Votes.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 10, 1993
