Why the INDIA alliance needs more than a Bharat Jodo Yatra

On the 14th of January, Rahul Gandhi began his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Manipur and will march across states from east to west ahead of the national elections. At the same time, the Congress is stuck bargaining with allies in the INDIA coalition to finalise the seat allocation across states.In this episode of the Times of India podcast, Neelanjan Sircar, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, explains why the Congress leader’s rally is passing through states where it doesn’t have a significant political presence, or hope of doing well in the national elections.He talks about how to view the impact of the first Bharat Jodo Yatra and what the Congress should be doing with the second one. He also explains why the Congress is finding it hard to get allies in the INDIA alliance to cede ground. Edited excerpts: 106326374Q. The Congress painted the first iteration of the Bharat Jodo Yatra as having led to electoral successes in Karnataka and Telangana, but glossed over states it didn't win in. How do you view the claims?A. There’s been a lot of research on this and purely in empirical terms it’s hard to make a clear-cut case that there are electoral dividends coming from the Bharat Jodo Yatra. The reason is that state politics is complicated and there are many other factors that mattered in Telangana and Karnataka. There are other factors in the Hindi-belt states. The one thing that we can say and what we did see empirically is there was a genuine increase in the approval ratings for Rahul Gandhi. It’s an open question on the extent to which that translates to winning for the Congress party. medium107056270Q. In most of the states the yatra will go through the Congress isn’t viewed as an electoral force. Can this rally invigorate the party given it doesn't really have a presence? A. The way I think about it is that the rally fulfills two goals which are not immediate, arithmetic electoral goals. The first is, whether you like it or not, the Congress party is imagined as a national party. So, to not go to places where you're not even remotely electorally competitive is to cede that ground and become more of a regional party. A classic example is Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress party maintains some image given it’s the traditional home of the Gandhi family. 105062905The second is, as politics has gotten more personal, the restoration of Rahul Gandhi's image is an important goal, irrespective of electoral dividends. The fact is that the BJP, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have used Rahul Gandhi as a punching bag. It has been key to the way in which the BJP has built a narrative since 2014, and even before that. As there is a restoration of his [Rahul’s] image, it becomes harder for the BJP to do something like that. Quite honestly, if we're looking at the national election, a large number of the states don't look so great for the Congress party. Where would you even walk in that case? medium105066886Q. How do you see seat sharing playing out in the INDIA coalition given allies don’t want to cede any ground to the Congress?A. Right now, the alliance has to make a calculation on how to choose a combination of seats which makes it a genuine competition in the national elections. Consulting firms and the parties themselves are looking at day-by-day arithmetic to make these calculations. The honest answer is that today it doesn't look like there's any combination of seats that would put up a significant challenge to the BJP. That might change given politics changes quickly.If we take the 303 seats the Bjp won in 2019, and we add the second place and third place vote shares, the BJP only loses some 40-odd seats. The margins of victory for the BJP were huge in many of the seats that they won. It's not a competition unless the BJP’s vote share actually drops a reasonable amount. 105063577Typically, a competition is between the top two parties and there are certain core areas. If we just take the Hindi belt, the BJP had a strike rate of over 90% in the last two national elections. This means even before you blink, it's starting with some 180-200 seats. If the INDIA alliance does not believe it has a fair shot, then essentially what it is actually doing is laying the ground for an internal competition as to who will take up the mantle going forward. If it's not a competitive election, then who wins the most seats will be a significant factor in who gains some status over the next five-six years.Q. One of the arguments against the INDIA alliance is that the caste-based politics many of its constituents practice are outdated, especially in a national election. How do you view that argument? I don't even think the parties in the INDIA Alliance agree on any part of the caste calculus, or even a caste census. I think having a common programme is a major challenge for the alliance. This does not mean that caste doesn't matter. It matters a lot for social realities, for political realities and political actors. The BJP also brings together caste-based groups.But the way in which, say in the 1990s, where your local caste leader controlled which benefits came to you, that reality has changed. So caste plays a far more complicated role in terms of how a caste leader is able to convert that into bargaining power. 104917034My economic realities aren’t as dependent on my caste leader. I think the paradigm needs to shift a bit for the alliance. The second thing I would say, is the difficulty of coming up with a common program is real for the alliance given it’s spread across different states and has regional actors. At one level, it's actually quite sad, because I do think that the BJP represents a clearly defined ideological view. It does represent a certain challenge to the state's institutions, to the federal structure. The inability to actually build a common sort of consensus around that is a bad sign. That’s the most obvious place to build a common programme. medium107056419Q. The Congress has chosen not to attend the function in Ayodhya and has been targeted by the . Will ideology be an albatross around its neck?If the Congress was purely a party playing up its secular credentials then the choice to not go to an event around the Ram temple makes a lot of sense. If it has decided that we want to appeal to the Hindu vote bank then why not go to the event? This kind of mixed messaging of some political leaders playing soft Hindutva, some not and some being secular, really hurts the Congress party, in my view. 107023517I think more than being secular or non-secular, pro-Hindutva or not pro-Hindutva, I think the inability to actually stake out clear positions is what hurts the Congress party. The public should demand that parties take consistent positions on such things. There are other parties that are boycotting the event, but you don’t imagine this is particularly hurting their political credibility one way or another. This is because the positions that they are taking have been consistent for at least a fair amount of time.