One may or may not agree with Tharoor’s conclusions, but he certainly didn’t deserve lectures from the Shergills and Surjewalas of his party.
There is a signature line that Congress president Rahul Gandhi uses in private conversation: “The Congress is not an organisation, it is an ideology.”
A recent addition to this is: “Modi is jittery. You see it on his face.”
He elaborated it to a visitor a few days back — “The BJP will not win even 10 of the 120 (Lok Sabha) seats in UP and Bihar.”
Most people come out of these meetings with Rahul Gandhi stirred, if not shaken — not by his assessment, but by his sheer confidence and sincerity of conviction. The party’s stands and its actions on issues tell a different story though. It has been found cowering every time the BJP drags it into a Hindu-Muslim debate.
Since getting drubbed in the 2014 general elections, the Congress seems to be desperately seeking to change its projected image of a minority-appeaser. This explains why Gandhi starts visiting temples during elections, takes a short break for a foreign jaunt, and then holds an in-camera meeting with the Muslim intelligentsia after the polls.
How else could one explain the party’s haste to disown Shashi Tharoor’s remark that if the BJP wins the 2019 elections, India will become a Hindu Pakistan?
No time to understand
It’s understandable why BJP spokespersons such as G.V.L. Narasimha Rao and Sambit Patra rushed to the TV studios to declare the Congress “anti-Hindu”. One may or may not agree with Tharoor’s conclusions, but he certainly didn’t deserve lectures from the Shergills and Surjewalas of his party on ‘India’s values and fundamentals’.
They had no time to consult him or even read his entire construct: “Pakistan was created as a state with a dominant religion that discriminates against its minorities and denies them equal rights…. The BJP/RSS idea of a Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of Pakistan – a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place. That would be a Hindu Pakistan, and it is not what our freedom movement fought for, nor the idea of India enshrined in our Constitution.”
Does the Congress differ? Of course not. In fact, the Congress president described Tharoor as a ‘role model’ at a meeting of professionals in New Delhi Saturday. But Gandhi wouldn’t say it outside, or on his Twitter handle.
In fact, most Congressmen also agreed with and privately applauded Kapil Sibal for his stand in the Supreme Court that hearings on the Ayodhya dispute be deferred until after 2019 elections. But, officially, the party refused to endorse his line.
The Aiyar parallel
The Congress believes that Sibal’s and Tharoor’s lines of argument could be used by the BJP to polarise Hindu votes, just as the ‘neech kism ka aadmi’ jibe at Modi by fellow St Stephen’s College alumnus Mani Shankar Aiyar cost the Congress dearly in the last Gujarat assembly elections. The party suspended Aiyar based on media reports, but hasn’t sought any explanation from him.
As he didn’t hear from the party’s disciplinary committee to which his case we referred seven months back, Aiyar himself took the initiative to seek meetings with panel members. He has met A.K. Antony thrice, Motilal Vora twice – the second time after having been made to wait for over an hour in an adjacent room – and Sushil Kumar Shinde once. They wouldn’t commit to anything, for the high command is wary of the possible media outrage if his suspension is revoked. Neither Sonia nor Rahul Gandhi has spoken to him once after his controversial remark.
Rahul’s father Rajiv Gandhi was junior to Aiyar at Doon School and at Cambridge. Their first meeting at Doon was when Rajiv came to seek his permission to use the swimming pool. He got it instantly. Decades hence, no Congressman is ready to offer a hand to the drowning Aiyar.
It’s not because the Congress believes that Tharoor and Aiyar, the two Stephanians with a penchant for controversy, really damaged the party and so should be punished. Sonia Gandhi’s ‘maut ka saudagar’ jibe at Narendra Modi in the 2007 Gujarat assembly elections might have hurt the party more. Rahul Gandhi’s own public denouncement of Manmohan Singh government’s ordinance on convicted lawmakers might have caused irreparable damage to the Congress and the UPA government’s image.
Ideological confusion
The cases of Tharoor and Aiyar only bring to light the utter confusion in the Congress about where it stands ideologically. Nobody betrays this confusion more than the Congress president himself.
One day, he projects himself as a devotee of Shiva, who declares his intent to go on a Kailash Mansarovar yatra after a flight scare. Another day, he cancels this plan and focusses on hosting an iftar party and reaching out to the Muslim intelligentsia.
These moves give an impression that the Congress leader is trying to appease the Hindus one day and the Muslims the next. If Gandhi has to dispel this impression, he should be quick to respond to Modi’s jibe and spell out his stance on the triple talaq bill and nikah halala. Vacillations on these issues would render the Congress unpopular on both sides of the divide.
As it is, if people vote for the Congress, not as an organisation but as an ideology, in 2019, they will be terribly confused.
Also read: A ‘Hindu Pakistan’ wouldn’t be Hindu at all, but a Sanghi Hindutva state by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor