AS in Kerala so in Assam the Congress paid the price for not projecting any chief ministerial face during the just concluded Assembly polls. The Left Democratic Front and the Bharatiya Janata Party might have the initial edge in these two respective states.
The need for a CM face was more necessary in Assam because of the campaign launched by the BJP that the Congress-led Mahajot would make Badruddin Ajmal, the leader of the All India United Democratic Front, the chief minister of the state after it is voted to power. Had the Congress central leadership put up the name of anyone from its own party this propaganda of the BJP would not have worked so much.
It is not that the BJP only tried to polarise the society in Assam as is being argued by many media pundits. Perhaps it did even more in West Bengal. But here there was a strong chief ministerial face in the rival camp. Needless to say, that was of Mamata Banerjee who countered all the communal propaganda of the saffron camp. In contrast, in Assam the field was left wide open which facilitated the smooth sail of the saffron party. A handful of visits by Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi could not work as magic.
True, a sizeable number of Hindu votes shifted to the BJP after the Congress joined hands with the AIUDF. This gave an opportunity for many in the media to propagate the view that Ajmal ultimately proved a disaster for the Congress. But this is only half-truth.
Old timers are of the view that had the Assam Congress not lost a leader like former chief minister Tarun Gogoi, the situation might have been different. He died of corona virus on November 23 last year.
It is true that in 2016 Tarun Gogoi rejected the idea of Congress-AIUDF tie up, but by 2020 he was a changed person and was inclined to have truck with Badruddin Ajmal. In 2016 Ajmal too over-estimated himself and boasted that he would emerge as a king-maker. The truth is that he then lost from his own Assembly constituency and that too at the hands of a Muslim Congress candidate, Wajed Ali Chaudhary. This defeat shattered his dream of becoming a leader of the Muslim community.
It is a fact that in 2016 the joint votes of Congress and AIUDF was larger than that of the BJP-Asom Gana Parishad alliance. Many people both in Congress and AIUDF regretted that had the leadership of both the parties been reasonable the result would have been different.
It would not be fully appropriate to say that the Congress had to pay the price for aligning with a Muslim party. In Kerala, the Indian Union Muslim League is an old ally of the party and has shared power many times. True, in Assam the presence of outsiders is an issue, yet the society is not as communal as the BJP wants to project it. After all this is the state which threw up the first Muslim woman chief minister, Anwara Taimur, in the country—and that too at the height of students’ movement in 1980-81. Not only that, the second Muslim President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, was from Assam.
It is not only in Assam, but in several other states, that the Congress is seriously lacking a strong regional leader to take on the BJP, which dexterously used the service of Himanta Biswa Sarma, who till his joining of the saffron party in August 2015, was the senior most Congress leader after Tarun Gogoi. His exit from the party had much to do with the personality clash with Gogoi.
Had there been no Sarma factor in Assam the BJP would have performed badly as in West Bengal where it has no leader. The campaign by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah would not have worked in the way the duo failed in West Bengal.
A quick look of the Congress victory in different Assembly elections suggests that the party had bounced back to power in those states with reasonable ease where it had an influential regional leader—be it Ashok Gehlot, Amarinder Singh, Kamal Nath, or anyone else. In contrast it lost Gujarat in December 2017 by a much smaller margin because it failed to project anyone as a CM face. In Kerala in the recently held poll it failed to take proper service of former chief minister Oomen Chandy, nor could it promote any other person.
Whatever may be the reason in West Bengal and Maharashtra the Congress lost Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar, two regional satraps more than 20 years back, who were no doubt mass leaders in their respective states.
Exactly the same is the case with the BJP. The party, notwithstanding all its wherewithal and the personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had failed in places where it did not have any state-level leader. This has happened in West Bengal now, and in Delhi in the past. The party had to realise the importance of Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh and B S Yediyurappa in Karnataka—though the latter had crossed the unwritten age-limit of 75 years for retirement.