NEW DELHI, 14 April — Most political leaders consider themselves utterly fortunate if they can become indispensable to one political party. Sonia Gandhi has achieved the impossible. She has become indispensable to two political parties. The Congress party as well as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Fourteen Congress chief ministers gathered in Guwahati with the singular purpose of singing hosannas to their choice of heir to Atal Behari Vajpayee. On the other side of India, in Goa, Vajpayee took up the challenge and opened the campaign for the next general election. Take my word for it. His gamble was protected by insurance. The BJP’s insurance policy is called Sonia Gandhi.
The BJP has dared its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to break ranks and join a coalition with Sonia. An alliance with the Congress would be easy for most of the partners of the ruling NDA. Old enmities have melted in the heat of new fires. Let Sonia mention today that she is not interested in becoming prime minister and in less than a week there will be either a different BJP or an alternative coalition in power in Delhi. After Gujarat, even George Fernandes’ Samata Party would split if Fernandes remained loyal to the BJP in such circumstances. But the BJP knows that the prime ministership is a non-negotiable item on Sonia’s agenda. She would much prefer Vajpayee to remain prime minister if she cannot get the job herself. That was Sonia’s obstinate insistence in the old dark days of “272” (you have to lisp that to get it properly right). The confidence behind that itch has increased with 14 states in the Congress fold. So the BJP can sit back and watch its partners in power squirming around a paradox: The stronger Sonia feels, the weaker she actually gets.
Is this aversion to Sonia personal? If it is, it is wrong. People in public life have to learn that they must keep their personal likes and dislikes outside the realm of decisions. A personal view must, or at least should, surrender to the larger need. Why should, therefore, potential allies of the Congress make Sonia into an issue; why not leave it to the Congress to decide whom it wants as leader? Why should any other Congress leader, whether Manmohan Singh or Digvijay Singh or P.V. Narasimha Rao be acceptable as a future prime minister, but not Sonia?
The answer is simple. Because she is not of Indian origin. She is an Italian. A passport, acquired fairly late in life, and much after it could have been done, does not make you an Indian. Her daughter Priyanka is an Indian, but not Sonia. The origins of Sonia would have been a problem for the Congress even in the usual circumstances of Indian politics, if the national debate had been over issues of bread, butter and circus, the three great themes of democracy. But the BJP, now fully led by its leader Vajpayee, has switched the debate. The question today is where the country stands over its minority Muslim population. That is the challenge thrown before every political leader, every political party, and every Indian. That is what the next general election will be fought on.
The biggest challenge is obviously before the Indian National Congress because it claims to believe in all three of the words that make up its name. It must decide on a critical point: is Sonia an asset or a liability for the party in this debate? Can an Italian Christian with extremely limited resources in Hindi language and syntax meet this great challenge? Can Sonia campaign in Gujarat beyond making set-piece speeches? The Gujarat elections will be in June. Is Sonia the right person for the Congress in this confrontation?
This is a moment, I believe, although I can only depend on a hunch rather than evidence, when even a Jawaharlal Nehru might have thought of stepping aside for a Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, if Patel could carry the Congress argument more convincingly. But in order to think like that you have to place the country’s interests above your own.
The BJP is confident that Sonia will never do that. That is the BJP’s insurance policy. So far Sonia has been taunting the BJP with the prospect of elections. After Goa, the BJP is taunting Sonia with an election date, not just in Gujarat but also in the country. The BJP would have been much more reluctant to take on a Congress led by Narasimha Rao in such a debate. I have been Rao’s worst critic since December 1992; I do not need a lesson in his inadequacies. But the situation is qualitatively different now. It is the Raos, Chandrashekhars, Deve Gowdas, V.P. Singhs, Manmohan Singhs, Chandrababu Naidus, Karunanidhis and Arjun Singhs who have to claim the country from the BJP in the court of the Indian people.
For that is where the future of India will be decided: In the minds of the Indian people, and particularly in the minds of Indians who are Hindus. The battle has to be at many levels. A Narasimha Rao could even form an alternative coalition in this Parliament, and turn the Lok Sabha into what it should be on occasion, the court of the people for the people. Sonia’s staccato phrases in an unfamiliar idiom will not serve. Indian Muslims are today shattered by Vajpayee’s speech in Goa. Part of the reason is that they were comforted by that analogy of the mask. As Prime Minister Vajpayee made that mask into a strategy and a policy, placing himself in between the Hindutva passions that flared up repeatedly in his own ranks; to use an analogy, he saw himself as the mortal man who had to drink the poison to prevent it from spreading into the body politic.
This was the man whose thoughts on a holiday in Kerala two years ago influenced the agenda of the nation, and dismayed the Hindutva brigade that wondered why it had made him prime minister. Something snapped somewhere. Perhaps it was the personal accusation that he had become a sponsor of Hindutva policies rather than a bulwark against them. Only he can say what happened, and what made him sweep every Muslim under the pockmarked fundamentalist carpet.
The real question before us is not what impact Vajpayee’s speech has made upon Indian Muslims, but the impact it has made upon Indian Hindus. We have to understand the Vajpayee phenomenon coolly, without the traditional invective that so often passes for anti-establishment courage, and is therefore totally counter-productive.
An image has been created, perhaps consciously, that Vajpayee is the BJP’s Nehru. This may have some truth to it, but it obscures the larger truth. Vajpayee is actually the BJP’s Jinnah, not Nehru. I say this as a compliment, not a criticism. We have demonized Jinnah so much because of Partition, that we do not understand what his career truly represented.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was an utterly brilliant man; on that at least there is consensus. He was also incorruptible, liberal, democratic, straight, and a thinking politician, as ready to see the faults in his own community as to criticize anyone else. He wanted at one point to become an actor and join the stage, but set aside early romanticism for theater for a life in law and public service. He rose very quickly to eminence.
More important, he was the most ardent of India’s emerging nationalists. He rejected the Muslim League when it was born, and only came onto its platform when it promised to be at most a sectarian rather than a divisive voice. He bludgeoned the League into the famous Lucknow pact with the Congress in 1916 that could have formed the basis of a constitutional settlement between the Hindus and Muslims, a pact that was welcomed enthusiastically by Bal Gangadhar Tilak as much as C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru, from their different perspectives.
Jinnah broke with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi because — and this will probably astonish people — of his abhorrence for Gandhi’s deliberate concoction of religion and politics. Keep the two separate, Jinnah warned Gandhi at the last Congress session he attended, in Nagpur in 1920, or this mixture will explode in your face. Jinnah did so against the tides of Muslim opinion, because he was ranged against the passions of his own community, then swept forward by the Khilafat movement. Gandhi sniffed that Jinnah did not understand Indians, and the Muslims, who were totally with Gandhi then, threatened Jinnah with violence and political excommunication. Jinnah preferred self-imposed exile. But the point I am making lies a little askance. Why did Muslims respond, first in bits and pieces, and then overwhelmingly, to his call for Partition in the 1940s? It is when this same Jinnah, the man who had rejected everything that Muslim fundamentalists had fought for, who had stood alone and firm against the fire of the Khilafat struggle, who was in his personal habits and convictions totally secular — when such a man finally decided that Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus needed separate nations, then those who were undecided were swayed in his direction. If a Muslim as non-communal as him found it difficult to live in a united India then what hope was there for the others?
This is the most important element of the Vajpayee shift. Vajpayee has never been a fire-breather. He has never displayed the hatred for Muslims that is the motivation for so many of those on the fringe of his political canvas. He has always reached out to the Muslim community to the extent that he can. If a BJP leader like him can place Indian Muslims in a single basket, then you can imagine the impact it will have on those who are still making up their minds. That is the hidden power of the Vajpayee’s challenge, and no other BJP leader could have done what he has.
My country’s Muslims can turn to anger; that will be understandable, but less productive than a second option. They might also want to try introspection. They must ask why a Vajpayee has reached where he has reached. It cannot all be the fault of the VHP and power politics and Gujarat, can it? Of course we all condemn Gujarat and Narendra Modi; but does some fault at least lie somewhere else?
The most damaging aspect of Hindu-Muslim relations in India is an untruth, but that does not make it less potent. This is the charge of appeasement. A growing number of Hindus, and you can include among them people who may never vote for the BJP, believe that Muslims can “get away” with anything while secular and democratic India provides no space for Hindu response or anger. The most important reason for this is that the face of Muslim opinion, in public life and media, is occupied by the most communal and sordid elements of the community. I certainly do not want to categorize the Muslim leaders into a single negative phrase. At the same time, they are not the real representatives of the Muslims on secular and political matters. Though some of them are very good in deed.
When Sonia Gandhi wants “Muslim” leaders she gives a ticket to a man who used to abuse her husband mercilessly through his beard, and spread communalism through his beady eyes. Even the thought of her assassinated husband did not prevent her from compromising with Obaidullah Khan Azmi. Some of the shaven faces in the so-called Muslim leadership are little better. Syed Shahabuddin has been conducting a campaign of communal divide for nearly 20 years now, and the acid he smears on the ground still spreads anger among Hindus. Where is the Muslim leadership that has spoken of education and reform and economic progress? It is as if the only problems that Indian Muslims have is the fate of a mosque at which no one prayed; or insistence on a discriminatory law against old widows.
Nehru had an effective observation for this syndrome: Majority communalism, he said, was far more dangerous than minority communalism because majority communalism could lead to fascism. Minority communalism could only be dangerous, he implied. But there are no Nehrus anymore, and communalism of both varieties has escalated to a level that Nehru and Patel could never have imagined. They lived through Partition, remember, so their imagination was not totally innocent; they had seen horrors their fathers could never have imagined. Each time it gets worse.
Jinnah never fully understood the consequences of what he was doing; and when he got his Pakistan he did not reject what he created, but he did wonder, publicly, whether it would work as he would have wanted it to. Jinnah wanted Pakistan to become a Muslim version of secular India.
I wonder if Vajpayee has fully understood the consequences of the challenge he has thrown before his country. He will lead his party in the summer elections for Gujarat, and probably the winter elections in the country. This may make him a prime minister for the fourth time. But there will still be a nation to mold afterward.
