Sonia is the problem, not the solution

The most astonishing fact that emerges from the latest India Today poll is that the saviour of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, is far less popular in the states than those she set out to save. The gap, moreover, is huge, a minimum of 16 points, which in statistical terms is the distance between the

Himalayas and the Vindhyas. While Sheila Dikshit gets a 48 per cent rating in Delhi, Sonia Gandhi picks up only 31 per cent approval, and it is obvious that even this 31 per cent means she is riding on her chief minister's coattails, or perhaps pallav. Dikshit's popularity has rubbed off on Sonia Gandhi. Her ratings in the other states confirm this. In Madhya Pradesh, Congress chief minister Digvijay Singh seems a loser, and yet he is more than twice as popular as the unchangeable and unshakeable Sonia Gandhi: while 31 per cent would vote for Digvijay, only 15 per cent would support Sonia Gandhi. In Rajasthan, the gap between party chief minister and party president is 19 per cent: Ashok Gehlot gets 43 per cent support while Sonia Gandhi manages just 24 per cent in a state where the party has some positive bounce.

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The evidence is in. Where the Congress has won, it is chief ministers who have taken the party to victory, despite the drag factor called Sonia Gandhi. The minimal job of any leader is to add to the party's base vote; a leader should be an asset, not a liability. If you need any more convincing look at the figures from Chhattisgarh, where the Congress and the BJP seem evenly placed for the moment. Where Ajit Jogi gets 38 per cent support, Sonia Gandhi can manage only a pitiful 10 per cent. Any Congress president who is 28 points behind Ajit Jogi should resign out of embarrassment.

These figures are relevant because the party leader's campaign will be responsible for the final decisive swing in either direction. Digvijay Singh is hoping to reverse the swing through an alliance with Mayawati's BSP, but that will work only if the voter has not turned decisively against him. Moreover, the BSP has decided to put up candidates only in the seats where it considers itself strong. Someone observant should point out the paradox: the BSP will only be strong in those seats that have traditionally gone to the Congress, because her vote was once the Congress vote.

In any case it will be a tough war. There will be a battle in Rajasthan too, where the BJP has not conceded defeat. Ashok Gehlot's excellent performance as chief minister has saved his party from an MP-like fate, but the BJP actually registers a far higher positive swing in this state than in MP.

There is a 7 per cent growth in the BJP vote in Rajasthan although that is still not enough to cross the 44 per cent vote that Gehlot has retained for his party. But a further two per cent swing during the campaign can change the seat equations dramatically. The election campaign will be decisive in Chhattisgarh, where the two parties are even. If Sonia Gandhi could add votes to her party she would have helped Ajit Jogi win. If...

All the weathervanes in this poll point in only one direction -- south, as far as Sonia Gandhi is concerned. Her personal popularity has dropped sharply in the last three months.India Today did its last exhaustive poll in August this year. In three months, Sonia Gandhi's ratings have dropped 10 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 2 per cent in Delhi, 7 per cent in Rajasthan and 4 per cent in Chhattisgarh. This is extraordinarily steep and means only one thing: that she will further subtract from the party vote. Sonia Gandhi already lags sharply behind her own party, once again in double digits everywhere: in Delhi the Congress has 49 per cent against 31 per cent for Sonia; in MP, it is 38 per cent vs 15 per cent; in Rajasthan, 44 per cent vs 24 per cent and in Chhattisgarh, 43 per cent vs 10 per cent. Compare this to the figures for Atal Behari Vajpayee. In Delhi, Vajpayee has 48 per cent support against the BJP's 35 per cent. In Madhya Pradesh, despite the fact that his party is winning, Vajpayee still rates higher than the BJP, getting 56 per cent against his party's 43 per cent. In Rajasthan the difference is higher in the Prime Minister's favour: he scores 52 per cent against the BJP's 40 per cent; while in Chhattisgarh Vajpayee has a remarkable 62 per cent support against his party's 43 per cent.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that Vajpayee will add those crucial votes to his party's candidates, while Sonia will either have no impact, or a negative one. These are not matters of prejudice; these are the only conclusions that can be drawn from the statistics garnered by interviewing 17,413 voters across 115 Assembly constituencies in the four states where elections are due in the first week of December.

The implications of course stretch into the general elections, since Sonia Gandhi will remain candidate for Prime Minister. The prospects are horrendous for the Congress. The most predictable part of the poll is the comparison showing that Vajpayee is more popular than Sonia Gandhi; but even the Prime Minister's most die-hard loyalists might be surprised by the abyss between the two. The Prime Minister is 17 points ahead of the wannabe Prime Minister in Delhi, 26 points ahead in Rajasthan, 41 points ahead in MP, and an unbelievable 52 points ahead in Chhattisgarh. There was a time when the Prime Minister was just three or four points ahead of the lady who wants his job, but time has exposed Sonia Gandhi's distance from the Indian electorate.

There is no mystery as to why the Prime Minister's approval ratings have gone up. The climb restarted when Mr Vajpayee once again took charge of his own government. The people elected him four years ago, and they elected him to lead, not to be led. When the Prime Minister withdrew from his job, the people withdrew from him. The BJP cannot win an election without Vajpayee.

The Indian voter has an instinctive dislike of hysterics, no matter where they come from, and is apprehensive about the direction in which the party might be pulled without Vajpayee's leadership.

It might be Sonia Gandhi's bad luck that in her make-or-break election she has come up against a naturally charismatic politician who has started firing on all cylinders. But there are ways in which to formulate a political response. Gimmickry, unfortunately, is not one of them. Sonia Gandhi did not host an iftar party during last Ramzan, because she did not want to identify with Muslims before the Gujarat elections, in which she had deliberately opted for what was called a "soft-Hindutva" line. The official excuse trotted out was that the Congress had cancelled the iftar because of the drought. This was nonsense. One 6 pm dinner for rent-a-rozedaar types does not cost crores of rupees. No one heard that the Congress had sent all that fabulous saving to the poor, parched farmer either. Sonia Gandhi's iftar has returned to agenda this year because secularism is back in demand, now that "soft-Hindutva" has fallen flat on its face. Placing the party's core values on a hire-purchase scheme is not the answer.

The only realistic option before the Congress, if it wants to make the general election a contest, is to dismount from the high horse and seek alliances. The operative word is 'seek'. It can no longer afford to wait for alliances. Even a year ago, before the Gujarat elections, the Congress was in a much stronger position, and if it had opened options for Mulayam Singh Yadav and Sharad Pawar in Gujarat, its own fate might not have been as dismal as it became. Hubris extracts its price. Today both Yadav and Pawar are looking in a different direction. Both have made it clear that there is no question of accepting Sonia Gandhi as a future Prime Minister. Pawar has gone as far as to laugh at the idea while claiming that he was amused by some other joke. Mayawati now has no such reservations, but she is never an unalloyed joy. Perhaps introspection is too much to ask for from the Congress.

One of the marginal questions in the opinion poll asked: What do you feel about Vasundhara Raje being a maharani and the BJP's chief ministerial candidate? Forty per cent of the voters answered: Being a maharani is not important. Certainly the commoner, Ashok Gehlot, has taken the measure of royal ambitions. In adjoining Madhya Pradesh, commoner Uma Bharti is giving a serious headache to 'Raja' Digvijay Singh. Is there a message here? Are voters now registering a thumbs-down for dynasts? That must come as bad news to the premier dynastic family in Indian politics, the Nehru-Gandhis.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.