Opinion Congress gets it wrong again

The Popular Front of India (PFI) is made up of exactly such jihadi terrorists whose main purpose has been to introduce in India the kind of Islam that the Taliban has used to ruin Afghanistan. The PFI until it got banned organized military parades of its cadres. They never deny that for them Islam is more important than India. After that incident in Kerala in 2010, when they hacked a Christian professor’s hand off for allegedly blaspheming the Prophet of Islam, their activities have been more insidious but, in every sense, dangerous and divisive.

In Karnataka, it was the PFI that organized the hijab protest in schools and colleges. Exactly when the brave women of Iran risked imprisonment and torture to defy the Ayatollahs by publicly removing and burning hijabs, young Muslim girls in Karnataka were demanding the right to go to classes wearing hijab. It was an absurd and ludicrous protest but there is more to hijabs than modesty. Experts who have studied the worldwide jihad have found that the first signs of radicalism are when Muslim communities suddenly decide to force women to start wearing Arab clothes. In India, the PFI has led the movement to radicalize the very gentle Islam that was once practised here. It was a religion associated with refinement, elegance, romantic poetry, and romantic films. This was the Islam I grew up with in northern India and I have seen it change before my eyes.

There are those, mostly leftists and liberals, who like comparing Hindutva with radical Islam but these are people blinded by liberalism and a defunct ideology. Hindutva has done real harm to the great Sanatan Dharma, and it has been responsible for many acts of violence against Muslims and Dalits, but it has so far not become an international terrorist movement. It has spread hatred but not come anywhere near close to creating a Hindu version of the barbaric Islamic State.

The world is a better place with that wretched country dead and gone but the return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan indicates that the founding ideas that the Islamic State espoused have found a new country. The worst sufferers have been Afghan women who have lost the right to education and the right to work. Nothing like that has happened in India or will ever happen because fanaticism of the kind that bred the Bajrang Dal has no religious sanction.

The Congress Party has in the past made the mistake of equating Hindutva with jihadism. BJP leaders never fail to remind us that a senior Congress leader tried to blame the 26/11 attack on Mumbai on the RSS, or that Rahul Gandhi himself told an American ambassador that in his considered opinion Hindu terrorism was more dangerous than Islamic terrorism. Since then, Rahul and his sister have done their best to wear their Hinduism on their sleeves by trotting off to temples at election time and making it a point to post pictures of themselves at prayer on social media.

This does the Congress Party more harm than good. And the reason is that with the BJP ranting and raving about gods and religion what we need most now is a political party that proudly flaunts its secular credentials. This is best done by reminding Indians that there was a time when election campaigns were not conducted like religious festivals. It is with deep nostalgia that I remember elections past when political leaders did not ask for votes in the name of gods and goddesses.