01 March 2013, 05:39 PM IST
Can the Congress repeat US President Barack Obama's strategy to win 2014? Obama beat Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by a slender 2% of the popular vote last November. His second-term victory has had political parties across the world scrambling to figure out how an African-American with a Kenyan father and a divorced mother won over a largely white, conservative electorate twice in a row.
The answer: a rainbow coalition of women, coloured minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians) and young white professionals.
Can the Congress pull off the trick in 2014?
Consider Obama's strategy more closely. The US president knew that most white men were hard-core Republicans. Nearly 80% of white men over 45 did indeed vote against Obama. White women were more evenly balanced with a small majority backing Obama.
But the president scored heavily (95%) with African-Americans and Asians and fairly heavily (70%) with Hispanics. Women finally clinched it for him: overall, more than 65% of US women – across ethnicities – voted for him, giving him his 2% popular vote edge which translated into a larger electoral college victory in America's complex winner-gets-all federal system.
The Congress clearly has an advantage over the BJP with minorities. In the US of course, unlike India, minorities are classified not by religion but by race. There is no categorization of American Muslims, American Christians or American Hindus.
In secular America, religion is – as it should be – strictly private. In secular India, religion is ostentatiously public. It is the single biggest reason why politicians across the ideological spectrum exploit religion for electoral ends.
Consider the Congress' strategy on how to corral the minority-poor-women votebank in 2014. The party's lock on the 14% Muslim vote is loosening with leakages to regional parties (SP, NCP, MIM, NC, etc). Some are allies. Some are not.
Will Muslims, despite being kept in poverty and backwardness by decades of Congress governments, still vote for it in 2014? Possibly. But as education seeps through the community, the realization that they have been tricked will grow.
Assuming this strategy of deception works for one more election, the Congress can hope to garner 8-9% of the 14% Muslim vote – the rest going to regionals. The poor are a bigger catch. They are vulnerable to money power.
Direct cash transfer is the Congress' weapon of choice. Sonia Gandhi reserved her longest, most animated applause for Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's announcement in Thursday's budget on the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme. She knows how high the stakes are.
But the poor too are a fragmented votebank. Many will vote regionally. Others will have seen through the deception of doles that don't materialize – and when they do, increase their dependency, not their competency. No physical assets are built. No productive infrastructure is created. These are subsidies packaged for elections, not the poor.
The third catchment area – women – is the most promising: it is an "emerging" bank and the Congress knows it could tilt the balance in 2014. After being slammed for its insensitive initial response to the Nirbhaya gangrape, the Congress has worked overtime to compensate.
It has passed the anti-sexual harassment bill in parliament and proposed a "women's bank" as well as a Rs.1,000-crore Nirbhaya Fund for women. Pitched against the BJP's Hindutva image, the Congress hopes to capture the gender vote.
Will women see all this as tokenism? Is Narendra Modi's relatively poor showing with women-respondents in an opinion poll by Open magazine last month a straw in the wind?
Obama was successful in building his rainbow coalition of minorities, poor and women because he had a positive agenda: universal healthcare, fiscal propriety, infrastructure development. The Congress has few policies beyond those that can win it elections.
It is also neck-deep in corruption. Obama in contrast has a reputation for principled policymaking and unimpeachable integrity. There is no duality of power and accountability in the US. The buck stops at the White House. Rainbows work under those conditions, not when the atmosphere is thick with graft, intrigue and diarchy.
Rahul vs. Modi may in the end turn out to be the wrong prescription. Rahul will prefer to play the Regent as in the British Raj while his appointed Viceroy deals with the minions and policy.
Modi may lead the BJP's national campaign committee but bide his time for the Prime Ministership. The BJP's core committee meeting over the next two days will provide clues as the countdown to 2014 begins in earnest.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter
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