26 6 august 2018reportedly told over 200 party members to learn from the BJP
and RSS, which through sustained efforts had drawn away a
significant part of the Tribal vote that the Congress once had.
This speech is said to have verged on adulation for the commit-
ment and strategy of the ruling party and its ideological men-
tor to sustain a political hold over its base and gain new groups
of voters. The address was first uploaded on YouTube and then
deleted almost immediately—a sign of immaturity on part of
the party’s IT cell.
Rahul Gandhi reportedly cautioned party leaders against mak-
ing comments that were at odds with the party’s principal objec-
tive of dislodging Modi and the BJP from power. The Congress
party line would strictly have to be adhered to. This warning was
interpreted by some as aimed partly at Shashi Tharoor, a party MP
who recently said that if the BJP won in 2019, it would tear up the
country’s Constitution and turn India into a ‘Hindu Pakistan’,
depriving minorities of equal rights as citizens. ‘It is safer in some
parts of the country to be a cow than a Muslim,’ Tharoor said.
This was seen as out of line by the Congress, whose leaders had
lately fallen over themselves to deny Rahul Gandhi had told a
group of Muslim intellectuals at a meeting that the Congress was
a ‘party for Muslims’. In his tweet clarifying the party’s position,
Rahul Gandhi declared that the Congress stood for all of India’s
marginalised people. ‘I am the Congress,’ he added for emphasis.
These moves reveal the dilemma that the Congress leader-
ship faces in courting anti-Modi liberals while also portraying
Gandhi as a ‘janeudhari’ (holy-thread-wearing) temple-goer, as
the party goes about trying to counter the BJP’s Hindutva plank
without seeming anti-Hindu to voters at large. Crafting such a
meta-narrative calls for a trapeze act, given the fractures in the
polity that appear to have rendered Congress politics inadequate
to majoritarian demands. In Parliament, while attacking the BJP
for allegedly spreading communal hatred, Rahul Gandhi ended
up acknowledging obliquely that his Shiva devotion was a recent
conversion; he even seemed to credit the RSS for it.
To craft a new narrative, the Congress leadership needs to cut
its umbilical cord with the old. But Rahul Gandhi has been un-
able to detach himself from the traditional Congress outlook on
minorities as a vote bank. His party’s decades-old empathy with
Muslims, both covert and overt, continues to come through as
an extension of its minority appeasement politics of the past. In
this context, Rahul Gandhi still appears in search of a balancethe trinaMool leaDer m amata BaNerjee has signalleD
that the congress is unwelcoMe in the anti-bJp front she
has MooteD unless it settles for less
C OvER
STORyASHISH SHARMA