When you are battling to regain lost ground after the Mandal-Kamandal twin issues have caused a tectonic shift, you cannot appear to be holding back. In an era when the city and the countryside can be as dissimilar and unattached as two separate continental shelves, the Congress has been persisting with its politics of the middle ground. But there is no treading softly on such a slippery surface. You have to take definite strides. In fact, the Congress should have known better. Inaction, or mere dalliance with dangerous issues, had hardly helped the party in the past. Looking back, Rajiv Gandhi’s response to the Shah Bano judgment did not take into account the long-term consequences. The Congress flirtation with the Babri dispute took an immense toll on the party’s electoral credibility.

If the Congress has not grown in UP, it is because of this inability to address the political duality of the urban and the rural. Both crucial segments of the population have been demanding exclusive development as the disastrous consequences of the India Shining campaign have proved. In trying to be impartial, the Congress has become equidistant and hasn’t addressed the problems of either. This rather meek and precisely centrist policy may help the Congress in a general election with its diffused focus but doesn’t take the party anywhere close to the Chhota Imambada in Lucknow. Unlike other states, UP politics at the moment is strategically not viscous enough to allow pre-electoral arrangements. The Congress, still taking its lessons in coalition politics, has fumbled and hesitated.

... contd.