Bad omen for a govt past its prime

NEW DELHI: As the results of the Punjab and Uttarakhand elections sink in for the Congress, the party’s reactions are arraigned in two broad categories with a fair bit of overlap.

The first kind of response — coming from a section of party veterans and government seniors — fixes the blame for the Congress’ defeat squarely on the chief ministers and brings up price rise in passing. The other one, more publicly heard on television from a cross-section of Congress leaders, makes inflation the villain of the piece along with anti-incumbency. Notably, party president Sonia Gandhi is kept out of the scheme of things in both cases.

One could simply say that this is what the Congress adopts as a strategy (as the BJP, for instance, almost always demands PM Manmohan Singh’s resignation when it does not know how to proceed beyond a point in Parliament). However, in this case, the Congress’ attempts to divert attention from Ms Gandhi’s inability to lead her teams to victory is just a tad more interesting.

For, how the Congress addresses this mid-term crisis of inflation and electoral defeats in the states could have a deep impact on the political machinations in the months ahead. The first and immediate fallout of the Congress blaming price rise for its defeat could be a strengthening of the Opposition campaign in the forthcoming elections.