Issueless campaigning gives little advantage

NEW DELHI: In December 2007, Congress hurled vitriolic invective ���maut ka saudagar��� on Narendra Modi and, in the process, handed over the campaign advantage to the Gujarat chief minister. The party appears to be making the same mistake a little over a year later by distracting the attention from its achievements, including the doles announced for rural India. In its anxiety to counter BJP���s ���weak leader��� taunt, the party has been concentrating its energies on defending Manmohan Singh.

Rather than showcasing its achievements in the agrarian sector, where schemes such as NREGA, PMGSY and the Rs 70,000-crore loan waiver package had the potential of influencing voters��� preferences, the party is now engaged in defending PM���s capabilities. And this comes even as coalition partners are shouting from the roof top that Mr Singh cannot take his continuance as the leader of the alliance for granted.

That the strategy had gone horribly wrong was nowhere more evident than in the constituencies that went to polls in the second phase. Barring urban pockets in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, the electoral map is predominantly rural. The urban voteshare was only 22%. The composition of the electorate in the seats facing elections in this leg provided a perfect opportunity to Congress���s poll managers to test the popularity of schemes. Somehow, this just did not happen, and the party got enmeshed in responding to BJP���s charge that Mr Singh was a weak PM, and that the nation deserved better.

The folly of employing this gambit was driven home by socio-political analyst Yogendra Yadav. ���Congress makes a mention of these schemes in its election manifesto, but there was no real attempt to raise them at an operative level. The irony is that the ruling party is not interested in promoting them. I���d say NREGS and the loan waiver package are a version of the New Deal. There was no attempt to derive political advantage from them. It���s a sin,��� Prof Yadav told ET.

Congress���s strategy of pitchforking PM to the centre of political discourse, as per political observers, strengthened the perception that the principal ruling party had gifted BJP with the opportunity to set the agenda for the ongoing electoral battle. Unlike many of his predecessors, Mr Singh, by his own admission, does not have the charisma or the oratorial skills needed to sway voters. Yet, Congress has sought to market him as one of its star campaigners, using him to primarily corner his principal adversary, L K Advani.

BJP, by contrast, has been successful in having its way on the direction of public discourse, pinning Congress down for the failure of the government led by it to rein in prices of essential commodities, addressing the anxieties of the burgeoning middle class and the growing fear of retrenchments.