Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Congress needs to speak to…

The government is saying that on issues that concern India’s largest minority, it will act or turn a blind eye at will, while the Muslims are cast in the role of passive target or passive beneficiary, the “labharthi”. Missing in the BJP’s high-minded talk on waqf reform, ostensibly to bring transparency and address deprivations of poor Muslims, was the voice of the BJP’s directly elected Muslim MP. Because — it is necessary to state the obvious — the BJP does not have a Muslim Lok Sabha MP.

At the same time, during the discussions on the Bill in the two Houses, it seemed, for a brief while, that some voices were also being recovered, a few silences were also being filled. For one, after a long while, Parliament hosted the big debate instead of being by-passed by it. After long, too, the Opposition spoke up and took a clear position on an issue that concerns the minority.

As it heads into an important AICC session in Ahmedabad this week, however, India’s main Opposition party, Congress, needs to ask itself this question: Does the strong and clear position it took against the Waqf Bill — even though it had a conspicuous hole in it, with Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, who has taken on the mantle of the ideological agenda setter-in-chief on caste, choosing not to speak on it — mean that it will now speak up on Muslim concerns more forthrightly and frequently, when the government attempts to deny them agency?

Or will it return to the prevarications and equivocations, ambivalences and silences that have so far defined its secularism — which seems to rely heavily on the fact that Muslims have little choice or political alternative, and which sees the raising of Muslim issues as riddled with dangers of Hindu consolidation that, it calculates, will only favour the BJP?

There is another question here: For all its claims to secularism, is Congress afraid/evasive/silent on Muslims because, 11 years after the coming to power of the Modi-BJP, it has not yet found a language, of confidence and conviction, to talk to voters who identify themselves as Hindu?

In other words, in times of BJP dominance, does Congress hesitate to say “Muslim” because it has not found a way to say “Hindu”?

In the national political mainstream, Mandal made it possible, and inescapable, to address caste groups by calling them by their name. But has Congress still to come to terms with the transformations both captured and unleashed, simultaneously, by the politics of Mandir?

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between Mandal and Mandir politics, and their respective fallouts and consequences. The backward caste groups that were acknowledged and mobilised after Mandal were, and are, the historically disprivileged majority. On the other hand, the BJP’s Mandir politics attempts to unite a privileged majority against a vulnerable minority, by inducing and deepening in the former a sense of siege.

In principle, and in practice, however, Mandal politics also needed to be rescued from a slide into majoritarianism — “social justice” became the legitimising rubric that prevents, or ought to prevent, the politics of caste from descending into casteism. Now, a rescue of another kind needs to be attempted. A larger rubric is needed to take the dominant majoritarian politics and reframe it — into one that acknowledges religious identity but resists a free fall into communalism in a multi-religious democracy.

That rubric could be diversity, or pluralism. It could be that, now, with the memories of Partition fading, a generation of voters coming of age after Gujarat 2002, and nearly two generations after Ayodhya 1992, the time has come to not be spooked by the power of embedded bitterness and prejudice, and to not escape into pretty but perfunctory slogans of “unity in diversity”. This may be the moment for a political project that re-imagines diversity so that it is less burdened by ghosts of the past, real and imagined, and so that it turns its face to the future, and situates the Hindu in it.

Instead, by all accounts, in a BJP-dominated polity, Congress has approached the voter by a variety of pessimistic and mincing strategies.

By painting pictures of impending or already-here doom and apocalypse on the watch of the BJP — Constitution-in-danger, free-and-fair-elections-in-danger, democracy-in-danger. By the politics of mahagathbandhan, which attempts to mechanically, state by different state, add up the Opposition arithmetic to take on the BJP’s arithmetic plus chemistry.

By sidestepping voters’ religious identity with appeals to their caste, or by going opportunistically hyper-local, and by talking, largely as a way to change the subject and mostly inconsistently, about price rise and corruption, unemployment and poverty. Or by addressing Hindu voters on terms set by the BJP — that is, through a surreptitious me-too, soft Hindutva politics, which lets a “secular” party play to the “communal” gallery, and does not explicitly or thoughtfully refute its underlying, congealed us-versus-them binaries.

It is not possible to rewind to an earlier time, when the BJP hadn’t yet made its way up, one Hindu mobilisation after another, making it its platform’s hard core and adding layers to it of other appeals.

As past experience has shown, unless Congress finds the words to speak to Hindus, two things will continue to happen — in the final days and hours of the election campaign, the BJP will pull out its brahmastra of Hindu-in-danger rhetoric, and Congress, for the whole campaign, will maintain a coy silence on minority issues because it fears the BJP’s brahmastra will consolidate the majority.

Yes, in principle, the majority in a democracy is not a fixed monolith, it has shifting concerns and identities. And admittedly, the Congress addressing Hindu voters carries a risk of ceding even more space than it already has to the BJP. But if it wants Indian politics not to remain frozen where it is now, and if minority concerns are to get their due — not just an airing, as on the Waqf Bill — India’s main Opposition party does not have the option of evading the hard labour of politics. It cannot afford to be tongue-tied with the Hindu in the room.

Till next week,

Vandita