Eye on 2024, A K Antony says Congress should take along Hindus, minorities not enough to defeat BJP

Addressing party workers, he said everyone should be alert and take the majority community along in the “fight against fascism”.

Noting that minorities have the freedom to practice their religion, Antony said when people from Hindu community go to temples, or when they wear a tilak or a bindi, they are being portrayed as people pursuing a soft-Hindutva line, which he said is not the right strategy. The Congress is “trying to bring the Hindu majority as well as the minorities in the party fold” and depicting such attempts as part of the Congress’s “soft-Hindutva line” would “only help Modi”, he said.

“Everyone should bear that in mind,” he said.

After the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, a Congress panel headed by Antony had examined the party’s debacle. The committee had reportedly found that pitching the elections as a fight between secularism and communalism had affected the prospects of the Congress, which was identified as pro-minority. The party’s “minority appeasement policy” also proved counterproductive, the committee had reportedly stated.

Antony had come out against what is seen by BJP as an upper hand enjoyed by the minority communities in Kerala politics on multiple occasions in the past, too. As the chief minister in 2003, he had criticised Congress’s UDF ally in Kerala, the Indian Union Muslim League, for putting a deadline to rehabilitation of victims of a communal clash that occurred at Marad in Kozhikode that year. He had said, “Minorities in Kerala are powerfully organised. They have secured more privileges and benefits from the government through collective bargaining. Unlike the rest of India, minority communities here dominate the state’s political and administrative echelons. It cannot be allowed.”

His purported anti-minority stance was seen as one of the reasons for the defeat of the Congress-led UDF in Kerala in Lok Sabha elections that took place the following year.