In response to my posting ‘Why Modi’, I received this response:
You’ve written on the election, so I thought you’d be interested in this article.
From The New York Times:
The Remarkable Comeback of Rahul Gandhi
The opposition leader is challenging Narendra Modi by offering social peace as a public good.
Without reading the New York Times article, I wrote:
Rahul is not the opposition leader at present in India.
People from outside can write about Indian politics only gathering information through surveys or interviews with few people. But we know the ground reality. In the previous Parliament Congress could not even become the ‘official’ opposition party as it did not have the required number eligible for that. So Rahul is not even the ‘opposition’ in India. There are so many opposition leaders for Modi and Rahul is just one among them. If he manages to make Congress as an ‘official opposition’ party in Parliament that will be his greatest achievement.
It was Congress which started both caste and communal politics. Though now it tries to put the mantle of secularism and work for social harmony, it is nothing but another Indian political party which cannot escape from the reality of ‘politicizing the community and communalizing the politics.’
Till Indra Gandhi managed to divide Congress in two parties as Congress (O) and Congress (I) [Indra Congress] many Congress supporters like my father turned against Congress. But all the tall claims by Congress as Secular party and promoters of ‘social peace’ are nothing but another political stunt. Just read the following extract to know the true picture about Congress. I need not to use my own words to highlight each point separately:
Extracts from Scholars:
…Myron Weiner emphasised the fact that ‘Congress is primarily concerned with recruiting members and winning support. It does not mobilize; it aggregates’: ‘In its effort to win, Congress adapts itself to the local power structures. It recruits from among those who have local power and influence.’ (M. Weiner, Party building in a new nation: the Indian National Congress, Chicago University Press, 1967, p.15)— Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s With a New Afterword, Penguin Books, 1999, p.151
The Hindu nationalists seemed to be held in a vice-like grip by the ‘Congress system’. On the one hand, in the states we have been considering—Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh—Congress traditionalists appropriated some of their arguments; on the other, Nehru was denouncing them at the Centre in the name of the secular state.30—p. 165
30 The secularism displayed by the Congress government was not totally unbiased. Some expressions of communalism by the minorities were tolerated, especially when the party might benefit from them. In 1959 the Congress made an alliance with the Muslim League in Kerala in order to form a new government after dislodging the Communists from power. This bias was consistent with the idea, implicit since Partition, that the Hindus, because they formed a majority, had more obligations than the minorities.—ibid. p. 165
The erosion of secularism as a political norm. In the early 1980s two factors combined to allow the tenets of Hindu nationalism to attain a certain legitimacy. First, the Congress(I) was trying to exploit communalism, thus contributing to a devaluation of the secularist norm; and second, this development was hastened by a revival of proselytisation and separatism on the part of certain minorities.
The Congress(I) was responsible for the erosion of secularism on several counts. As far as symbols were concerned, the new religiosity of Indira Gandhi prompted her to visit a growing number of holy sites: in the first six weeks after her return to power she visited a dozen temples situated all over India…67—ibid. p. 330
67 I. Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A personal and political biography, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989, p. 231. This new religiosity was largely precipitated by the untimely death of her son Sanjay in 1980 (P. Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: a biography, New Delhi: Viking, 1988, part 8{quoted from Jaffrelot, op. cit., who gives no page reference}).
The policy of Congress(I) in Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Punjab took on a ‘communalist’ character with the intention of enfeebling its rivals in those states. This tactic implied a combination of contradictory elements for it appealed alternatively to Hindu, Muslim or anti-Sikh feelings. However its general effect was the establishment of communal idioms in political discourse at the expense of secular themes. Moreover the outcome of the new Congress(I) alignment was pro-Hindu. With the emergence of centrifugal tensions among non-Hindus in Kashmir and Punjab, the government tended to confuse the safeguarding of national integrity with the mobilisation of the majority community….—ibid. p. 332
…When peaceful demonstrators passed through the city {Delhi} chanting ‘Hindu-Sikh Bhai-Bhai!’ (Hindus and Sikhs are brothers), the lootersan killers, in a frenzied state, replied ‘Indira Gandhi zindabad!’ (long live Indira Gandhi) and ‘Hindu-Hindu Bhai-Bhai!’ (‘Who are the guilty? Causes and impact of the Delhi riots’, EPW{Economic and Political Weekly}, 24, Nov. 1984, p. 1979) Rajiv Gandhi subsequently organised his campaign around the theme of national integration with a pro-Hindu bias in the run-up to the election of December 1984, with great success.—ibid. p. 333
Both tendencies—the marginalisation of social development in the Congress programme and the erosion of secularism—were interrelated: the party shifted from populist promises, which the Indian electorate treated with less and less respect, to communal categories to attract support. Their effects were also cumulative….—ibid. p. 336
…New Delhi probably realised that Hindu feelings were such that in North India, where the Congress(I) had already lost much of its influence, the post-demolition policy might be counter-productive. The decision to allow darshan in the makeshift temple and the near suspension (p.467) of repressive measure against the Hindu nationalists must be seen in this perspective: the risk of antagonisng the majority community and casting Hindu nationalist leaders in the role of martyrs was too great.—ibid. pp. 467-8
…The Congress (I) government now appeared willing to adhere less firmly to its secularist principles; it had given way to orthodox Muslim opinion in its handling of the Shah Bano affair, it had condoned the decision to unseal the disputed structure in Ayodhya, and it had allowed the shilanyas ceremony to go ahead. The Congress no longer had either the will or the means to uphold secular ideals. In the 1950s and ‘60s, local Congressmen did not hesitate to use communal appeals while the central leadership maintained a secular profile. However, in the 1980s it was the central government which resorted to a communalised form of politics which gave much more prominence to the alleged rights of religious groups, with the result that debate about ethnic questions became commonplace. To some extent the Hindu nationalist discourse was legitimised. In addition, the mainstream opposition, though antagonised by the revival of Hindu militancy, agreed to form an anti-Congress (I) alliance with the BJP in the late 1980s. The BJP was thus presented with ideal conditions for the launch of a ‘mixed strategy’ in which instrumentalism was centred on manipulation of the symbol of Ramjanmabhoomi ….—ibid. p.527
At this time the Congress was ‘speaking with three voices: the members in Kerala active in violent agitation, the central leadership permitting such activity without approving of it, and Nehru disapproving of it but taking no action to curb it’…..[S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 3: 1956-1964 (London: Cape, 1984), p. 66]— Ramchandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, London, Picador, 2007, p.294
…The Congress itself brought communalism into politics and created a strategic space on the right side of the political chessboard….— Gilles Chuyen. Who is a Brahmin? The Politics of Identity in India. New Delhi, Manohar, 2004. p. 209
…Many a Congressman was a communalist under his national cloak….— Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom; The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. Copyright 1941 by the John Day Company. Boston. First published as a Beacon paperback in 1958. p. 114
…Secularism’s great tragedy is not that Hindu nationalists became powerful. It is that at moments, both before and after Independence, the Congress party assumed monopoly over its meaning. Sensible secularism became hostage to Congress fundamentalism. — Secularism has no shades: Mani Shankar Aiyar raises profound questions about the political limits of secularism, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta. A Review of :Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Penguin India, [2004? Year is not mentioned] Book, The New Sunday Express (The Times of India), Bangalore, December 19, 2004, p. V.
…Even the Indian Congress exploits the Caste system for election purpose as no other political party in India does. Examine the lists of its candidates in relation to the social composition of the constituencies and it will be found that the candidate belongs to the caste, which is the largest one in that constituency. The Congress, as a matter of fact, is upholding the Caste system against which it is out-worldly raising an outcry.— Prospects of Democracy in India. B. R. Ambedkr. In K. M. Panikkar, Caste and Democracy, First Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, London 1933& Prospects of Democracy in India, B. R. Ambedkar (1956), Critical quest, New Delhi, 2004, p. 29###
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