by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
Ever since the A.K. Antony committee identified the Congress’s Muslim “appeasement” tag as a major reason for its electoral reverses, the 133-year-old Grand Old Party (GOP) has been unable to formulate a clear-cut policy on the country’s largest minority community.
In a transparent attempt to shed the derogatory label given by its opponents, Congress President Rahul Gandhi has engaged in what has been called “temple hopping” and has even expressed a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Kailash Manasarovar, the ultimate pilgrimage destination in Tibet for Hindus.
The chances, however, of these gestures persuading Hindus to turn away in droves from the avowedly pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and support the Congress are minimal. Instead, the latter’s new Hindu card may confuse the Muslims.
Rahul’s father, Rajiv Gandhi, also made the mistake of following a muddled policy when he opposed the Supreme Court’s judgement in favour of a divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano, at the behest of Muslim fundamentalists and then ordered the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid to please their Hindu counterparts.
However, the fact that religious overtures do not matter if the nation is seen to be advancing economically was proven in 2009 when the Congress increased its tally of Lok Sabha seats at a time when India was experiencing the fastest-ever reduction of poverty, according to Arvind Subramanian, the former Chief Economic Adviser of the Narendra Modi government.
Yet, only five years later, the Congress suffered its worst ever defeat largely because of the “socialistic” policies favoured by Sonia Gandhi advocated by the crypto-communist members of her National Advisory Council at the expense of economic reforms.
What these ups and downs show is that economy is the key. There is no need either to display an overt devotion to Hinduism or hold a meeting with a select group of Muslim intellectuals, as Rahul Gandhi has done, to find out what their community wants.
It is another matter that at the moment, the Muslims want a sense of security, which was pointed out by former Vice President Hamid Ansari. Their angst is understandable at a time when a Union minister garlands a group charged with killing a Muslim.
But, in the long run, the most palpable sense of safety is provided by a buoyant economy as it fosters a feeling of wellness which few want to disrupt through targeted violence.
The BJP’s success in 2014 was the outcome of Modi’s appropriation of the economic reforms which the Manmohan Singh government had neglected in its twilight years when, as former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said, the government made the mistake of taking its foot off the accelerator of reforms.
It is patent enough that the BJP would not have fared so well in 2014 if large sections of the Muslims had not voted for it. If they are now feeling uneasy, as Ansari has said, the reasons are not only the sporadic acts of violence of the saffron activists, but also that the reforms have not delivered to the extent they were expected to do.
As the original initiator of the reforms, the Congress’s focus should be on ways to rev up the economy and not on photo-ops at temples and powwows with Muslim notables. If the party can generate enough confidence about its ability to do what it alleges the Modi government has failed to do, there will be no need for any kind of religious overtures.
Along with the articulation of development-oriented ideas, the Congress will have to be less apologetic about its pursuit of secularism. While Jawaharlal Nehru’s Fabian socialism can be discarded when it doesn’t exist even in the fatherland of the creed, his secularism has to be preserved and nurtured.
If the Congress earned the reputation of being a “Muslim party”, as Sonia Gandhi has said, it is because of the misapplication of the secular principles as the Shah Bano fiasco showed, for the doctrine does not entail pandering to the Muslim hardliners as was done in the mid-1980s but to the ordinary members of the community.
Their value is immense not because they constitute 14.2 per cent of the population, numbering 172.2 million, second only to Indonesia (209 million) and ahead of Pakistan (167.4 million), but because of their contributions to India’s art, architecture, cuisine and culture. Moreover, their interest lies in advancing in step with the rest of the country as M.S. Sathyu’s iconic film, “Garam Hawa”, depicted in the 1970s.
The Congress, however, made the mistake of seeing the community through the lenses of the bigoted and bearded maulvis (clerics) and abiding by their prejudices. Hence, the “Muslim party” nomenclature because the BJP was quick to capitalise on the GOP’s lapses in judgement.
It is time for the Congress to clarify that secularism does not stand for appeasement of minorities but ensuring that they have a place of honour in the country.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
Nowhera Shaik (centre)
By Saeed Naqvi,
On May 15, when the Karnataka election results are announced, and the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) find themselves in an almighty scrum bargaining for power, a certain mysterious lady will be watching the proceedings from her suite in the country’s most luxurious, seven-star Leela hotel on Bengaluru’s old airport road.
The hijab clad, 45-year-old, Nowhera Shaik, President of the All India Mahila (Women’s) Empowerment Party (MEP), is fielding candidates for all the 224 assembly seats. It is a mistake to regard MEP as a woman-only party. “A woman has a brother, father, son,” she says. Moreover, there is no taboo on men seeking MEP tickets.
Her hijab is a far cry from a docile acceptance of male oppression. It is an assertion of feminine independence. She is CEO of the Hyderabad-based Heera Group of companies, dealing with a wide range of commodities across the globe — building material, gold and diamonds. The last mentioned happens to be something of an obsession with her. Heera, name of her company, means diamond. Her election symbol is the Diamond. Who knows, her name Nowhera may be a contortion of Nav Heera, which means “novel diamond”.
In the Sherlock Holmes classic, mystery deepens when the dog “does not” bark. In Shaik’s case the deathly silence of politicians and the media at the high voltage election debut is as intriguing.
There are all sorts of ironies involved. The latest Congress policy towards Muslims is based on the appraisal that the BJP’s shrill allegation, that the party appeases Muslims, has begun to affect the majority community. The Hindu increasingly sees the Congress as a “Muslim Party”. How should a party which is greedy for Hindu as well as Muslim votes cope with the predicament?
It was to meet this situation that the new “cloak and dagger” policy towards Muslims was enunciated. The party will distance itself from Muslims to prevent a haemorrhage of Hindu votes. But by hint and gesture the Muslim voter will be persuaded that this “distancing” is only a tactic in the Muslim interest. The Muslim must not leap into the Congress lap in full public view, but, with expert slyness, sneak towards the Congress polling agent.
The game acquires a touch of situation comedy when an audacious, hijab-wearing lady, with wealth beyond measure, a credible image of a philanthropist, jumps into the electoral fray. The Congress cannot throw up its hands and scream, “Help, help, she is nibbling away at Muslim pockets in a close election where even a few hundred votes matter.”
Nor can the BJP be ecstatic: “Welcome dear Begum Sahiba; go, damage the Congress.”
Unobtrusively, she just may end up marginally harming the Congress. If each one of her 224 candidates is pillowed with cash, the law of averages may return two, three or five winners. This may give her a hand to play in post-poll poker. Her ambitions for 2019 leave one gasping.
If the Congress loses the Karnataka election, it will be difficult for the party to escape the label the opposition is in gleeful readiness to paste on the Congress forehead: P2, a party confined to Punjab and Puducherry.
While nobody is conceding outright victory to the Congress, punters are willing to give it the largest single party status and therefore hope for coming state elections.
A representative group of eight senior journalists and political activists (including two having deep links with Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS) pondered over the election scene in my Bengaluru drawing room. There was no great difference of opinion on the way the cookie was expected to crumble on May 15. The Congress, BJP and Deve Gowda led-JD-S were expected to poll 95 to 100, 85 to 95 and 35 to 40 seats, respectively. A hung house will enable the JD-S to play a leading role in the post-poll poker.
Let us pick up the narrative in 2010 when Siddaramaiah, then in the opposition, chastised the infamous Reddy Brothers (more popularly known in Karnataka as the Bellary mining mafia) on the floor of the state Assembly.
The Reddys promptly dared him to repeat his charges in Bellary where, they threatened, he “would be finished”. Siddaramaiah took up the challenge. He undertook a 200-mile padyatra to Bellary. The voter, desperately searching for something he can respect, spotted a touch of heroism in Siddaramaiah.
There are now three principal caste groups (hundreds of smaller ones) in the contest:
Siddaramaiah with his diligently consolidated Kuruba caste; Deve Gowda, something of a Vokkaliga stalwart and B.S. Yedurappa, the tallest Lingayat who had almost been ruled out by the BJP because of a jail term for massive corruption. His powerful caste Lingayat has trumped all negative considerations.
Siddaramaiah is not a classical Congressman. Rather, his background should be a cause for concern for the Congress: There is in his DNA a trace of Lohia Socialist. This is what kept him in the JD-S for 35 years. But his parting with Deve Gowda was so bitter that theirs is now a blood feud. Deve Gowda would jump in front of a train rather than allow Siddaramaiah a second term in Bengaluru.
Yedurappa poses the Lingayat challenge. This has propelled Siddaramaiah towards an audacious gamble. An old demand by a section of Lingayats seeking a status outside the Hindu structure has been dusted up by him. Yes, he says, Lingayats will be outside the Hindu fold. This is far-reaching, tearing into Veer Shaivaite-Lingayat divide.
Trust a Lohiaite to have played this hand. There are echoes of V.P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report. V.P. Singh himself was not a beneficiary of his machinations. But the post-Mandal tumult brought to the fore Mayawati, Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad, Rath yatra to Ayodhya and so much mayhem. Let’s see how Siddaramaiah’s gamble plays itself out.
(A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
