Digvijay’s Mumbai

Conspiracy theorising is an addictive sport. By all accounts, Digvijay Singh, a Congress general secretary with long experience in administration, is hooked. Conspiracy theories liberate the theoriser from the sobering constraints imposed by fact. They breed all kinds of what-ifs along the spin given by the theoriser. Not only do they draw him out of the fringes of political debate, if skilfully framed, the theories allow him to reconfigure that debate. Just recently, Singh went without censure from his party for his encouragement to A.R. Antulay’s questions on the circumstances of Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare’s death in Mumbai on the night of November 26. Now he says he stands by a statement made this weekend that the Central government had not accepted demands made by the Mumbai terrorists in the hours and days thereafter. The Congress-led UPA government, he said, refused to countenance demands for the release of certain terrorists, and instead resolutely went about eliminating them.

This is a startling claim. If true, it would not just alter the political debate on terrorism, as Singh so evidently hopes to by stacking up the Congress’s tough resolve in Mumbai against the BJP-led NDA government’s surrender at Kandahar in 1999. It would change the strategic debate on Mumbai and its aftermath. But all Singh cares to give by way of proof are “media reports”. That is the carelessness and, once again, danger in Singh’s comments. Just as Antulay’s attempts to connect Karkare’s killing to his investigation into the Malegaon blast did, Singh’s ransom claims too could inevitably draw the Central government into making clarifications it should not need to. Recall, Antulay may ultimately have averted expulsion from the council of ministers, but he nonetheless had his statement deemed “regrettable” in Parliament by a fellow minister. Digvijay Singh cannot be allowed to carry on without retracting what appears to be a very flippant remark.

Singh is a senior Congress leader, and one with a track record of keeping on the right side of the party leadership. The Congress president should therefore know that when he speaks he does so with the public perception that he is a man who has the approval of the high command. As the Antulay controversy showed, senior partymen like them do not have the luxury of speaking in their “personal” capacity.