Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: As the military dust settles

Before terror struck, the Congress-led Opposition had returned to the backfoot because of the BJP’s assembly victories in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi. After making a dent in the BJP’s tally on the Lok Sabha scoreboard, constituents of the INDIA bloc suddenly seemed to lack the will to live together again, or at least, going by the resentments expressed by smaller allies openly, not under Congress leadership. There was a brief moment when these parties set aside their differences to break through their hesitations and ambivalences on a question that involves the Muslim minority — in Parliament, on the waqf bill. But the moment remained a blip.

Now, going ahead, the Opposition’s challenge will be to confront a BJP that is trying to wrest from it the “social justice” plank after announcing the caste census, at a time when the flaring of India-Pak hostilities is set to further shrink the Opposition’s space and broaden the stage to pose on for the BJP.

On the caste census, the BJP has made an awkward Congress predicament worse. While Rahul Gandhi has made the demand for a caste census most insistently, he faced a credibility issue even while he was making it.

As a party, on the ground, Congress has been much slower to Mandalise itself than the BJP — in state after state, you can count more backward caste leaders in the saffron party. While it can be said that the BJP’s OBC leaders — like other BJP leaders — have decreasing clout amid a centralisation of power in the time of Narendra Modi, even on a token representation test, Congress lags behind the BJP.

Across states, a Congress under a walled-off high command has seemed frozen, it has not seen the rise of an identifiable set of new grassroots leaders in decades. The BJP, on the other hand, driven by a will to power undiminished by winning it, and propelled also by the RSS, is straining and spreading, pushing and moving.

In Madhya Pradesh, for instance, where Congress has just launched what it calls its most extensive organisational restructuring exercise, which aims to introduce a new tier of committees at panchayat and ward level, it also needs to ask itself this: Why is it that, over the years, it has not managed to produce OBC leaders in the state to match Uma Bharti, Babulal Gaur and Shivraj Chouhan of the BJP?

MP is a state in which no single OBC caste is numerically dominant, which could form the nucleus around which a challenge to upper caste dominance could coalesce. And yet, come election-time, the BJP at least lines up its individual OBC leaders behind Modi, while Congress fights for the OBC vote on terms set by the BJP. It flaunts a me-too Hindutva, showcased by its leaders’ hectic temple-hopping, when it is not trying to outbid the BJP on its cash transfer schemes. In MP, and elsewhere, Rahul Gandhi’s demand for a caste census has remained a slogan that is unsupported by a larger programme of social justice that his party owns or participates in.

After Operation Sindoor, Congress faces another tangled challenge — it needs to find the language in which to frame the questions that need to be asked of the government, starting with what went wrong in the Centre’s story of a terror-mukt, post-Article 370, “Naya Kashmir”. It needs to find the words that can hold the government accountable, while side-stepping its attempts to trap and corner it.

All indications are that the Modi government will not hesitate to leverage the military operation within the country. Even before Pahalgam, “pro-Pakistan” and “anti-national” were freely being used as labels to taint and subdue political opponents. Now, the arrest of Ashoka University professor, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, for online posts — Supreme Court has handed him a grudging interim bail since — has sent out a message that is chilling. It speaks of the disturbing ease-of-criminalisation, today, of criticism and free speech.

The government self-righteously warns against “politicisation” of Operation Sindoor, even as Tiranga yatras are organised across states by the ruling party. For all its exhortations that national security is above partisan politics, and the two should never meet, the BJP has unabashedly used one to reinforce the other – after Balakot, “Pakistan ko ghar mein ghus ke maara (we entered Pakistan and hit it)” has become a staple of the BJP election campaign. The party draws photo-ops and freeze-frames of foreign and security policy, air-brushed and context-free, into the domestic point-scoring.

By including Opposition leaders in all-party delegations to foreign capitals after Operation Sindoor, the BJP has sought to do two things simultaneously. To the world, it projects a united front, and domestically, it magnifies the difficulties for the Opposition party — now the latter must join hands with the government while figuring out the best way of opposing it.

The row over the selection of Opposition leaders, which invited accusations from Congress and TMC that the government had not consulted the party — TMC managed to replace the government’s nominee with its own subsequently – was a reminder of a deepening freeze. Government and Opposition don’t talk to each other anymore. Amid a catastrophising of the opponent by both sides, there is little give-and-take, and a near absence of civility.

This denuded landscape was not created by Pahalgam. But Pahalgam has become a sombre milestone in it.

Till next week,

Vandita