The Congress is grappling with a severe identity crisis. The malady is bad enough, but the repercussions could be worse given that the disease comes in the run-up to a set of important Assembly elections, and the Lok Sabha poll six months from now. The online version of Merriam Webster Dictionary offers the following definition of ‘identity crisis’: “A state of confusion in an institution or organisation regarding its nature or direction”. The Congress of today fits that description.
Some weeks ago, a senior Congress leader told a gathering that his party had the DNA of a Brahmin. Earlier than that, during the Karnataka Assembly election and soon thereafter, another Congress leader had said that his party’s president Rahul Gandhi was a janeudhari Hindu. Rahul Gandhi also paraded himself as a Shiv Bhakt. Meanwhile, the Congress had taken it upon itself in Karnataka to divide Hindu society by seeking to tear off the Lingayat community from the Hindu fold and giving it a minority status. Somewhere in the vicinity of these remarks, it was reported in the media that the Congress chief had assured a gathering of Muslim personalities that the Congress was a party for Muslims. Confused? There’s more.
A few days ago, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad lamented that, nowadays his party’s supporters from the Hindu community refrained from inviting him to meetings. What he left unsaid was that such Hindus were communal in their approach and didn’t trust him because of his Islamic faith. Days before this shocking remark, another senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had stated that his party lost votes every time time he said something.The unstated part here was that because he often spoke against the Right and in favour of the minorities, the Congress lost votes.
Something is clearly wrong with the Congress. It knows not where it stands with regard to its positioning on the Hindu-Muslim issue. On the one hand, it is peddling a soft-Hindutva line. On the other, it is straining every nerve to appease the minorities. The end result is that it’s on the blackfoot on both fronts. The pro-Hindu campaign is not working because the shadow of some recent remarks by its important leaders looms over it. Congress leaders had coined terms such as ‘Hindu Taliban; ‘Saffron terror’; and, ’Good Hindu’ as opposed to bad Hindu. The pro-Muslim card had flopped long before, but the Congress’s attempt to revive its potency has failed because the party is seen to be bending over backwards in appeasing the majority community for a change.
To add to its woes, the Congress is now faced with the prospect of taking a stand on the Ayodhya issue. Until now, it had got away with being ambiguous, but that luxury does not exist anymore. The matter has returned to the centre-stage due to a series of developments. One, the Supreme Court begins day-to-day hearing on the case from this month-end, to determine the title deed. Two, the RSS — and even the BJP — has said that among the many constitutional options available, is an Ordinance to clear the way for the construction of a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. Three, the Uttar Pradesh Shia Wakf Board has expressed its support for the construction of the temple. Since there is an overwhelming demand among the country’s majority community to construct the temple at the earliest, the Congress finds itself in a dilemma. If it backs the demand, it will be flayed by the dominant minority community; if it opposes, it stand to lose out electorally if the BJP makes it a key election issue.
The Congress cannot pin the blame on anyone but itself for the crisis that it has been hit with. In the early decades of independence, it got away with minority appeasement because the voters had no choice but to back the party. When options became available, in the form of the BJP and the regional parties, not just the minorities but also the rest of the electorate began to switch sides. Thus, while the minority votes began to swing the way of the regional outfits — the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, and so on — a chunk of the majority community’s votes shifted to the BJP. The recent soft-Hindutva line has been an attempt by the Congress to course-correct, but the effort has done little to address the party’s messy image.
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