Reposing faith in Congress again

The sweeping victory of the ruling Congress party in the just concluded municipal elections in Andhra Pradesh has surprised many an observer and thrown the opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) into a serious identity crisis.

In an unprecedented verdict, 74 of the 96 urban bodies went in favour of the Congress and its allies while the TDP emerged as a poor runner-up winning just 10 municipalities.

Besides, all the ten municipal corporations went in favour of the ruling party. The TRS, which launched a vitriolic attack against chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy in the run-up to elections, could bag just two urban bodies, that too in the home district of its president K Chandrasekhara Rao.

In the past, several urban elections that were held under different circumstances, the strength of any Opposition party of the day never went down beyond 30-35 per cent, unlike now. This was the case even when Naidu led the electoral battle from the front.

The results are a rude shock to Naidu as he expected to prove a point in his accusation of large-scale corruption and all-round failure of administration against the government through the results, which he thought would show the ruling party in a very poor light. But his calculations went seriously wrong, exposing his own weaknesses in not being able to steer the party to victory. Minus state power, he now seems to hold no other means to command the loyalty of party cadre and the second rung leadership to make them rise to the occasion unlike Rajasekhara Reddy, who, besides having the advantage of power and being a charismatic leader, commands loyalty and a strong following within the Congress party.

The verdict also humbled the tall claims of TRS leaders who were championing the cause of separate Telangana. Even in Warangal district, the intellectual and emotional hotbed of the separate Telangana movement, the party's performance was dismal. The TRS leaders sought to undermine the results by stating that they had "poor urban base". However, if the TRS had "very limited strength" in urban areas, one wonders why the party leaders chose the municipal elections to throw a gauntlet at the ruling Congress party, particularly the chief minister.

Even as some number-based analyses pointed out that the percentage of votes polled to Congress and its Left allies, including TRS for comparison sake, has come down by 1.6 per cent as compared to the votes polled in urban areas during 2004 Assembly elections, the gap between the percentages of votes that went in favour of Congress and TDP this time is still quite wide.

While Congress took 40.86 per cent votes, TDP's vote share stood at 34.18 per cent, down by 3 per cent. Combined with the vote share of the Left parties, the gap in percentage of votes has been further widened to 10.57 per cent between the Congress alliance and the TDP. Naidu's decision to break up with the BJP to win over the decisive minority has in fact boomeranged. While all those municipalities with prominent presence of minority population went in favour of the Congress, the combined votes of TDP and BJP are found to be higher than the Congress and its allies in at least five districts, four of them belonging to Telangana.

According to some political analysts, first and foremost, the present election results are an indication of an enhanced political awareness of the masses. The result of this is that being in the Opposition and accusing the ruling party of corruption among other things, the TDP is not going to be embraced by a majority voter.

This means that the TDP, which received a severe drubbing in the last Assembly elections, continues to suffer a huge credibility gap under Naidu's leadership. It's the lack of a credible alternative that has actually helped Congress spin a landslide victory and not any miracle that happened under the Congress rule in last 16 months or so.

The other important inference drawn from the present results by political observers is that the TDP had lost control on its major social support base, namely backward classes (BCs). Thanks to the reservations for BCs in local bodies, which were first introduced by N T Rama Rao in 1987, all the political parties now have their own share of BC leadership at the grassroot level. This, according to them, has diluted the hold of TDP on these social strata over a period of time.

The Congress, on the other hand appears to have become more inclusive and acceptable due to this fact. In the present elections, all the political parties, including Congress, allotted a considerable number of general category seats to BC candidates beyond 33 per cent reservation available to them.

For the first time, the Majlis too lost its ground to Congress on account of a set of pro-Muslim measures announced by Rajasekhara Reddy including the 5 per cent reservation to Muslims in education and employment.