NEW DELHI, 8 February 2003 — The Congress party lost control of its political fortunes when it lost control of two words and a phrase in the second half of the Eighties. Since it has made no attempt to find what it has lost, it is still adrift.
Mahatma Gandhi fashioned the essential dialectic of the Congress movement (as distinct from the freedom struggle) around the concept of “Ram Rajya”. Ram Rajya was not “soft Hindutva”, a charge that was, incidentally, made against it by the Muslim League. It was a symbol that was romantic and inclusive.
Independence was an eclectic idea for the peasant, who had suffered economic bondage by several layers of masters; and meaningless to groups like the untouchables who were the victims of a vicious and humiliating slavery. The fight against the British could gather momentum only if there was something better on the horizon.
Ram Rajya was a definition of this vision, an elemental part of every Hindu’s dream world. There were many specific kinds of freedom in Ram Rajya: Freedom from hunger; freedom of faith; and perhaps most important, freedom from injustice. Freedom was quantified; freedom was made flesh, as it were.
The peasant had to have faith in Gandhi and the Congress under Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru would usher in Ram Rajya. Gandhi gave the Congress property rights over Ram Rajya, while making Nehru chief custodian of the dream.
Gandhi sought to solve the two critical barriers to mass mobilization through two words. Secularism was the term generated, a trifle artificially, to denote a civilized relationship between Hindus and Muslims.
The original meaning of secular is as an opposite of the clergy; this was honed in India to mean a relationship between communities that was above or beyond their faith.
Secularism became a concept closer to religious tolerance, an ideal that allowed every Indian community to follow their religion the way they wanted to, and find space for any difference. Non-violence offered a parallel protection, for it excluded civil war from options, at least in theory.
The second Gandhian word, and this one was a complete, and original invention, was Harijan. Gandhi was certain that India would never be able to move forward unless it uprooted this evil. To be credible, Ram Rajya would have to release this quarter of the population from the status of pack animals. And thus was the untouchable transformed into a Harijan.
The redoubtable L.K. Advani neatly sliced Ram Rajya off the Congress matrix by including a Ram temple at Ayodhya within this revised kingdom. Under Advani’s ambidextrous leadership, the BJP evolved into the custodian of Rama’s India.
The party deliberately treated Gandhi with kid gloves, because it knew how effectively Gandhi had used Hindu imagery for a secular purpose. The party also realized that it had been hurt badly by association with Nathuram Godse, for the Mahatma had become an icon of sacrifice and piety in public life; if it could not inherit the Gandhian mantle, it could at least choose not to sully it further.
In the meantime, the Congress showed every sign of taking its Gandhian inheritance for granted. Lip service was the best that the Mahatma got. For the rising Doon School generation around Rajiv Gandhi, the older Gandhi was a public necessity but a private bore.
Advani also pulped secularism at the same time. A mistake by Rajiv permitted him to do so. Rajiv succumbed to pressure by Muslim leaders like Syed Shahabuddin and used the power of Parliament and executive authority to reverse a court judgment that gave relief to a Muslim divorcee called Shah Bano.
He permitted a Muslim minister in his Cabinet to abuse the judiciary in Parliament while liberal India watched aghast. Advani was too sharp a politician to let Rajiv escape. But Advani’s real target was larger than a prime minister or even a party; he went for the jugular, and revised the meaning of secularism. He made the word synonymous with appeasement. From a positive word that had helped define the majority-minority relationship, it became a negative term that invited ridicule. Deftly, Advani reversed a key element of the Gandhian dialectic, taking care all the while not to besmirch the icon himself.
Simultaneously, from another direction, the third leg of the Gandhian legacy was being sawn off. The carpenters this time were Kanshi Ram and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party. They challenged “Harijan”. They told yesterday’s untouchables that they had been cheated by a false promise. India was still in the throes of a caste system that kept them imprisoned, and these shackles would be broken not by patronage from duplicitous Congress leaders, but the strength of their unity, mobilization and challenge. They could empower themselves through the democratic system if they understood their strength.
They had to recognize that they were Dalits, the oppressed; the Congress could take its hypocritical lollipops elsewhere. They banned the use of Harijan from political terminology, and such is their success that no Congress leader now dares to use a term that Gandhi invented. Harijan has become synonymous with betrayal.
The Congress has found no answers. It might be correct to say that it has not even debated the questions, leave alone trying to find answers. It is unsurprising therefore that it no longer exists in areas where its electoral base depended on support from the Harijans that Gandhi brought to its fold. The charge of appeasement, and the dynamics of the temple movement, shifted the upper caste Hindu vote away; the charge of betrayal took out the Harijan/Dalits; and the Muslims, who need allies within the demographic mix, moved to leaders who could fulfill this need, like Laloo Prasad Yadav.
The party survives where it does for what might be called non-ideological reasons — in a state, for instance, where there are only two principal parties, and where anti-incumbency can bring its rewards. But anti-incumbency is an insubstantial motive. The Congress is no longer propelled by electorates that are committed to the party because it believes in and represents their interests. It wanes and waxes in proportion to the public sympathy that exists for the Congress’ opponents.
It might win in Assam, for instance, but only because P.K. Mahanta and the Asom Gan Parishad (AGP) party have become unpopular. But where others have moved in to win sections of the old Congress vote, the party has become irrelevant. The evidence shows that where the Congress has been marginalized it has never managed to recover lost ground.
Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are the outstanding examples. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have joined this list. In more than 200 Lok Sabha seats, therefore, the Congress is simply not in the picture; and in all the states where it is ruling its share of seats is going to depreciate sharply. It is too early to predict what will happen in a general election a year and a half down the line, but if the polls were to be held today the Congress tally would not enter three figures.
All this has been evident for some time, but the party leadership is either indifferent, or led into self-delusion. At the very least it should have begun the process of alliance-building five years ago. But the culture of coalition-building is alien to the party.
Individual loyalty to its leadership is more important than creating a platform on which more than one voice can be heard. Moreover, in another smart move, the BJP has co-opted the one party that could have provided essential ballast to any coalition against the NDA. The Bahujan Samaj Party has probably the most committed vote outside the BJP. For more than one reason, the BSP should have been wooed by the Congress. It was not, and it is now an ally of the BJP. If the BJP and the BSP contest the elections in Uttar Pradesh together, sharing seats by mutual agreement, they will sweep the largest state in the country.
This makes it all the more necessary that the non-Congress parties outside the ruling alliance come together. But these parties are either too small, or too driven by maverick egos, to unite. There is nothing that prevents Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav from being in the same party except their individual need to be supreme. It is a strange, inexplicable and illogical route toward suicide, but then suicide is not the preferred option of those who are sensible, rational and logical.
It took decades for the Congress to become a national party; it will take time for the party to vacate the space that was built by Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and their successors, up to Indira Gandhi. Nor is decline inevitable. But to reverse decline needs greater courage than the party has. It must start by recognizing reality, and then articulating it, and then formulating the processes by which fresh momentum can be induced. It must go back to believing in the people, rather than believing in just a leader.
