How The Congress Reduced Itself To Being A Political Instrument Of Islamism

An official social media handle of the Congress party recently posted a graphic which was in extremely poor taste. It showed a motorcycle tyre track running across a pair of khaki shorts.

This was a reference to their leader Rahul Gandhi’s bike trip in Ladakh, and the post’s message was unambiguous: he and his party were going to demolish the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) by riding roughshod over them.

The invocation of a such a violent metaphor by a political party, the hatred conveyed by the graphic, plus the sentiment that the RSS and Congress were mutually exclusive (meaning that only one force would be allowed to exist at any given point of time in the same space), were both unbecoming and ominous.

Unbecoming, because it implied that there was no scope for even a minimal degree of compromise on anything; and ominous, because it implied that the Congress would go to any extent, to erase the RSS and its affiliates like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from our political sphere.

This is an absolutist, exclusionary position which is also doggedly delusional since it refuses to recognize or accept a new incipient reality: that, like it or not, identity politics is slowly, systematically, and inexorably being side-lined by a magnificent civilizational churning which gains in strength, and grows in numbers, every time, and everywhere, an identity card is played.

The focus of this political churning is a bridging of caste divides within a vast, diverse Dharmic fold. These divides first arose when an old way of life came under a terrible existential threat from long centuries of successive conquests by Islamic invaders, in which, most ancient cities in the subcontinent – great centres of commerce, ritual, and traditional learning – were either destroyed, or taken over by the invaders.

These divides then hardened further through two centuries of parasitic colonization, during which, the rural areas were laid waste by radical shifts in cropping patterns. As a result, the resource pie available to most shrank drastically. Abject poverty became the new way of life. And if that wasn’t suffering enough, independence, which ought to have ushered in a new era of prosperity, instead introduced socialism, secularism and a bloody partition of the subcontinent along religious lines, into an already-defeated mix.

It is from this fetid swamp that the first lotuses started to bloom. They had to; and it was inevitable that they would. A terrible political mistake the Congress and its many successor parties made, was to employ minority appeasement as a counter to a supra-caste consolidation, because it pushed the Congress to one end of a political spectrum from where there is really no return.

But these attempts to use a small minority vote bloc to force an electoral verdict weren’t always as desperate or flagrant as they have become now. Even during the days of Indira Gandhi, vote banking was not so brazen that it put off other communities. The appeasement was conducted tacitly, behind a phalanx of both provincial and national leaders who had no qualms about being ‘normal’ Hindus. 

In Kerala, for example, Congress Chief Minister K Karunakaran maintained a fetish for frequently visiting Guruvayur Krishna temple, which helped retain the Nair vote within Congress ranks. The demonization of Hinduism was gladly left to the Communists, while the Congress quietly, and repeatedly, profited from an enduring alliance with the Muslim League for decades.

The late Prime Minister VP Singh once frankly admitted that he won his first assembly election in 1969, in Uttar Pradesh, solely because the constituency’s Muslims came through for him as a crucial swing vote. No one made a big deal of it, there was hardly any virtue-signalling, everyone got a slice of the pie, and everyone went home happy.

The problem began during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, when he tried to have the cake and eat it too, by fluctuating between extremes. He over-compensated his appeasement of Muslims, when he reversed the Shah Bano judgment through legislation, by letting a court order permitting worship at Ayodhya to be put into effect.

When that enraged the Muslims, his response was to over-compensate once again, and employ trite tokenism to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. This was rank cluelessness, rank immaturity, and rank desperation – not to mention a fatal inability to accept good advice – because, lest we forget, the spectre of the Bofors scam had also begun to haunt him severely by then.

And in the process, both Hindus and Muslims saw through him, to the extent that the Congress was largely wiped out of the north – a devastation which it has not been able to recover from since. That devastation they sought to counter by resorting to Marxian welfarism, at the cost of growth and fiscal prudence.

It is from this churn that the present Congress has evolved – Leftist enough to attract those remnant scraps of the old Lohia-ite vote that weren’t absorbed by the new social justice parties which rose in the late 1980s, and Islamist enough to ensure that the bulk Muslim vote remains as their electoral mainstay outside the Gangetic plains.

Once it was clear by the early 1990s that the Congress would never again become the dominant political force in the north, this new political strategy (if we can call it that) began to concretize. It worked well for a while, and still does in pockets, but at the national level, all it has done is to accelerate a counter-consolidation which makes the Muslim vote increasingly irrelevant.

This is reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s memorable quote: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

To make matters worse for the Congress, the Christian vote has started moving away from them in the past decade, either directly to the BJP, or into alliance with the BJP, or to a provincial non-BJP aligned competitor. That has made the Congress even more desperately dependent on the Muslim vote.

In Goa, Christian BJP candidates are now increasingly capable of winning on their own steam. It is the same growing situation in the North Eastern states, both where Christians are in an overwhelming majority, or where they are a large-enough community to influence electoral outcomes: today, every single provincial government in the region is an NDA one.

In Kerala, the principal local Christian party ditched the Congress in 2020 to join hands with the Communists. In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress has been wiped out after the substantial Christian vote there went with Jaganmohan Reddy. It retains some hold in the Christian belts of Tamil Nadu but, frankly, from a national perspective, what is that worth?

These serial debacles have now led to such a state that the Congress, which lost the ability to win well in the north decades ago, will now be hard-pressed to win much in the North East or the south.

So, unless the Congress can conjure some spectacular coalition magic, they are looking at less than 40 Lok Sabha seats in the 2024 elections. Pound to a penny, Rahul Gandhi’s victory margin in Wayanad – if he contests from there – will be far less than the 4.3 lakh vote margin he secured in 2019 (it dropped to just 38776 votes in 2021, in aggregate, in the seven assembly seats which make up Wayanad Lok Sabha seat, and the Left won in three)

The problem is that, for all practical purposes, the Congress has been reduced to the humiliating position of a rump adjunct of the Muslim vote outside the north. Under such circumstances, it was inevitable that at some point of time, the tail would start wagging the dog. It has.

Today, an Islamist party like the Muslim League is perfectly capable of winning seats without the Congress’ assistance, but the Congress can’t win without the League’s vote. In the process, the persistent backbone of the two-nation theory which thrives to this day, cultural separatism, has been appropriated by the Congress for its political survival.

The hatred, frustration, resentment, and ressentiment these political parties bear towards an undeniable civilizational awakening currently in progress, exemplified in the socio-political domain by the RSS and the BJP is, as a result, now projected by the Congress. 

Unfortunately for the Congress, what it fails to understand – or perhaps it has become incapable of understanding because of this extreme political desperation – is that, the more it becomes a political instrument of Islamism, and as a result of which, the more it seeks to thwart our civilizational awakening, the more it proves that its secularism is incompatible with patriotism or progress.

Consequently, in conclusion, even as a magnificent millennial rejuvenation sweeps across the subcontinent, India will have to recognize these degenerative tendencies for what they are – the death throes of secularism, and, therefore, treat this period as a necessary rite of passage with abundant caution.