Shikha Mukerjee | India’s leaders must leave the world of virtual reality

Rhetorical flourishes are a bad idea to begin with. Repeating the worst samples can become a ghastly habit. The frequency with which the Indian political class repeats and thereby flatters the dominant user of this patently fake claim, “Never before in the history of Independent India”, is a measure of the size of the world of augmented and virtual reality that it has created for itself. The entire political class has picked it up like a tic and it pops out in both weird and wonderful contexts.

The gold mangalsutra, or sacred chain of married Hindu women in some parts of India, turns out to be one such “never before” flourish in the AR and VR world of Indian politics. The steep 30 per cent jump in defaults on borrowings from banks and non-banking financial companies against gold, over a four-month period in 2024, is an ominous indicator that the middle class, from the lower end to the top end, is financially strapped and probably in distress.

Instead of responding to the distress, the Congress chose to turn it into a cheap jibe targeting Narendra Modi government; Jairam Ramesh, the party’s communications in-charge, seized on the indicator as the “dubious distinction” earned “of being the only government in the history of Independent India to steal mangalsutras from women.” The Congress’ conclusion is an insult to the distressed. It’s also a sign of how impervious the party is, like the ruling BJP led by its helmsman, Narendra Modi, to the granular details indicating the magnitude of the economic crisis in India.

Political parties that cannot empathetically respond to the different ways in which the economic crisis manifests itself in the everyday lived realities of the people are public institutions that have lost their bearings about their role, responsibilities and the physical world around them. The hard, not augmented nor virtual, reality is that Indians are financially distressed. Inflation is high, especially food inflation; joblessness is a reality; real wages are mostly down and, worst of all, the number of children enrolled in the primary and secondary education system has shrunk by a whopping 1.55 crores over the past two years.

The economy is not buoyant; the animal spirits of India’s entrepreneurial class have tamely leashed themselves, because demand is slow and nobody wants to be saddled with inventories of unsold goods. The world knows that India in the past 10 years has systematically cooked the numbers to reflect the myth that the beginning of the Modi era coincided with the start of “Achche Din”, or good times. The gold loan defaults, 1.5 crore children less enrolled in schools, sluggish demand, drop in real wages are facts that cannot be cooked.

These are indicators that no political party or politician, in power or in the Opposition, should deny or pretend that the numbers are not significant. To do so is to admit to cognitive dissonance, a condition that reveals a disconnect to reality that ought to automatically disqualify these politicians and their parties as legitimate representatives of the citizen. And that applies as much or may be a bit more to the BJP as the ruling regime as it does to the Congress, as the principal Opposition. Regional and smaller parties, some of which are in power in the states, are more grounded, because the demand for being accountable to the people they represent, has a habit of turning up at the door of panchayat leaders, state legislators and party netas in the form of agitated groups of discontented voters.

Politics is not a virtual game played as a distraction, where winning an election is not scoring big; neither is losing an election, a serious loss. The problem is a downsized INDIA bloc that excludes the Congress is not a viable challenger to the BJP; a big party with a national presence and a history that even today has emotional resonance with voters like the Congress is a necessary ingredient to create a viable Opposition alternative, as the 2024 Lok Sabha election proved.

Politics, elections and power are not elements in a virtual game. The reality is that a rudderless INDIA bloc is not a viable challenger to the incumbent BJP unless it gets down to the business of representing its 36.7 per cent of the population that voted in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. That is what it promised to do during the campaign and even before it, when Rahul Gandhi trekked through the country on his Bharat Jodo Yatra, once on foot and the second time in a bus.

In times that are so difficult for the overwhelming majority of Indians, from the categories of the middle class to the ranks within the poor, the least the Congress in particular and the other INDIA bloc partners can do is hold the Modi government to account. Parliament is not the only arena for doing so.

Rudderless is a harsh assessment but that is exactly what ails the Congress, which depends on Rahul Gandhi and the family name to lift the party out of failure because the organisation and the regional leaders have lost equity with the people. The swing from the Congress as an asset to a liability for the INDIA bloc happened in a matter of months; the conversation within the bloc is about how to cut its losses and run from the Congress, before it further damages the prospects of powerful and successful regional parties.

The Congress’ failure to sustain the momentum has been a gift to Narendra Modi and the BJP. After its miserable showing in Haryana and totally unsatisfactory performance in Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir, the Congress has not reworked its strategy for the forthcoming Delhi elections. It is on track for a head-to-head collision with the Aam Aadmi Party, a founding member of the INDIA bloc. In other words, instead of uniting against and fighting off the BJP, the Congress is sabotaging the chances of Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP.

The responsibility for representing the people, not as Hindus as the BJP would like to do, but as citizens, is now almost entirely the burden of the INDIA bloc partners, representing a spectrum of ideologies from the centre-right to the extreme left on one hand and representation of people from every state in India. This is conceptually a powerful combine with a potential that was barely explored in the Lok Sabha election. Wilfully failing to live up to expectations is tantamount to a criminal breach of faith against voters who had expectations that an alternative to the BJP had been birthed.