Terms of Trade | Why Congress's trollification is bad for its political prospects

Ideological commitment, organisational perseverance and tactical clarity rather than just shrill rhetoric in social media echo chambers is the need of the hour

This week’s column will succumb to the temptation of beginning with a personal anecdote. When Jyoti Basu passed away in 2010, a condolence meeting was organised the same day at Jawaharlal Nehru University — this author was a student of the university then — by the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student organisation affiliated with the Basu’s Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Can the Congress or the Opposition hope to win elections with bipartisan solidarity alone? (PTI)

One of the speakers in the meeting recounted his personal experience to explain what made Jyoti Basu not just a politician but also a statesman. The speaker had gone to interview Basu for SFI’s magazine in the 1990s. After the interview was done, Basu paused for a second and asked the young comrade to edit out his remarks which were critical of the prime minister, who was on a foreign trip at the time. We should not be criticising him when he is representing the country outside, Basu told him. This seemingly innocuous act from the leader of a communist party, which had sharp ideological differences with the ruling party and the Indian State, underlines the importance of maintaining bipartisanship on foreign policy issues despite domestic political differences in Indian politics.

Cut forward to September 9, 2023, when the New Delhi G20 summit managed to achieve a consensus on a joint declaration. Analysts across the board agree that building a consensus on the declaration signifies an important diplomatic victory for India, at least in the realm of optics, which is not an insignificant game in the realm of diplomacy. My colleague Prashant Jha has explained the challenges and therefore the importance of achieving this consensus with great clarity. That day, however, the Congress party’s official X (formerly Twitter) handle had what can only be described as a political meltdown. It reached its nadir when the Congress’s handle posted a mocking video of the prime minister at around the same time the external affairs ministry put out the official text of the G20 declaration.

The purpose of this column is not just to bemoan the ‘trollification’ – a word that should be added to the English dictionary soon – of India’s primary opposition party. The behaviour is also symptomatic of the ideological disarming of the Opposition, which has given Narendra Modi and the BJP a walkover on its claims of preserving and strengthening India’s national interest.

The current world order is increasingly moving from what commentators such as Francis Fukuyama termed as (US-dominated) end of history to one where advanced capitalist countries, and their undisputed leader, the US, are worried about an economic and possibly even a geopolitical conflict with China. The end of China’s honeymoon with the West has made India an attractive ally for the Western block. India has fought a war with China, and continues to have a border dispute with it which has seen active hostilities in the last few years, and is trying to resist China’s growing economic clout to preserve its own soft power in the Global South.

Implications of India-US alliance

To be sure, these developments are not exactly new and the Indian State has been inching closer towards a strategic alliance with the US for quite some time now. This bonhomie could have been disrupted when Russia, an old strategic ally of India, invaded Ukraine last year. Things such as India’s refusal to condemn Russia on the lines of Western countries and continuing to buy discounted crude oil from Russia generated a lot of critical commentary in the West. It is against this backdrop that the dilution (in terms of Russia not being named) of the Ukraine war issue in the G20 New Delhi declaration must be seen as a significant concession by the US-led block to let its newest strategic ally (India) have its place under the sun.

To be sure, there is genuine scepticism, not just among analysts but even within US and Indian establishments, about what exactly the strategic relationship between India and the US will offer in tangible terms in case there is an actual geopolitical conflict in the Indo-Pacific region. There is also good reason to be sceptical vis-à-vis the amount of gains the Indian economy can make from its growing proximity with the US-based businesses. To put it in crude terms, one can always ask how many jobs would India create even if Apple were to start making all its iPhones in India.

Having said this, a logical case can be made that a strategic embrace of the US to counter China is not the only geopolitical option for India. One can always argue that India should confront rather than cooperate with the US and the Global North on their contradictions vis-à-vis the Global South (they are far from insignificant) and this can be a tool for building rather than burning bridges with China. To be sure, China’s financial relationships with a lot of countries in the Global South are increasingly becoming exploitative with opaque and predatory lending becoming its characteristic feature. Also, the wider Global South solidarity is no guarantee that China and India’s regional aspirations will not come into conflict.

This debate need not detain us here, because the Indian National Congress’s own historical track record has been more towards the pro-US position. The Indo-US nuclear deal, which was signed under the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, even at the cost of breaking ranks with the Left, was one of the defining moments in India’s strategic alliance with the US. So far, there is nothing to suggest that the Congress’s larger foreign policy understanding is very different from the current government’s line. In fact, the Congress’s polemics have been critical of the government for not being aggressive enough vis-à-vis China on the latter’s incursions along the LAC.

Seen in this perspective, one can only say that the Congress’s shrill posturing in the midst of an important diplomatic event for India was aimed at just being shrill rather than making a substantive political-ideological critique.

There is no point in predicting future electoral outcomes, but the Congress’s previous experience with shrill rhetoric against the BJP and especially Narendra Modi has not been very good. In fact, one can say that such personal attacks against Modi have helped the BJP to counter polarising opinions against the Opposition.

Where the Congress’s shrill rhetoric during G20 is particularly damaging for the party is that it allows the BJP to usurp a long-term ideological realignment project in the realm of geopolitics which has seen as much if not more contribution by the Congress. It is almost a given that the BJP will leave no stone unturned to exploit the G20’s success to improve its political fortunes in the upcoming elections. One can expect to see the beginning of this exercise during next week’s special session of the parliament.

To be sure, one could always turn back and ask whether the Congress adopting a sober attitude would have helped the party given the BJP’s sectarian political narrative which claims that all things good with India have been achieved under the Modi government and the period till 2014 was an abject failure.

It is on this count that the Congress’s propaganda and tactical department seems to have fallen for the BJP’s trick. While the BJP’s narrative of India becoming immensely powerful under the Modi government does have some domestic traction if the results of a recently released Pew Survey are to be believed, a shrill rather than sober counter to such propaganda actually helps the BJP’s cause rather than the Congress. The biggest reason for this is that the prime minister’s personal popularity and therefore his ability to put out and establish a narrative is much bigger than that of any other Opposition leader. A bipartisan solidarity, at least, among those who follow such debates carefully, would have made the BJP look petty for its sectarianism.

Can the Congress or the Opposition hope to win elections with such bipartisan solidarity alone? Of course not. But they must realise that these claims are not the only thing which has won the BJP two consecutive parliamentary victories. A Hindu consolidation and the image of a wide and well-functioning welfare net, not necessarily in the same order, are the two key pillars of the BJP’s current political dominance in India. The opposition has no other option but to keep working on challenging the BJP on these two fronts if it wants to win. This will require ideological commitment, organisational perseverance and tactical clarity rather than just shrill rhetoric in social media echo chambers.

A note from history

Winston Churchill was immensely popular for having successfully led the war effort during the Second World War in Britain. Yet he lost the elections to a significantly less charismatic Clement Attlee, his Labour Party deputy in the wartime cabinet in 1945 within weeks of the end of the wartime coalition government. Historical scholarship suggests that Labour’s 1945 victory was a result of organisational gains and a growing political consensus for a left-leaning realignment of economic policies in post-war Britain while being respectful rather than shrill about Churchill’s war-time effort.

“When I listened to the Prime Minister’s (Churchill) speech . . . I realised at once what was his object. He wanted the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill the great leader in war and Mr Churchill the Party leader of the Conservatives... I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly,” Atlee said while responding to Churchill’s first of four radio broadcasts before the elections according to Geoffrey G. Field’s book Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945.

India is not fighting a World War and Narendra Modi is not Winston Churchill running a wartime cabinet, but the Opposition, especially the Congress, would do well to keep underlining the contradiction between Narendra Modi’s foreign policy prowess (at least going by the Congress’s larger ideological framework) and his domestic economic and social fault lines, rather than appear as a bunch of social media trolls. The latter is the worst thing which can happen to a political party which has been the biggest contributor to India’s national movement and nation-building project.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal