Congress’ Ahmed Patel euphoria will go the way of Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa

Maybe it was because the clock had just hit 2 am. Or maybe it was exhaustion after going up against the Bharatiya Janata Party president and five Union Ministers all day. Whatever the reason, Congress leader Randeep Surjewala hit some hyperbolic notes on Wednesday morning after confirmation that Ahmed Patel had been re-elected to the Rajya Sabha, despite the best efforts of the BJP. “It is not a victory of Congress party alone or of our senior leader Ahmed Patel,” said Surjewala. “It is a victory of truth. It is a defeat of forces which wanted to misuse muscle and money power. It is an eye opener for BJP.”

This “eye opener” is a single seat from Gujarat in the Rajya Sabha, one that was already with the Congress. Considering the stature of Ahmed Patel, known to be close to Congress President Sonia Gandhi and a key backroom dealer, it should have been an easy victory. From a numbers perspective too, the Congress had sufficient Members of Legislative Assembly to comfortably secure a win.

Until they did not. The BJP spent the previous weeks prodding and probing, convincing six Congress MLAs to leave the party and vote for the other side. One of these was nominated as a candidate to compete against Patel. The remaining Congress MLAs had to be flown out to a Bengaluru resort to prevent further breaking of the ranks.

Despite these efforts two Congress MLAs would still end-up crossvoting on Tuesday. Their votes should have imperiled Patel’s candidacy, except the turncoats messed up. They revealed their ballots to people other than their party’s election agent, violating secrecy rules. After several delegations, including five Union ministers from the BJP, turned up at the Election Commission to argue the matter, the EC finally concluded that the two votes were invalid.

Twists and turns

And so, with a little help from one other as-yet-unclear MLA, Patel returns to the Rajya Sabha. This is how the narrative has turned in just the last few weeks.

• First the Rajya Sabha polls were expected to be routine, with two BJP seats and one Congress. The only real storyline was the BJP picking party president Amit Shah to make his first entry into Parliament.
• Then, as the BJP raised the political pitch, it suddenly became a personal battle. Here was Amit Shah doing whatever he could – grabbing Congress MLAs, convincing other parties, forcing an airlift of MLAs to Bengaluru – to send a message that he truly was trying to keep Ahmed Patel out of Parliament and further the cause of Congress-mukt Bharat.
• With BJP as front-runner in all three seats, voting began, quickly followed by the invalid votes controversy. The BJP sent its top brass to the Election Commission in a desperate effort to win, furthering the impression of Congress as underdogs. When the votes were finally declared invalid, suddenly Ahmed Patel hadn’t just won, he had achieved a great victory despite Shah’s best efforts. The newspaper front pages also took this line.

It might make sense for the Congress to sell this story line of a comeback victory over money and muscle power. The events give them a boost ahead of Assembly elections in the states. But the Congress should be wary of actually believing this narrative. The truth of the matter is that it nearly lost an election that should have been a shoo-in, and it was an accidental slip-up from its own cross-voting MLAs that ended up shifting the balance. If you had to credit the Congress with anything, it would be knowing technicalities well enough to catch the voting violations, and this too came in part because they had fallen afoul of this rule last year.

Optics vs reality

The optics might have improved. The Congress has not. It is still the party whose presumptive leader has been waiting, or milling about, in the wings for half a decade now. It is still the party that leaves local leaders waiting for high command decisions no matter how long they take. It is still the party that won the most seats in Manipur and Goa in elections earlier this year, but were unable to form the government.

The lesson of Uttarakhand in 2016 is instructive. Despite some anti-incumbency against the Congress government, the BJP still seemed determined to try and make it fall before elections, and even managed to do so. But then the Supreme Court stepped in and reinstated Congress chief minister Harish Rawat.

Suddenly a tottering Congress had been handed a huge victory despite the BJP’s underhand methods, and it was given a comeback narrative that it could have ridden into Assembly elections in early 2017. Instead, Rawat frittered this away while also losing Congress leaders to the BJP, which eventually won 57 out of 70 seats in the state, many of them turncoats.

Wednesday morning’s hyperbole could easily give way to the same result in Gujarat where, despite some anti-incumbency, the local Congress leadership seems lost at sea. Unless the party is able to resolve the core issues that brought the Congress to such a desperate position on Tuesday evening, Ahmed Patel’s victory will remain simply a participation prize.