After Rosaiah

Bihar’s voters have radiated to the rest of the country a high peculiar to the demo-cratic way: the celebration of an unambiguous vote for purposeful governance. Yet,there can be no ignoring the brutal dismissal of the also-rans. And as the Congress looks to regroup in this key Hindi heartland state,it would do well to look beyond its haphazard campaign for what went wrong — and at what voters have been seeking in state election after election. In assembly elections,countrywide,voters repose their mandate in empowered local leaders,doers with a positive agenda. In fact,the Bihar verdict carries lessons for the Congress in a state where it had got it right at election-time,but where it’s just lost a chief minister to resignation.K. Rosaiah took over as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh last year in the aftermath of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s untimely death. Operating in the after-glow of YSR’s game-changing tenure was a challenge,but it needn’t have unravelled so comprehensively for Rosaiah. YSR had just months before his death been returned to power in the state,keeping intact an umbrella agenda in a state where politics had tended to split along caste lines. His social sector schemes had also extracted the state’s politics from a Hyderabad versus the rest binary. And while his death took away the Congress’s most charismatic chief minister,the YSR model offered enough for a quieter successor to fold up his sleeves and consolidate the governance plank. Instead,Andhra politics has been riven,in the past year,by the Telangana schism and by the revolt of Jagan Mohan Reddy,YSR’s son,who’s been in permanent rage over being denied a dynastic succession. All this,however,has taken place in the shadow of a national party leadership,unable to curb its worst instincts to meddle and to be decisive in dealing with the factionalism.Instead of re-engaging with voters through its local leaders after YSR’s death,the Congress’s management of its Andhra unit has been remarkably un-political. No wonder that now,when it all threatened to unravel,it has had to return to an older way of balancing communities,regions and interests. That politics is past its sell-by date,as Nitish has shown again and YSR once did.