The Nation: Congress;Down At The Start

Even Sonia's presence at the Varnasi rally failed to draw the crowds.

After the rally, a deluge. If the internecine war that has broken out in the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Congress is anything to go by, that certainly seems to be the case with the party. Congress President Sonia Gandhi's June 18 rally at Varanasi was meant to kick off the party's campaign for the coming Lok Sabha elections in the state. More important it was to have showcased the party's resurgence and what it perceived as its "increasing clout" among the state's Brahmins and Muslims, crucial to any electoral success at the Centre. But in what turned out to be a damp squib, the turnout was low and worse, much bad blood flowed bringing more schisms within the Congress out in the open.

UPHILL TASK

The performance in Uttar Pradesh in recent times has been far from comforting for the Congress:

ť In the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, it failed to win even one seat from the state.
ť Congress candidates lost their deposits in 74 of the 85 seats they contested that year.
ť The party secured only 2.6 per cent of the total votes polled.
ť Of the 32 Congress MLAs elected in 1996, 18 joined the Loktantrik Congress.

For a party still coming to terms with the Maharashtra split, this came as another rude jolt. The Congress had banked heavily on the Varanasi rally to provide a favourable index to its performance in the elections. After failing to win even a single Lok Sabha seat last year -- besides losing its deposit in 74 of the state's 85 constituencies and garnering a bare 2.6 per cent of the votes -- the Congress had been assiduously trying to woo back Uttar Pradesh's Muslims who have been rallying behind Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and the Brahmins backing the BJP. The belief that the Muslims were getting disenchanted with Mulayam as were the Brahmins with Kalyan Singh's "reign of corruption" had bolstered such efforts.

But the poor turnout at Varanasi belied the party's expectations. Also conspicuous by their absence on the occasion were some of the Congress' own heavyweights -- former chief minister N.D. Tiwari, Congress central observer for the state Moti Lal Vora and former Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) chief Jitendra Prasada. Maintaining that the invitation to the rally came too late, Prasada even organised a workers' meeting two days later at Pilibhit. The meeting was presided over by Vora and Sushil Kumar Shinde, the general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh.

That all was not well within the state unit of the party was evident following Sonia's resignation last month. The dissidents and the loyalists, led by UPCC chief Salman Khurshid, came to blows on the eve of the All India Congress Committee session. It was only after Sonia got party treasurer Ahmed Patel to intervene that the issue was sorted out. But the truce appeared to be shortlived. In the aftermath of the Varanasi rally, the anti-Khurshid faction held him responsible for the tepid public response while his own supporters cried sabotage. Sonia's fleeting advice -- "Aap saath kaam kijiye. Party ko fayda tab hi hoga (The only way the party will gain is if you work together)" -- to the feuding groups minutes before she hopped on to the plane back to Delhi did little to improve matters.

"I have serious ideological differences with Prasada," admits Khurshid. "I have been sent by the Congress president to beef up the party. If it is unpalatable to some, there is nothing I can do about it." Prasada, on his part, accuses Khurshid of turning the party organisation in the state into his own fiefdom, giving key posts to his supporters. Prasada and Tiwari fear that such "favouritism" would extend to the distribution of tickets in the elections as well. "When people want to make it a one-man show, it can only lead to disaster," says Ghufran Zahidi, Rajya Sabha member and a Prasada loyalist. Zahidi along with Begum Noor Bano, former Lok Sabha member from Rampur, even led a delegation from the state to Sonia to protest against Khurshid's style of functioning.

Repercussions of the infighting on the Congress' performance in Uttar Pradesh apart, the party's central leadership is now worried over its effect on the overall campaign. Despite Sonia's increasing visibility in public meetings -- she has addressed five in the past fortnight -- the Congress campaign is yet to pick up momentum. Strategists at 10 Janpath, who wanted to cash in on the emotive response of party workers following Sonia's resignation, are now left wondering whether it was a good idea to get Sonia to hit the road so early.

In a calculated shift, they are now planning to space out the rallies after the first phase of campaigning ends in Pune on July 2. "Soniaji needs to spend some time in Delhi to deal with party matters at the centre," justifies a member of the campaign committee. The state units have also been directed to pull up their socks and make adequate preparations before inviting Sonia to address campaigns. "All units, from state to local -- frontal organisations included -- must be involved in mobilising people," says a note sent by the party high command to the Pradesh Congress Committees. With the mood of the nation focused on Kargil, the task will be that much more difficult.