Commentary/Varsha Bhosle

Mera Congress Mahaan

On April 22, while Sharad Pawar spoke at tedious length on the occasion of Prime Minister I K Gujral’s confidence-motion in the Lok Sabha, your friendly psycho spent the time divining the kinematics of levitating the chair from under the Speaker and into the source of the speech. It didn’t work: Regardless of how hard I tried to put mind over matter, our television-watching nation had to gruel through Mr Pawar’s saga on the selfless nobility of the Congress party.

There are good days and bad days, and that day was one of the worst. Try as I did, I couldn’t get over the creepy feeling that we’ve been had once again. Whether the CPI-M roils the waters or not, it’s plain that the United Front is no different from what we’ve suffered for half a century – the Big C (yes, it is a cancer). Not only is the UF godfathered by an ex-Congressman (V P Singh), the Budget drafted by another ex-Congressman, but the country, too, is headed by the same species. I’m tickled pink when writing secularists scorn the state of administrative affairs, breast-beat over the culture of institutionalised corruption, bang their heads over the moral bankruptcy – and then have kittens over the triumph of the architects of the same. For the option of – and bring on mitthoo miya here – “divisive-fundamentalist-communalist forces” just can’t be brooked.

I’ve been pondering over trivialities: former communications minister Sukh Ram of the telecom scam; former surface transport minister Jagdish Tytler of the Mumbai Port Trust land-allocation fraud case; former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao and the Lakhubhai Pathak cheating case; Satish Sharma and his Italian tiles; Kalpnath Rai’s lodging of Dawood Ibrahim’s murdering henchmen (the same who had arrived in Delhi with former defence minister Sharad Pawar in an air force jet); Rajiv Gandhi and Bofors; Jagjivan Ram’s “forgetting” to pay 10 years of income tax… why is it that no scandal sticks to the Congress for long? How does it manage to emerge as the second-largest party? How is it still in a position to snarl a government? I’m beginning to believe that if there is any “due process of law” in India, it only applies to those who are not or never were in a government – and government here means the Congress.

Unlike the CPI and BJP, the modern Congress has no ideology – it’s a hoary, firmly entrenched institution loafing on the laurels of Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel. And it’s clear that since after the freedom struggle, the party hasn’t attracted people who have goals other than a sure-shot way to make a fast and dirty buck. What exactly does the Congress espouse? It doesn’t even seek to obey the codicils of our Constitution – eg, the one mandating the adoption of a uniform civil code. Instead, it has developed, bred and uses its own brand of secularism – one that cinches its influence, regardless of the risks to the spirit of the bulk of the nation. The ends of those who make up today’s Congress have zero to do with any ism other than self-servism. There are no exceptions to that rule.

The Congress is like any aristocratic family; when scions stray, the rest close ranks… teri bhi chup, meri bhi chup. Take V N Gadgil sweetly asking Sukh Ram for an explanation of the telecom millions… What “explanation”, for Chrissake? Did the Tooth Fairy leave the money under his pillow? In any other country, I’d have said the Congress was finished. But not here. Not where people build temples to starlets. Indian politicos are not unique in taking kickbacks; the difference is that in other countries, when politicians are exposed, forget careers, even their freedom is shorn. But more significantly, even as they fill their pockets, they do not harm the nation: Rare is the case when a bribe is taken for, say, substandard arms. Indeed, why would the manufacturer of a quality product be willing to dole out to secure a tender?

How is it that these self-righteous secularists who led sustained attacks on the BJP’s L K Advani in the now-overturned Jain hawala scam, feel comfortable with a government made up of the secular likes of Laloo Prasad Yadav, Shahabuddin, Phoolan Devi and Mulayam Singh Yadav? And isn’t it fitting that this caucus of unscrupulous miscreants be supported by, what else, the Congress?

But let’s not get fixated on money. In September 1996, a Delhi court sentenced 89 people to five years RI for their role in the 1984 riots when 3,000 Sikhs were slaughtered. And what, pray, is the lot of Congressman H K L Bhagat who led the rioters? He sits safe and pretty, out on bail. Does the press (which is anyway very busy chasing Bal Thackeray) remember him at all? Compare that to the fates of the two former presidents of South Korea, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, whose ordering of troops to crush an uprising led to the massacre of 200 civilians. The former was sentenced to death and the latter was given a 22-year imprisonment. I should have advised them to join the Indian National Congress!

Take housing: Ex-ministers would be acquainted with India’s acute problems, no? Yet, M/s Buta Singh, Balram Jakhar, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Rajesh Pilot, Kamal Nath and 230 other prosperous Congressmen continued to occupy official bungalows – and the UF’s then-prime minister Deve Gowda let them! What constitutional machinery are we talking about? Did we get a different government at all?

But let’s get back to mitthoo miya’s mantra which I, your friendly trishul-carrier, perceive as nothing but the appeasement of minorities. The term “policy of appeasement” got its derogatory connotations after the tenure of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, whose major aim was to avoid a European war at all costs. His policy of placating Adolf Hitler’s Germany culminated in the Munich Pact of September 1938, after which Chamberlain returned home proclaiming “peace in our time.” But of course, Germany invaded Poland, Chamberlain recognised the failure of his policy and led Britain into the war. After the British debacle in the first months, Chamberlain was forced to resign, and was succeeded by right-winger Winston Churchill – who had all along insisted on the need for rearmament and censured the appeasement of Hitler. The pacific policy had come to naught. It always does.

Appeasement is the crutch of essentially weak and insecure governments, and the fountainhead of Hindutva revivalism in India today. Issues like terrorism (TADA), territorial rights (Kashmir), infiltration by aliens (illegal immigrants), internal security (ISI-funded organisations), law and order (roadside namaaz), and defence (the nuclear option) cannot be left to invertebrates. This nation is in a state of arrested political development because the only powers great enough to unite its 900 million inhabitants – Indian nationalism and Hinduism – have been prohibited from playing a role. Too weak to bring about a solidarity based on true secularism, the Congress has still been strong enough to prevent any other force from doing so.

Think of our largest and most volatile minority, the Muslims. Even a mere 12% of India’s population is more than the aggregate of the populations of Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Austria, which, together, comprise of roughly 107 million people. Can Hindus wave a wand and have vanish such a multitude of people? Will the international community let them? Can scholars like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi and a physicist like Rajendra Singh be so brain-dead to envision it? But, no; the Congress’s hammering in of the Final Solution incantation continues… And the O-beat-me-for-I’m-a-Hindu laps it up. SNAFU, as usual.

In my view, the minorities set *themselves* apart from the mainstream: Julio Ribeiro, former ambassador to Romania, cited an incident where a certain, educated Mrs Almeida claimed that the Marathi she spoke at home was not Marathi at all, but “East Indian”. What does one say to that? I’m forever foxed by the countless Khans of India, all claiming Pathan, Baluch or Arab origin. After all these centuries, and with Quran-sanctioned polygamy, Afghanistan is peopled with less than 19 million people! From where do our Muslims come? If they digested that their own forefathers once prayed to Ganpati, would they not flinch at “creating disturbance during a religious procession”? Reconciliation can only work if practised by both sides – it cannot be rammed down Hindu throats in the name of Nehruvian secularism.

It’s we who are to blame, we who have empowered the Congress enough for it to be able to form, support or threaten governments. We who have been conned by its spurious secularism. But is there an alternative to what we’ve borne since Independence? How will we know – unless a party without a hint of the Congress is given a chance? Ask yourself why India is in such a mess: However hard we work, why does it amount to nil? Because, good people, most of our money is never raked back to work for the nation. Ask yourself why Hindus are restless in their own land. Because, gentle folk, there is no rationale, no parity in the secularism established by the Congress. To shed the old guard is long overdue. The next time around, just say “No!”

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