There is little reason to repeat what a number of stories in this magazine have already argued: the Congress is afraid to call out the violence against Muslims and Dalits for what it is: a clear attack against the identity of these communities, a hatred directed at who they are by birth or belief.
Our cover story this month deals with how, in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party—with the Congress playing, at best, a minor role—took on and defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party. The most important lesson from the election result was that the BJP cannot take its support base for granted. While the party held on to its upper-caste Hindu vote, it lost a great deal of traction, primarily among voters from castes administratively referred to as Extremely Backward Classes.
Did these voters move away from the BJP because they sought solace in Shiva? Did they move away from the BJP because they felt protected by the fearlessness of the hand held aloft in Abhay Mudra, also the Congress symbol? The answer to both questions is an emphatic no. They voted for greater representation in India’s exclusionary power structure, a representation whose possibility the BJP tantalisingly held out and then failed to deliver on.
Beyond the UP victory, let us look back over the ten years in power of Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Who stood up in public to be counted? We saw the Dalits at Bhima Koregaon question the very basis of Peshwa Brahminism that the RSS thrives on; we saw the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, in particular, gather together to protest the discriminatory citizenship criteria of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act; and we saw the farmers of Punjab and Haryana, a great number of them Sikhs, stand up to, and defeat, the injustice of Modi’s agrarian reforms. Rahul Gandhi and his “good Hindus” were mostly missing in all this. Even when violence shook north-east Delhi in 2020, Rahul and the Congress failed to go among the Muslims, who were targeted in state-backed attacks. When Rahul’s hand-picked man Kanhaiya Kumar campaigned in this constituency during the general election, he did not even mention, leave alone condemn, what had happened.
There is little reason to repeat what a number of stories in this magazine have already argued: the Congress is afraid to call out the violence against Muslims and Dalits for what it is: a clear attack against the identity of these communities, a hatred directed at who they are by birth or belief. Instead, Rahul prefers to couch it as a manifestation of economic distress—unemployed Hindu youth misled into violence by their circumstances. It is a formulation that evades not just the truth of the Sangh’s vision of Hinduism, but the truth about how Hinduism is often practised in many parts of the country.
When Rahul spoke in parliament—his first speech after the election results—the past ten years were suddenly recast to a different script, in which he was the hero and the Congress the force that battled the BJP. He evoked the Bharat Jodo Yatra, which, strangely, worked only in Uttar Pradesh, where the SP led the campaign, but not in adjacent Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress fought on its own.
Rahul’s speech was reminiscent of a vast array of Hindi movie scripts, where the good upper-caste Hindu hero fights the evil villains and triumphs, and minorities play clichéd bit roles—often the brave but foolish Sardar, the honest Muslim and the sozzled, but decent, Christian—who line up to sacrifice their life at an appropriate time in the narrative. Rahul’s speech was as close to reality as such Hindi movies are. To make sure his speech was not completely exclusionary, he also brought in Nanak and Mahavir, once again in supporting roles, in a script where Shiva was the main character.
The “good Hindus” during the Modi years were conspicuous by their absence in any collective mobilisation where they came together as “Hindus.” There was only a single set of marches early on in Modi’s first tenure, by this supposedly huge swathe, to protest against the lynching of Muslims. The lynchings went on, the marches did not. If they were out demonstrating the goodness of Hinduism at other times and in ways that really counted, I apologise. I must have missed them.
I do know a number of good people, good Hindus, who did work behind the scenes to help out in ways they could. But most preferred anonymity, seeking to keep their heads down, avoiding the attention of the Modi government. Wise strategy, and also needed at such times, but hardly a strategy that can be recast as the starring role in the opposition.
This, in particular, extends to civil society in India. We talk often about the dereliction of duty by the media, but not enough has been written about NGOs and the various organisations that make up the development sector. Most organisations just abdicated its responsibilities, while others got caught up in matters of Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, which the BJP, learning from the Congress’s P Chidambaram, used as a tool to silence the sector.
Through this period, the failure of the most visible part of civil society to distinguish itself from the Congress’s rhetoric, inherited from the UPA years, continued. Like in the media, civil-society leadership was largely upper-caste Hindu, and as loath to re-examine structural failings within. And most of them could not draw the line between opposing the kind of regime Modi represented and becoming embedded in the Congress. So, even before the BJP has lost power, or Modi has been dethroned, the ecosystem that was in part responsible for his emergence is reasserting itself around the Congress without learning anything from the past. However flawed this may be in principle, it is also a dangerous delusion for planning the future. If the Congress does not learn the lesson of these elections, of being more representative of the aspirations of all those who lie outside the term “upper-caste Hindu,” of giving them power to speak and decide for themselves rather than speaking for them, of running parties like the Congress not in name but in substance, then it is doomed to remain where it is in the Hindi belt: unable to fight the BJP in a direct fight.
A few days after Rahul spoke, Shashi Tharoor wrote one more of his paeans to Hinduism. Like Rahul, he took care not to mention the term “caste,” or the varna–jati system, which is much like trying to describe a ball without mentioning that it is round. The blindness of Tharoor’s position has been pointed out earlier in an article by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. As for the Congress’s attempt to occupy the Hindu high ground against the BJP’s Hindutva, it is a strategy that dates back to early in the Modi years, and all it has earned the Congress is repeated defeats.
Rahul would pay well to heed that his version of Shivji ki baraat is just another way of leaving out a substantive number—the majority of those who truly took on Modi and diminished him. Rahul may prefer to live within a Hindi movie script, but we cannot allow him to do so.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/rahul-patronising-speech
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After the truth-shower 