Opinion

Congress’ wrong strategy

December 17, 2017

INDIA’S opinion polls are notoriously unreliable, as previous state and national elections have proved only too well. Still everybody takes a victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the two states that went to polls last week (Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh) granted, as predicted by almost all the exit polls. BJP has been in power in Gujarat, Modi’s home state,

continuously for two decades. Himachal Pradesh, currently ruled by the Congress, has alternated between the two main parties.

Elections were a serious challenge to both Modi and Rahul Gandhi who has just taken over as the head of the Congress.

Modi and his party were worried over the implications of a defeat or decline in its fortunes in Gujarat on the party’s prospects in the 2019 parliamentary elections. For Gandhi, this was the first opportunity to prove his mettle as a leader by boosting the flagging fortunes of the Congress Party.

So both Modi and Gandhi didn’t leave anything to chance. But Modi did something worse: He forgot that he was the prime minster of a great country.

Since Modi came to power, Muslims, forming 15 percent of India’s population, have been facing increased marginalization and hostility across the country. Dozens have been killed, mostly on false charges of slaughtering or transporting cows, revered by a majority of Hindus.

Modi never condemned such attacks on his own and his supporters were content to attribute all this intolerance and violence to the fringe elements in his party. But the Gujarat campaign leaves no one in doubt that if anybody is responsible for the communal poison spreading through India’s political life, it is none other than the country’s prime minister.

Modi’s campaign speeches reveal that the breakdown of civility has taken place at the top. To win the votes, he tried to create the fear of Muslims and Pakistan in the minds of the majority Hindus. Speaking at Sanand, he claimed “a former chief of the Pakistan Army,” Arshad Rafiq, had called for Ahmed Patel, a Muslim Congress leader, to be made chief minister of Gujarat. He misconstrued an innocent meeting at Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar’s residence on Dec. 6 and presented it as a conspiracy by Pakistan to interfere in the Gujarat polls. Modis predecessor Manmohan Singh was also a party to this “anti-national plot”.

This was not the first time that the BJP was playing the “Congress-Muslim-Pakistan conspiracy” card. While campaigning for Bihar’s assembly elections, Amit Shah said that firecrackers would be burst in Pakistan should the BJP lose. Shah was the party chief. But Modi has to think of the dignity and moral stature of the prime minister’s office. That he forgets this and plays on fear and insecurity in a classic and cynical game of divide and conquer is the tragedy of India.

Unfortunately, the Congress which gave India a constitution based on democracy and secularism behaves as if it does not realize the danger. On the contrary, it is trying to defeat the BJP at its own game. With the result that there was hardly any difference between the two parties in terms of electoral strategy as in previous elections.

Gandhi did not say anything about the

religious polarization that has been tearing apart India’s social fabric ever since Modi assumed office. Nothing about the sense of insecurity from which minorities suffer.

While Modi raises the bogey of a Muslim chief minister for Gujarat, the Congress was careful to ensure that its list of candidates contained as few Muslim names as possible. Muslims form 10 percent of Gujarat’s population, but the Congress fielded only six Muslims (out of 182 candidates).

Congress should realize that it can never hope to defeat the BJP by incorporating some of its agenda. By trying to imitate the BJP, the Congress will be strengthening it by lending legitimacy and respectability to its divisive policies.


December 17, 2017
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