A Pale Shade Of Saffron
Is the Congress nothing but the BJP without the Lotus? Despite holding the secular banner, time and again it has faced the soft Hindutva charge. Such as now
Bula Devi
It cut to the quick, this question. Waris Pathan, an MLA of Asaduddin Owaisis party AIMIM, got unanimously suspended from the Maharashtra assembly till April 13 for refusing to say Bharat mata ki jai. And more than a few secular-liberal hearts cringed at the fact that support for Shiv Senas loyalty test came from the party of which Pandit Nehru was the progenitorthe Congress. And when general secretary Digvijaya Singh piped his approval, the thought crossed many a mind: Was the Congress of 2016 playing its own version of Hindutvaalbeit a soft Hindutva?
Make no mistake, Pathan was perfectly within his rights in refusing to be intimidated by his colleagues across the aisle. The assembly is not a place where you can be compelled into proclaiming allegiance to the nation. Neither the Constitution nor any rule governing the legislatures require legislators and parliamentarians to do so. And it is not the business of the assembly or its members to conduct such a test. The BJPs self-granted right to be the arbiter on this question may be fairly dubious. In fact, the question itself may be unsustainable. But thats not a line one can even advance in a situation where the Congress and its offshoot, the NCP, find it useful to hunt with the hounds.
The Congress stands completely exposed. On the one hand, Rahul Gandhi says the RSS subscribes to a single ideology. On the other hand, his party is doing exactly what they are doing on issues like these, says Pathan, a lawyer and son of a judge. In other words, different shades of saffron. Adds Delhi University professor Bidyut Chakraborty: Despite being inheritors of the Nehruvian legacy, the Congress knows Nehruvian pluralism wont fetch it votes. Hence, these tacit messages.
Just to show the Maharashtra episode was no aberration, the Madhya Pradesh assembly, soon after, adopted a censure motion moved by Congress MLA Jitu Patwari against Owaisi, who had challenged RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwats claim that the time had come to teach the new generation Bharat Mata ki Jai. The Congress is in doldrums, Owaisi told Outlook. When it should be talking of communal clashes in MP, the highest in India, it pushes for a censure motion against someone who has nothing to do with the state assembly. If the Congress wants to follow its Gujarat model of Hindutva, then God bless them!
While the conduct of the BJP and the Shiv Sena in the assembly was as expected, the Congress seemed tentative. The party, which has 42 MLAs, first did not oppose the resolution to suspend Pathan. However, Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, leader of the Opposition, apparently said: If anybody insults national sentiments, it cannot be tolerated. I demand strong action against the member for insulting the country.
Dr Hamid Dabholkar of the Maharashtra Andhashradha Nirmulan Samiti, told Outlook: While the BJP is programmatically communal, the Congress actis pragmatically communal. It chooses to be secular on occasions, and if it wants, it can choose to be communal. The Nehruvian and Gandhian secularism is increasingly getting diluted in letter and spirit, and in the fight between the BJP and the Congress, the real issue of development and social justice is getting sidelined.
I am not against the slogan, but it should not be the yardstick of my loyalty to the nation, says Owaisi. Tomorrow they will say we dont like your name or your religion. Why should I succumb to them? They expect others to toe their line when it suits their kind of liberalism, secularism...otherwise it is Hindutva. The idea of India cannot be one religion, one culture and one language. I am against Hindutva, but I am not against Hindus.
This is not the first time, of course, in its century-old history that Congress has sent such confusing signals to voters, to the extent that it appears that the party itself is in an ideological dilemma and uses the Hindutva card according to its convenience. Everything that happened recently looks magnified, but let us not forget that this has been building up for years, all the way from Partition, perhaps even earlier, says a veteran political observer.
However, history also shows that whenever the Congress has tried to ride the tiger of majoritarian politics, it has backfired on the party:
Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks of the Babri masjid in 1986 to appease majoritarian anger of the reversal of the 1985 court order on Shah Bano only to see Ram Janmabhoomi movement take off
He began his 1989 general election campaign from the banks of river Sarayu in Ayodhya following the shilanyas of the Ram temple close to the disputed spot, only to lose the polls
P.V. Narasimha Rao, long accused of being a covert Hindutva subscriber, oversaw the demolition of the Babri masjid, leading to the communal riots of 1992-93
In the riots that followed in Maharashtra, Congress chief minister Sudhakarrao Naik allowed the police to give a free hand to the Shiv Sena, so much so that a respected leader like Sunil Dutt resigned his Lok Sabha seat in disgust
Old-timers recall that in the mid-1990s, the late V.N. Gadgil was against his partys appeasement of Muslims. Gadgil had said at a training camp, Every time the Shahi Imam makes a statement, the party reacts as if God himself has spoken. Do minorities mean only Muslims? What about Buddhists, Sikhs and others?
Subsequently, writes journalist-author Rasheed Kidwai in 24 Akbar Road, the CWC adopted a resolution in Delhi on January 16, 1999 that goes: The CWC endorses the views of the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, in her speech on the anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, where she had said, India is secular primarily because of Hindus, both as a philosophy and as a way of life based on what our ancients said: Ekam satyam, vipraha bahudha vadanti (The truth is one, the wise pursue it variously).
the Congress government.
Qaiser goes on to point out that while the Congress has been playing the soft Hindutva card, it has benefited whenever it took a robust stand against the BJP, as in the 2004 general elections and the 2015 Bihar assembly elections.
Tariq Anwar, of the NCP, feels Waris Pathans suspension was not the correct approach, although his party legislators were also part of it. It is dangerous for national unity, he says. Steering away from the controversy, Congress leader and former Union minister Ashok Chavan says his party doesnt need a certificate from the RSS/BJP on nationalism. Qaiser, however, wonders if the Congress would reflect about Subhas Chandra Bose, who always chanted Jai Hind, in which Hind represents Hindustan, and not Bharat Mata ki Jai , or Inquilab Zindabad. Does Bose become less patriotic? He also wonders, since Bharat Mata reflects a northern Indian image, what should a Tamilian or a Keralite chant?
Minority appeasement was cited as one of the reasons for the Congress rout in 2014 by the A.K. Antony report. An excessive focus on minorities, many veteran Congressmen felt, alienated the Hindus; hence a course-correction. Since then, Rahuls spin-doctors made it a point that he visits temples as a good Brahmin.
The Congress was as hard on Islamic terror as the BJP, and a large number of Muslim youth were arrested during the UPAs ten-year tenure for their alleged links to terror. And yet a large number of them are now steadily getting acquitted by courts for lack of evidence.
The grand old party, therefore, needs to think hard on how it is going to be different from the BJP. By aping the BJP and the RSS, the party is sending out confused signals. And because of its failure to resist unconstitutional excesses, it is raising the suspicion that it is failing to work even as a robust opposition. It may have just 44 members in the Lok Sabha, but the bigger problem, as its conduct in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have shown, is that it lacks courage of conviction. A serious credibility gap is the last thing it can afford ahead of crucial state elections in Assam, West Bengal , Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. Outlook
