Back on the agenda

Back on the agenda

SC defines Hindutva as way of life, next elections to see resurgence of saffron politics

N.K. SINGH  JANUARY 15, 1996 | UPDATED 14:17 IST

The BJP-VHP rally in Delhi prior to Ayodhya: return to the old days?

"When we say this is the Hindu nation, there are some who immediately come up with the question, 'What about the Muslims and Christians dwelling in this land?'... But the crucial question is whether they remember that they are the children of this soil. No! Together with the change in their faith, gone is the spirit of love and devotion for the nation. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They look to some foreign lands as their holy places. It is not merely a case of change of faith, but a change even in national identity." -Guru Golwalkar, former RSS chief, in his treatise, Bunch of Thoughts.

Is Maharashtra Chief Minister Manohar Joshi's grand dream of ruling India's first "Hindu state" any different from the Hindu nation of the RSS, in which the minorities are identified with the "enemies of the nation"? Does Joshi disagree with Shiv Sena boss Bal Thackeray, who promised during an election campaign that with the Shiv Sena in power everybody will have to take diksha (initiation) into the Hindu religion?

The Supreme Court apparently thinks so. In a landmark judgement last fortnight, it absolved Joshi of the charge of garnering votes in the name of Hindutva by ruling that his promise to establish the first "Hindu state" did not amount to appealing for votes in the name of religion.

It also said that Hindutva and Hinduism are a way of life and not confined to religion, and therefore, its use in a speech did not amount to corrupt electoral practices. It is a point of view that the Sangh brotherhood has been trying to promote for decades, equating nationalism with Hinduism. Said BJP Chief L.K. Advani: "The Court has lent its seal of judicial imprimatur to our ideology of Hindutva."

The judgement has opened a Pandora's box. Coming as it does barely a few months before the Lok Sabha election, the verdict from the apex Court can amount to a virtual licence to fundamentalist forces to conduct a shrill and communal election campaign.

Never mind that the same Court has severely castigated Thackeray for making inflammatory speeches. Never mind too that two days later the same Court found a prima facie case of corrupt practice against Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat for mixing religion with politics.

The crux of the matter is that now any group of fanatics can mix religion with politics and carry on vicious, communal propaganda during election campaigns, even as the direct beneficiaries of such a campaign, the candidates riding the communal wave, can plead ignorance on the ground that the meetings organised to canvass support for them were held without their consent .

The Sangh brotherhood could not have asked for a better judgement. Said RSS chief Rajendra Singh: "We have always been of the view that the term Hindu connotes much more than a mere form of worship. "The RSS' mouthpiece, Organiser, declared triumphantly: "No more will the champions of Hindutva be required to sound apologetic."

The BJP can now afford to be more brazen. Advani sees in the verdict a licence for a Hindutva campaign: "If any party or candidate talks about religion, temples, Hindutva, Hinduism, etc., it cannot be seen as violating the electoral law." Said VHP chairperson V.H. Dalmia: "The legal hindrance in propagating Hindutva is over now." And Thackeray, notwithstanding the Court's strictures against him, believes the judgement is a clear message that Hindutva can now be openly propagated.

Senior leaders from the Sangh brotherhood who did not wish to be identified revealed that the BJP and its allies will now focus their campaign on the following issues:

• Total ban on cow slaughter: The Bajrang Dal is planning to launch a massive, aggressive movement from January 14 to forcibly stop cow and bull slaughter in the country.
• Uniform civil code: Under the Constitution, the states cannot introduce a common civil code. But the BJP/Shiv Sena governments will try to make political capital by pushing bills on the subject.
• Muslim population: During the past 40 years, the percentage of Muslims in the total population has risen from 9.93 to 11.67. The Sangh brotherhood will play on the anxiety that Hindus may eventually be reduced to a minority.
• The temple trio: The BJP will not take up the Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya issues directly. But the VHP will. The only problem is that the Sangh brotherhood is not sure whether the strategy will work this time.
• The appeasement of minorities: Issues like the Government's reported decision to subsidise imams' salaries and pensions by increasing grants to Wakf boards, which will increase the burden on the exchequer by Rs.243 crore this year and another Rs.405 crore over the next three years.
• Infiltration of foreign nationals: Between 1981 and 1991, the Muslim population has increased by nearly 40 percent in the border states of Rajasthan, Tripura, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.
• Demand for scrapping the minority commissions: The BJP-Shiv Sena feels this is another example of appeasing the minorities.

The BJP will take up Hindutva as a campaign slogan because the party knows that it pays. Advani's Rath Yatra to Ayodhya virtually changed the country's political map five ye ars ago. But faced with the Congress(I)'s soft response to Hindutva and the hard line secularism of the Left and the Janata Dal (JD), the BJP walked away with an unprecedented 120 Lok Sabha seats in 1991 from merely two seats in 1984. Religion sells. Advani affirms this: "The BJP's principal success has been in making ideology relevant to electoral verdicts."

The judgement has obviously gladdened the hearts of the Hindutva forces. But except for the National Front-Left Front (NF-LF) combine, all the other major political parties on the opposite side of the Hindutva fence seem to have adopted an ostrich-like attitude to the Supreme Court's pronouncements last fortnight.

The ruling Congress(I) has so far made no official comment on the judgement. Says Congress(I) spokes person V.N. Gadgil: "We are studying the judgement and will react only after fully reading it." Even the rival Congress faction led by N.D. Tiwari and Arjun Singh is yet to take a stand on the issue. "We will react to the lengthy judgement after reading it thoroughly," says Singh. 

The BJP can now afford to be more brazen. Advani sees in the verdict a licence for a Hindutva-based campaign.

But the NFLF p arties appear to have been shocked by the judgement. The communists came out on the streets of New Delhi in protest last fort night. "This judgement, unless challenged, will be used by those who are trying to divide society to garner votes on the basis of religion," says CPI MP Guru das Dasgupta.

The NFLF are now considering going in for a review petition, and are also exploring the possibility of getting the matter dealt with by a larger Constitution bench. Said JD spokes person Jaipal Reddy: "If it helps clear the confusion, we are in favour of going in for a constitutional amendment." CPI(M) politburo member Prakash Karat supported Reddy's idea. The NFLF parties also plan to raise a public debate on the issue and exert pressure on the Government to initiate moves to suitably amend the Constitution.

Perhaps the most forthright reaction to the Supreme Court's judgement came from former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. He not only termed the definition provided by the Supreme Court as "unnecessary", but called it very harmful for the nation. "If the definition that they have given upholds the Hindutva being espoused by the VHP then I think the consequences for this country are very dangerous indeed," he said.

The non-BJP parties have only one way out: to revive the 1994 Constitution (82nd Amendment) Bill and the Representation of Peoples Act (Amendment) Bill, which sought to delink religion from politics. The reforms package, which was withdrawn by t he Government, made provisions for the re-registration of a political party if its memorandum of rules and regulations did not conform to the oath of secularism and if it promoted or attempted to promote itself, "on grounds of religion, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill will between different religious groups".

-with Smruti Koppikar and Javed M. Ansari

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sc-defines-hindutva-as-way-of-life-next-elections-to-see-resurgence-of-saffron-politics/1/281755.html

Gadgil -- Popular parliamentarian and witty orator

PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

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NEW DELHI, FEB 6: Brevity, wit and instant repartee were the forte of Vithal Narhar Gadgil, who in later years created a storm in Congress by clamouring for a new look to the party by redefining several concepts including secularism.

"The problem being faced by the Congress is not why minorities are not voting in favour of it but why the majority community has got alienated from the organisation" was Gadgil's contention.

He came under attack from his detractors who saw it as apro-Hindutva stance while BJP was quick to embarass Congress by citing Gadgil's views as being in tandem with its own.

Gadgil, it appeared, had to pay a price for his openness which was not in tune with the thinking among a majority of prominent partymen.

Worried over frequent electoral setback at the Centre, Gadgil wanted Congress to follow Tony Blair who gave a new look to British Labour Party when it was down in the dumps.

However, Gadgil will be remembered long for his role as chief spokesman of the party. He regaled the media with his enormous grasp of Congress history, parliamentary democracy, especially of the Westminster type, international affairs and grassroot polity.

"No decision is also a decision," he once quipped to mediapersons when asked why the Narasimha Rao government delayed decisions. Incidentally this remark became a hallmark of the Rao era.

A loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Gadgil used to justify with ease the cult of "high command" in the oldest political organisation in the country.

Gadgil's refrain was when the polity is federal, the organisation should be unitary. In fact, he boasted that high command was in a way a "gift" given by the Congress to Indian democracy.

To buttress his point, he would point out that the BJP which always took potshots at the Congress for its central command structure has now itself started calling its leadership as the "high command".

Before having to deal with the media, he was the Information and Broadcasting minister in the Rajiv Gandhi regime and wrote several books including "Obscenity and Law", "International Law" and "Judicial Administration in India".

Born in September, 1928, at Pune, Gadgil was thrice elected to Lok Sabha in the eighties from his birth place and represented Rajya Sabha an equal number of terms in the seventies and late nineties.

A popular parliamentarian and orator, he got his basics in public speaking from his father N V Gadgil, who was a freedom fighter and later minister in Nehru's first cabinet.

After a brief stint in the Praja Socialist Party, V N Gadgil joined Congress in 1962 and became General Secretary of the Maharashtra PCC in 1967 and was soon brought to the Rajya Sabha by Indira Gandhi, who liked his oratory.

Having studied at the London School of Economics and later called to the Bar from Lincoln's Inn, London, he became a Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India. He was honorary professor of economics in Ruparel College, Mumbai, and professor of Constitutional Law in New Law College.

Married to Sunita Gadgil in 1955, he has one son and one daughter.

Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.

COVER STORY Endorsing Hindutva The Supreme Court verdict in the Manohar Joshi case raises fears that the next poll campaigns will witness more communal virtriol then ever before LEKHA RATTANANI, PADMANAND JHA COMMENTS PRINT MORE SHARING SERVICESSHARE ON FACEBOOKSHARE ON PINTEREST_SHARESHARE ON TWITTERSHARE ON EMAIL TEXT SIZE    ALSO IN THIS STORY    IT was one of the most awaited judgements in recent times. And there was palpable tension in Maharashtra the day before it was to be delivered. On Monday, December 11, the Supreme Court was to decide not only the fate of Maharashtra ChiefMinister Manohar Joshi, but also define by implication whether or not appeal for votes based on Hindutva was permissible in election campaigns. The latter, of course, was the more important aspect of the case, for it was to come virtually on the eve of the general elections.     The verdict specifically arms the Hindutva forces with a nuclear device." Rajeev Dhavan, Supreme Court lawyer     When the verdict was finally delivered by a bench comprising Justices J.S. Verma, N.P. Singh and K. Venkataswami in the packed courtroom number three, its echoes were heard in every section of the nation's polity. The Hindutva brigade of the BJP and the Shiv Sena burst into applause—Bal Thackeray's indictment was only a small price to pay for a larger cause. The National Front-Left Front combine spluttered in stunned disbelief. The Sena-BJP alliance's primary source of worry had been the possible fallout if the apex court had confirmed the Bombay High Court verdict disqualifying Joshi. With the Sena-BJP rejoicing over the verdict, the secular front's worries had multiplied, not only on account of the benefits that would accrue to the Hindutva brigade, but also because of the possibility of the upcoming campaign becoming virulently communal in the context of the judgement. As for the Congress, it was too busy trying to handle the telecom controversy in Parliament, and all its spokesman V.N. Gadgil could mumble was, "we respect the verdict of the highest court". The BJP did not hide its delight. "The judgement is a seal of judicial imprimatur to the BJP's ideology of Hindutva," said party chief L.K. Advani. "The BJP believes India is one country and that Indians are one people. We hold that the basis of this unity is our ancient culture. For us this nationalism is not just a geographical or political concept.     "The BJP and the Janata Dal have both misread the judgement." Shanti Bhushan, Supreme Court lawyer     It is essentially a cultural concept. Whether you call it Hindutva or Bharatiyata or Indianness, the nomenclature does not matter. It is all the same."The jubilation was understandable. For, the court—through citations from as varied sources as the Webster's Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and earlier judgements—had held that "Hindutva or Hinduism per se" cannot be "assumed to mean and be equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry," or be construed to fall within the ambit of the sections of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) under which Joshi's election had sought to be set aside. The court had broadened the word "Hindutva" to be "used and understood as a synonym for Indianisation, i.e., development of a uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all the cultures co-existing in the country." The forces of the emerging secular third front were not amused. They felt the Supreme Court's observation of the term Hindutva, based on broad philosophical terms and on legalese, had not quite taken into account the political context of the term, which had been virtually appropriated by the Sangh parivar and its allies, and that it had over the last few years evolved a distinct anti-minorities connotation.  "The judgement is ambiguous on the question of the use of religion for electoral purposes even though the bench has decried the use of religion during elections. It will encourage the use of religion for political ends. It, therefore, becomes necessary to review the provisions of the RPA and take steps to ensure that no legal ambiguity remains. Only this will make it impossible for fundamentalist parties to use religion for poll campaigns," said the Communist Party of India (Marxist) politburo. But the need to amend the law to prevent the misuse of religion for political purposes is easier expressed than implemented. The Narasimha Rao Government learnt that lesson in 1993 when it rather unsuccessfully tried to push through the Constitution (80th Amendment) Billand the Representation of the People Amendment Bill seeking to delink religion from politics. The bills, as they were drafted, failed to secure the support of the National Front and Left parties even before they could be introduced in Parliament and had to be abandoned. Since then the Government has been too busy with its fire-fighting operations on various fronts to revive the move. And now, with the tenure of the Lok Sabha all but over, it is certain that the Sangh parivar would use the Hindutva appeal to try and storm to power at the Centre. Not all the critics of the judgement were as subdued though. The DMK in Tamil Nadu was scathing in its broadside. Its official mouthpiece Murasoli said in an editorial: "...the apex court's interpretation of Hindutva and Hinduism has given new impetus to communalforces who are dancing like inebriated monkeys following this verdict. The BJP has declared Hindutva as its ideology. The Shiv Sena's aim is to establish Hindu rajya. (Their) vicious propaganda against people belonging to other faiths, the naked violent aggression directed towards minorities, gives only a communal colour to terms like Hinduism and Hindutva. No Indian has forgotten their role in the atrocities perpetrated against the Muslims. None has forgotten their despicable role in the diabolical act of destroying the Babri Masjid....The present judgement, based on finer nuances of semantics, will only strengthen the hands of the bigots."  It wasn't as if the politicians alone were split in their opinion. Eminent Supreme Court lawyer Rajeev Dhavan too noted the context and the timing. "This judgement comes before the most difficult election that India will be going through. It comes after the nation has been polarised by the word Hindutva and intimidated by ugly versions of Hinduism," he said. On the equation of Hindutva with Indianisation, he castigated the court for wanting "to create an artificial construct of Hinduism which nobody has ever believed in except a handful of Indologists and no less a handful of judges". Dhavan was also critical of the court's invention of the "narrow consent-nexus test," which he said was almost impossible to prove and felt the judgement could have ominous portends for future election campaigns. "It (the judgement) categorically blesses an interpretation of the word Hindutva and its electoral implications. There is no such specific interpretation for Islam or Christianity....It is true that it will also protect other appeals to religion but that will only make the election worse in terms of its fundamentalist flavour. A flex-ible law on religion arms all fundamentalists with mischievous conventional arms to muddy the 1996 election. But the spe-cific blessing on Hindutva arms the particular group with a nuclear device." Dhavan's colleague in the apex court, Shanti Bhushan, disagrees. Describing the verdict as "statesman-like", Bhushan felt both the BJP and the Janata Dal had misun-derstood its import. "The BJP is gloating over it. The Dal is sulking. Both perspectives are incorrect. The orders, read as a whole, prevent the BJP from communal propaganda. Without condemning Hindutva, the court has condemned the misuse of Hindutva." Bhushan, obviously, saw a sense of balance between the severe strictures against Sena supremo Thackeray for his vitriol against the Muslims in the course of the campaign and the benefit of doubt given toJoshi. And there is reason to believe that the BJP, even while seeking to project the judgement as a strong endorsement of its policy, would exercise some caution in its poll campaign. The strategy, party sources said, would be to try and avoid the vitriol of the likes of Sadhvi Rithambhara from the platforms of party candidates and allow them a free run on their own. By doing that, they would be able to take advantage of the doubt as to whether the vitriolic campaign of the VHP and allied organisa-tions has "the consent" of the candidate concerned. After all, it is this doubt which formed the basis for the court letting Joshi off the hook. In any case, the threat of the law still looms over the BJP with the court finding prima facie evidence of a similar charge against Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the relativelymoderate face of the party, and asking the state high court to try him. The question that remains is whether the verdict would encourage the Sangh parivar and its allies to revert to the virulence of the 1990 campaign in which the BJP-Sena combine had few qualms about denigrating the " landes " (a derogatory term for the Muslims because of their circumcision)? Vithal Sawant, the election agent of the late Bhaurao Patil who had filed the original petition against Joshi, was certain it would. "Now that the court has given them an NOC, I am sure they will go back to what they did," he said. BJP General SecretaryPramod Mahajan hinted at such a shape of things to come. "Hindutva is our basic catchment area. I have to appeal to my constituency. I can't be looking at the 10 per cent Muslim vote in Maharashtra, and forget my constituency, can I?" Even as the politicos absorbed the judge-ment and busied themselves with their poll strategy, there was one person for whom the fight was far from over. Bhaurao Patil's son Nitin, who had carried the case through after his father's death, refused to take the judgement as final. "I will file a review petition. I will appeal to the Chief Justice of India to have this case brought before a full constitutional bench," he said. His stand is that the judgement had "shown the way to militant parties". For Nitin Patil, the whole affair has become much more than "daddy's case". "They are supporting the RSS way of life. They are challenging the Constitution which clearly says this is a secular country. In a mixed religious country, are we to learnthat Hinduism is nationalism? And does a Parsi now have to say that he is a Hindu first?" asked the man, who claimed that he pursued the case despite personal threats from gangsters like Amar Naik in Bombay. But most people, including Joshi's lawyer J.B. Chinai (who obviously was effusive inhis praise of the judgement) and Dhavan, feel there is little likelihood of the review petition being admitted. But even if the review petition were to be admitted, by the time the judgement is delivered the elections would be over. And that remains the primary concern. What impact will the verdict have on the campaign styles of political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena on the one hand, and the Muslim League and the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen on the other? The fear is that the Joshi case could well be cited as a precedent by fundamentalist parties to vitiate the atmosphere, and gain a legitimacy for their efforts to mix religion and politics. Judging by what has happened to the country's secular fabric in the last few years—the Ayodhya demolition, the subsequent riots, and the Bombay blasts—the mix could be an explosive one. With Yubaraj Ghimire and Bhavdeep Kang in New Delhi and A.S Panneerselvan in Madras

Vol. 15 :: No. 04 :: Feb. 21 - Mar. 6, 1998 

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UPDATE

Parties and Web sites

THE BJP's position of being the only political party to have a Web site was short-lived (Frontline, February 6). It has rapidly been joined on the Net by the Shiv Sena, the Congress(I) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). But even the initial self-congratulatory tone of the BJP was dampened by the fact that the Web site attracted more unwelcome attention than the party had bargained for.

On January 20, Congress(I) spokesperson V.N. Gadgil launched a strong attack on A.B. Vajpayee's Organiser article 'The Sangh is My Soul'. The BJP, which is struggling to preserve A.B. Vajpayee's 'good guy' image, reacted with a statement denying that the article was written by him. The statement claimed that the article had been based on an interview with Vajpayee and that it had been published without his concurrence. It also claimed that the contents were at variance with what Vajpayee had said. At some time around 11.00 a.m. on January 21, the hypertext link to the article was cut, thus severing the article from the Web page of the BJP. A gleeful Jairam Ramesh of the Congress(I) declared at the inauguration of his party's Web site that it did not carry anything that would need to be withdrawn later.

It is clear that the BJP is tripping over its own propaganda. The stream of statements from Vajpayee and other spokesmen that seek to project a 'moderate' image are clearly at variance with what most of their party persons (including those in the BJP media cell) perceive to be BJP and Sangh Parivar policy. Hence the inability really to clean up Vajpayee's image and to leave behind pointers to the truth, such as the 'Sangh is My Soul' piece.

More interestingly, none of the other virulently Hindutva pieces have been removed from the Web site - the 'official' Web site, we may remind ourselves. It would appear, strangely enough, that the BJP thinks that it is sufficient for Vajpayee to be cast as a 'moderate' while the rest of the machinery may openly champion the hard-core Hindutva line. It seems that the BJP would have the electorate believe that Vajpayee, after being elected Prime Minister, would follow policies entirely different from the party that got him there. The wide gap between the RSS-Hindutva core of the BJP philosphy and practice and its current image-building exercises is even more obvious if we compare the BJP election manifesto (recently posted) with the rest of the material at the Web site.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechuri at the launch of the party's Web site.

Clearly, the BJP, and other political parties as well, are yet to realise that going on the Net can work both ways. While the Web site helps provide a wider dissemination of its message, it also allows its readers to examine more carefully the material presented there. This is significantly different from the print or electronic media where the reader has access to the material only through the mediation of journalists and editors. Apart from easy access, collection and archiving become easier. Henceforth all that the BJP offers on the Net can be documented and stored easily by several individuals and the danger of propaganda manoeuvres coming unstuck will increase. For instance, despite the BJP's withdrawal of the Vajpayee article, it is already available elsewhere on the Net (see, for instance, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/9219).

The bulletin board at the BJP Web site continues to provide interesting insights into the minds of the BJP's Internet following. Nahid Ali from his America On-line account thinks that the BJP is not communal and should be given a chance, while ignoring several messages that advocate throwing Muslims and Christians out of India. Appeals by some to exercise moderation in language and style in the messages ('Let us remember that our views are open to the whole world' wrote 'Shalini') are ignored or openly opposed by others. Wildly abusive messages (early targets were Sonia Gandhi and Harkishen Singh Surjeet, the latest are 'secular Hindu bastards') continue to appear at regular intervals. There is advice to the BJP leadership (support the 'Desi Bahu versus Pardeshi Bahu', that is, Maneka Gandhi versus Sonia Gandhi), while a Mumbai doctor who wants to know why the BJP is backing corrupt candidates draws abuse in reply.

The manner in which the board is conducted reflects the fascist element in the Hindutva style of debate and discussion. The common practice on the Net, when serious discussion on controversial issues is needed, is to have a bulletin board with a moderator. The BJP has satisfied itself with a ritual disclaimer that the views expressed there are not its own without any discernible attempt to control the hate mail. In the Hindutva dispensation, reasoned discussion has to vie with hate talk to be heard.

Even if you are no supporter of the Congress(I), its Web site will be something of a relief after the stridency of the BJP. The Sonia factor is used rather discreetly and is to be found only on a few pages. Among the more interesting things to read are the question and answer page (which meets the most damaging questions against the Congress(I) head on) and the entire election manifesto that is available.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Congress(I) site is its conflation of party and nation. The page on 'Achievements' includes sections on oceanography, space and atomic energy as if all these constitute the achievements of the Congress party itself. On the history page, predictably, the entire freedom struggle is appropriated to bolster the case for the Congress party of today. Equally predictably, there is no mention of the Emergency.

Among the useful items to be found at http://www.indiancongress.org is that little read document, the Constitution of the Congress party. Congress-watchers would be well-advised to store it for reference at the time of the next round of party organisational elections.

The other two parties that have Web sites are friends of the BJP, the AIADMK (http://www.aiadmk.org) and the Shiv Sena (http://www.Shivsena.org). The AIADMK site is a surprisingly restrained one, in sharp contrast to the media style of its supremo.

The latter site is a quick read - most of the pages are collections of one-liners. My favourite page here is the collection titled 'Thoughts about Shivsena', which is remarkable for its unintended grim humour. My favourite quote here is this pair: 'Shivsainik rushes to help the people in distress as a fire fighting engine rushes to calm the inferno.' 'Shivsainik is like a burning torch. He shall burn the evil and he shall also show the path...to those who are in ... darkness.'

Among the constituents of the United Front, the first to go on-line is the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This was long overdue, considering the traditional importance the Left has attached to its internationalist approach to politics. The CPI(M) Web pages on the VSNL's Delhi web-server (http://wwwdel.vsnl.net.in/cpim) include the basic party policy, details about the performance of the State Governments run by the party, and the current elections. The full text of the Left parties' election manifesto is also provided. It is noteworthy that the pages appear to be volunteer-run and not run commercially like the other parties.

Among the items here for the more serious student of Indian and Left politics is the party's resolution, adopted at its Congress in Chennai in January 1992, on ideological issues in the post-Soviet era. Given the generally serious and intellectually deep approach of the Left to Indian politics, one may hope that these Web pages will become the hub of a progressive international and national network devoted to active debate on contemporary social, political and economic issues. Click and see what's on.

T. Jayaraman

Dogma dilemma

As senior Cong leaders root for accommodating Hindutva, party struggles to redefine itself

LAKSHMI IYER  FEBRUARY 17, 2003 | UPDATED 16:43 IST

Secular albatross: Congress leaders are hoping Sonia will show the way

On January 31, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh declared in Delhi that there was nothing wrong in taking up issues concerning Hindus. Defending his decision to write to the prime minister on beef exports, he said he had merely forwarded a letter by a cow-protection group. 

He also took full credit for banning cow slaughter in his state in 1994, even talking about the medicinal and commercial value of cow's urine. A day later, Arjun Singh, Digvijay's mentor - turned-rival organised a meeting at the Parliament Annexe. 

The People's Integration Council (PIC) meet not only aimed at uniting secular parties but was also meant to reassure minorities about the Congress' secular credentials and to clear the air on the party's soft-Hindutva stance during the Gujarat elections. 

The PIC was Arjun's answer to the failure of successive governments at the Centre to convene the National Integration Council (NIC) meeting since 1992. Five members of the NIC, including Arjun, are among the 113 members in the new body. The PIC's 20-point resolution, among other things, called for a law to punish those guilty of genocide. 

The Arjun initiative on combating communalism and Digvijay's moves aimed at wooing the Hindu vote bank, all within a week, represent the contradictory ideological impulses in the Congress today. If secularism is a sacrament to one, Hindutva is not abominable to the other. 

Self-interest: Arjun Singh's views have few takers

They were both responding to Hindutva, the concept that has overwhelmed the political discourse since Narendra Modi's stunning return to power in Gujarat last year. But while Arjun seeks to combat Hindutva, Digvijay feels it would be best to co-opt it. In the wake of the Gujarat debacle, there are more takers in the party for Digvijay's line - unthinkable till a few months ago - than Arjun's. 

And though Arjun's colleagues share his reiteration of the party's commitment to core values, they also see the PIC more as a bid by the leader to assert his own relevance, his counter - offensive to his marginalisation within the party. His close identification with the Muslims proved such an embarrassment for the party's candidates in Gujarat that they did not allow him to address any public meeting during the poll campaign. 

Now with the PIC, Arjun feels he is on his way to re-establishing his utility value in the party. The council is being viewed in political circles as a secular political alliance, a rival to the ruling National Democratic Alliance. Congress President Sonia Gandhi spent three hours at the meeting, while Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav was there with party General Secretary Amar Singh in tow. 

At the end of the two-day show, Mulayam promised to back the Congress in Uttar Pradesh's Gauriganj assembly by-election. In response Sonia, who till now had been depending on the CPI(M) to establish contact with other opposition parties, offered to host a dinner for opposition leaders ahead of the budget session of Parliament beginning February 17. 

Party circles liken the Arjun's PIC effort to his setting up of the Congress (Tiwari) in 1995. "Eight years ago, he felt the Congress' ethos was threatened, so he floated the Congress (T). Today he has floated the PIC to protect the secular credentials of both the party and Sonia," says a party leader. 

Post-Gujarat, it is clear that neither Arjun nor Sonia can persist with unequivocal commitment to secularism within the party. Arjun's views on secularism found no takers at the January 5 CWC meeting that assessed the party's Gujarat debacle. 

The new school
Salman Khursheed	A.K. Antony	Kamal Nath
"The Congress cannot afford to be led by the NGOs."  Salman KhursheedFormer UPCC chief	"We should not be seen as going against the mood of the nation."  A.K. Antony Chief Minister, Kerala	"Arjun Singh's views on secularism are now history."  Kamal Nath AICC General Secretary

AICC General Secretary Kamal Nath, his junior in state politics, was outright uncharitable as he dismissed Arjun's views on secularism as "history" - a remark that stung the senior leader. It was at the January 5 meeting that signs of the ideological churning in the Congress first became visible. 

While some members felt the party lost Gujarat because of a lack of ideological clarity and soft - Hindutva, others felt its textbook secularism had distanced it from the people. 

Kerala Chief Minister A.K. Antony had endeared himself to Hindus by extending the management quota allowed to minority-run educational institutions to those run by Hindus. "The party should not be seen as going against the mood of the nation," Antony said. 

He was supported by Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, who had recently backed a controversial Ramkatha hosted by state Governor Anshuman Singh at the Raj Bhavan to raise funds for drought relief. "Soft Hindutva is just a new term coined by newspapers," was how Gehlot later dismissed questions on the issue. 

The chief ministers may be seen to be taking independent positions on ideological matters, but party leaders admit that it is Digvijay's strategy of identifying with Hindu causes that can insulate the party against the anti-incumbency factor in states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan that will soon be going to polls. 

Dubbing the Left and liberals as pseudo-liberals, former UPCC president Salman Khursheed feels the liberals are indirectly helping communalism, "The liberals say we cannot have bhajans at our public meetings. They question innocuous moves like Soniaji's visit to the Ambaji temple that strikes a chord among common people. 

They are trying to alienate us from the average man in a country that is deeply religious." Increasingly, leaders like Khursheed feel, the party needs to do some soul searching. That the party should not offend Hindu sentiments, without compromising on its core secular values. 

This question - raised by the late V.N. Gadgil after the 1989 election debacle - has split the CWC once again. There are those who feel that the party should redefine secularism in tune with the changing times, while others feel it should not compromise its ideology even if it means losing the next Lok Sabha polls. 

There is a generational divide on this question, admits a CWC member. "It's the old timers with no stake in the party's future who are clinging to the past and saying there is no need to redefine secularism. 

The younger lot feels the party should not appear to be anti-Hindu or appeasing the minorities," he says. A senior functionary admits the AICC now has to deal with the generation that couldn't care less about what the Congress did in the past. "Unlike in the 1960s and 70s, the young today are deeply religious. 

There is also a Hindu backlash to Muslim fundamentalism," he says. When sadhus stormed Parliament in 1966 on the cow- slaughter issue, "Indiraji (the then prime minister) met Vinoba Bhave to mollify them", says the party leader to argue that Hindutva is no anathema to the Congress. 

While Congress leaders feel using sadhus for campaigning is an issue best left to individual candidates, there is a consensus on the need for discussion on ideological questions. Perhaps another Pachmarhi - type brainstorming would be in order. The only hitch is that Sonia, the one who should give direction to the party, is in no position to provide it.

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/as-senior-congress-leaders-root-for-accommodating-hindutva-party-struggles-to-redefine-itself/1/206929.html

Can the Congress find a future

MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

THE nineties were, for the Congress, a time of traumatic transition. In the Lok Sabha elections of November 1989, the party with close to three-fourths majority was reduced to an also-ran. A few months later, almost all the states which went to the polls replaced Congress governments with non-Congress coalitions. The main opponent of the Congress, the BJP, found itself with a BJP chief minister for the first time ever – and that too in a major state, Madhya Pradesh.

By mid-August of 1990, battle was joined between Mandal and kamandal. Vast swathes of backward caste voters who had already drifted to the two Yadavs – Laloo Prasad of Bihar and Mulayam Singh of Uttar Pradesh – further alienated themselves from the Congress in the name of Mandal; and through Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra, Hindu communalists found a champion who gave them a fiery rash of fresh hope.

Then, Laloo Prasad Yadav, by arresting Advani at Samastipur, emerged as a new messiah of the Muslim minority, one-upped a few days later by his then party colleague, UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav taking such strong action against the kar sevaks at Ayodhya at the end of October 1990 that he ousted Laloo as the favoured darling of the Muslims – earning the flattering sobriquet of ‘Maulana Mulayam’. The minorities, who had been loyal supporters of the Congress till the shilanyas of November 1989, started deserting the party in droves.

By the end of its first year out of power, the Congress was left with no community vote-bank; it was transformed into the residue of every social grouping. Its inclusive ethos, which had attracted the socially disadvantaged to its fold, became the very reason for each community seeking an exclusivist communitarian destiny elsewhere. The sharp deterioration in the economy, brought on by the prospect of the first Gulf War and then the war itself, persuaded virtually every social segment that the national cake could not be enlarged to secure a bigger share for everyone; equity and social justice came to mean grabbing a larger slice to the detriment of everyone else.

What little expectation there was of the magic of the Gandhi name reviving the fortunes of the Congress was snuffed out when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in the closing stages of the tenth Lok Sabha election on 21 May 1991. His grieving wife refused to accept the succession and her children were too young to be even considered. P.V. Narasimha Rao became prime minister in June 1991, remained in office for five years, and gained kudos from all sections of non Congress party and political opinion. Within the Congress, however, the centre did not hold.

A section, led by senior Congressmen Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari, broke away and the Tiwari Congress had its brief moment in the sun. Soon thereafter, on the eve of the 1996 eleventh Lok Sabha elections, what little remained of the Congress in Tamil Nadu drifted almost entirely with their leader, G.K. Moopanar, to the Tamil Maanila Congress. So, when the reverses of those elections confirmed that public opinion of Rao conformed to the Congress opinion of him, it was only a matter of time before the Congress did what it had not done since independence, and certainly not as bluntly since its foundation in 1885 – cast aside a Congress president like a used tissue paper and obliterate him from the collective consciousness of the party.

It was Rao’s hand-picked successor who was the first to do the Brutus on him. Sitaram Kesri dug his dagger into Rao’s back even before it was quite turned. But mere months later, the plenary session of the All-India Congress Committee of August 1997 persuaded large numbers of Congressmen that Kesri was no vernacular Congressman come to restore the Congress to its grassroots but a vicious factional infighter whose coterie had concentrated all power in its venal hands. Therefore, the party began disintegrating when, after the fall of the Gujral government, the twelfth Lok Sabha elections were called in December 1997. The most visible manifestation of that discontent was Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, founded at the end of that month.

At this, Sonia Gandhi overcame her inhibitions over entering the political arena. (Vir Sanghvi, now editor of The Hindustan Times, tells me she vouchsafed him the confidence that the very photographs and portraits of her family hung on the walls of her home reprimanded her for placing her preference for privacy above her public duty.)

On 29 December 1997, it was announced in New Delhi that she would be canvassing for Congress votes in the upcoming elections. The news was conveyed to me on the platform of a public meeting in Calcutta, the first held by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, minutes after Mamata had announced that I was her candidate for Barrackpore. I returned to Delhi but not to the Congress; when Sonia Gandhi asked me why, I said that I had asked her to lead the Congress, not come to the aid of the Kesri Congress. She demurred, affirming that there was only one Congress.

However, it took but a fortnight for me to be thoroughly disillusioned with what little I saw of the Trinamool Congress; so, I went back to Tamil Nadu to contest my old seat of Mayiladuturai as an independent. I lost my deposit but got more votes than any Congress candidate in the state bar one. Such was the condition of the Kesri Congress. After the country-wide results came in, it was clear that the public had given Kesri the thumbs down. Sonia Gandhi became Congress president at 5:30 pm on 14 March 1998. I rejoined the Congress at 5:30 pm on 14 March 1998.

Not much more than a year later, yet another Lok Sabha election, the thirteenth, came upon the country after the Congress failed to validate its claim to having a majority to replace the Vajpayee government. That contretemps contributed to a mini-revolt in the Congress Working Committee (CWC). Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar left the party, followed by no one of any consequence. But between the fall of Vajpayee and the elections of September-October 1999, Pervez Musharraf came to the rescue of the BJP-led NDA. His war over Kargil wiped out all traces of every other electoral consideration, enabling the NDA to coast to a comfortable victory, reducing the Congress tally to a bare 110 or so, the lowest Congress score ever.

Yet, these electoral reverses did not provoke a reaction against the leadership. On the contrary, when the arch-member of the Kesri coterie, Jitendra Prasad, challenged Sonia Gandhi in the party polls of 2000, he got all of 94 votes in opposition to her 9000 plus. For the Congress recognised even in defeat that abandoning Sonia Gandhi would amount to buying a one-way to ticket to final disappearance. She had won all the state assembly elections of November 1998 in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (losing only the Christian state of Mizoram – which ought to have buried, but did not, the canard about her origins being the prime Congress disability).

The Congress party’s confidence vote in her leadership paid off: the Congress is now in office in 15 states, including J&K where its chief minister will in due course take over the baton from Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. Moreover, Himachal Pradesh in March this year revealed what a pyrrhic victory Gujarat has been for the BJP. Sonia is the trump card, and the Congress is not about to surrender the one exponential factor it has going in its favour.

We are now on the eve of the next (fourteenth) Lok Sabha polls. These are not due till September 2004, but the betting seems to be that the NDA government cannot afford another divisive budget and dare not risk a third bad monsoon in mid-2004. February 2004 seems, therefore, to be the likely date for the next Lok Sabha election. Is the Congress ready for it?

Clearly, a Congress which relies entirely on its exponential asset – Sonia Gandhi – is neither a likely winner nor one that deserves to win. The party has to get its act together, organizationally and ideologically. What are the key determinants of the Congress actually being able to live up to the expectations reposed in it by all those who dread another five years of BJP-led governance or, worse, five years of undiluted BJP governance?

First, the organizational issues. In the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress lost over a hundred seats (my provisional count is 135) by a reversible percentage of the vote. A mere three to four per cent change in the poll, and all other factors remaining equal, the Congress should be able to nearly double its performance by concentrating on these seats. Of course, this has to be offset against the seats won by the Congress by reversible margins, because in those seats the Congress is as vulnerable as in the counterpart seats where last time’s non-Congress winner is vulnerable. It is this kind of micro-level exercise the Congress first needs to undertake to identify seats where by better organisation alone victory is possible – and victory last time round is not undermined.

Such a micro-level, ‘vulnerable constituency-wise’ exercise might also throw up patterns of problems which require a macro solution that would impact most at the vulnerable micro level. Impressionistically, it appears to me that a disproportionately large number of such seats fall in the tribal belt. The scheduled tribes have been traditional Congress voters. Now there is a belt of seething tribal discontent and, therefore, tribal violence running south from Nepal to the northern Telengana areas of Andhra Pradesh.

I believe we have signally failed the tribals in recent times. Their problems have thus far fallen outside the purview of the political economy of the reforms process. There is, therefore, inadequate attention or priority given to tribal development. The last major Congress initiative in this regard was the Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP). It still remains the sheet-anchor of development in tribal areas, but because that was long ago, the ritual invocation of the TSP has now become something of a political cliché. No one opposes the Tribal Sub-Plan, but few are enthused by it.

The absence of any imaginative initiative in favour of the tribal community is aggravated by the very real developmental burden which tribal areas are carrying in the name of environmental protection. A state like Chhatisgarh, for example, boasts 70 per cent forest cover; but restrictions on development projects in the name of the Forest Conservation Act fall disproportionately on states that have traditionally conserved forests and hardly touch those sinning states which have wiped out their forest cover decades ago. This is patently unfair. The environmental burden of providing the nation as a whole with adequate forest cover needs to be borne equitably by everybody.

There is probably no single cause more responsible for the virtually uncontrollable spread of Naxalism in tribal India than the unimaginative and unsympathetic implementation of FCA. A Congress which imaginatively examines the problem and provides a constructive, detailed solution in time to reach it to far-flung tribal communities would snatch back the tribal vote; otherwise, I fear the sharpening of the communal conflict between Christian and non-Christian tribal communities by the sangh parivar will fetch the BJP tribal votes that should be denied it for the sake of common humanity.

A simple return to the original 1927 definition of ‘forests’ might be the key to discovering an environmentally sustainable solution to the roadblocks on the path to development which are fuelling the worst rebellion against the modern Indian state since independence – a problem barely noticed by the mainstream media because it impacts not at all on middle class preoccupations. (Incidentally, a Congress which allows its agenda to be set by Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg is a Congress which will be thrashed at the polls – and deservedly so. We should leave The Times of India to continue turning into an advertisers’ gazette!)

The other major organizational change required for the winning of elections is proving very difficult to translate into actual practice. After the debacle of the last Lok Sabha election, the Congress president had appointed an introspection group under the chairmanship of A.K. Antony (who has since become the chief minister of Kerala). I was the principal rap-porteur. (Our report, I say with no false modesty, is anEncyclopaedia Congressica).

We recommended that Congress candidates be selected at least three-to-six months before the due date of elections in order to give them time to prepare for the polls instead of hanging around AICC headquarters till the last moment before nominations close, as has regrettably been the usual practice. The recommendation was accepted by the Congress Working Committee (CWC) but it has not proved possible to implement it. There are practical problems; there is also an adamant mindset anchored in past practice, privilege and patronage that is proving difficult to break. I remain deeply persuaded that choosing our candidates well in advance could give us up to 50 seats more than we will otherwise get (nearly 10 per cent of the total number of seats at stake).

The third key measure would be the finalisation of the state teams that will take us into the elections. In far too many states, including my home state of Tamil Nadu, no one knows who will constitute the Congress arrowhead for the home-run. There is no way everyone can be satisfied, and in a party with as much inner-party democracy as the Congress has, it would be impossible (besides being undesirable) to wipe out dissidence and indiscipline entirely. But a certain coherence between the central High Command and its team in the field at state level should make for better performance at the hustings than meandering confusion and contradiction till nominations close, with factions pitting their energies more against each other than against the enemy at the gates.

The fourth important organizational requirement is alliances, particularly in those states where the Congress is exceptionally weak. I would give the highest priority and attention in this regard to Tamil Nadu and Bihar/Jharkhand. We have almost everything going for us in Tamil Nadu but a coherent party. The merger of August 2002 has restored the integrity of some 15-20 per cent of the persistent non-Dravidian party vote. As both the AIADMK and the DMK fall far short of a majority on their own, it is the Dravidian party which gets the Congress vote and so goes on to cobble together the larger coalition that is an almost sure-shot winner.

Neither Dravidian party is, however, today an immediately acceptable partner to the Congress. The AIADMK’s Jayalalitha, inebriated as is her wont with power, has quite gratuitously targeted Sonia Gandhi, and the DMK’s utterly unprincipled alliance with the BJP – unprincipled for the incompatibility between the fiercely atheistic traditions of the party and the sadhus and sants of the sangh parivar – makes any relationship between the Congress and the DMK unacceptable unless and until the DMK quits the NDA.

The unexpected advantage of this stand-off between the Congress and the two Dravidian parties is that it gives the Congress the space to build itself before choosing its electoral path. Sadly, nine months after the merger (an entire pregnancy!) Congress unity and cohesion are still to be born. At least 10 seats, more probably nearer 20, and by a stretch of imagination up to 25, are going a-begging in Tamil Nadu for want of key organizational decisions.

As far as Bihar and Jharkhand are concerned, the aim should be to keep the BJP and its cohorts out – and fashion the relationship with the colourful Laloo Prasad Yadav accordingly. In UP, the Congress so far has been co-opting the loser ex post facto. It should perhaps think of coopting the winner ex ante. Happily, the BJP is such a reduced force in the state that it cannot be the winner, although, by Congress default, a defeated BJP can find itself on the winning side. This is the contingency we should dedicate ourselves to forestalling.

As regards West Bengal/Tripura, we must battle the communists in the state while keeping open the door to them in Delhi. And perhaps in Andhra Pradesh, some understanding with the communists might be necessary to keep the very vulnerable TDP-BJP alliance at bay.

This is not the place to go into a number of other detailed organizational improvements desperately needed. But the four key steps mentioned above should quite easily take us over the 200 seat watermark.

Two hundred, however, is not enough. In any case, organizational steps alone would not guarantee even such a modest outcome. For the Congress to re-emerge as the natural party of governance, it is essential that it acquire an ideological profile which over the turbulent nineties (and into the first three years of the 21st century) has grown fuzzy. The dramatic transitions of the last 15 years or so have resulted in the Congress drifting from its anchoring of the past and the anchoring of the past sometimes drifting from the Congress. To re-invent itself, the Congress has to face up squarely over the next few months to what it was and what it wishes to be – and convey this unambiguously and succinctly to the electorate.

The party, therefore, needs to know itself. Only then can it tell the world who it is – and why it is different to the alternative. Congress ideology over approximately the first half-century of independence was based on four fundamental premises and principles: democracy, secularism, socialism, and non-alignment. In respect of each of these, the challenge before the Congress is to decide whether advantage lies in an imitative positioning to arrest the drift of Congress support or a differential positioning to present a clear alternative.

Fortunately, there is no argument over democracy: no one suggests any tinkering with the basic structure of democracy written into our Constitution, and the NDA’s Constitution Review Commission, launched with so much fanfare, has happily proved a damp squib. However, the ugly truth is that ours is a democracy gone stale. The legislatures at the centre and in the states have lost their early bloom, their freshness; the esteem in which legislators are held is at an all-time low.

On the moral scale, the people wedge politicians somewhere between dacoits and prostitutes. A rejuvenation of our democracy has, therefore, become necessary. This means the Congress championing electoral reforms to raise the moral tone of our politics and reforms aimed at improving the functioning of legislatures to enlarge the scope for the constructive contribution of legislatures to governance.

Equally, perhaps even more important, is a deepening of democracy. Representative democracy cannot and should not be about under a thousand MPs (Lok and Rajya Sabha), and under 5000 MLAs/MLCs representing a billion people. Thepanchayats and nagarpalikas have now added three million elected representatives to our democracy, of whom as many as one million are women.

India, at the start of its time of transition, qualified to be the world’s biggest democracy; it, however, failed the test of being the world’s most representative democracy. In December 1992, Parliament passed the 73rd and 74th amendments incorporating two whole new parts in the Constitution – Part IX (‘The Panchayats’) and Part IX A (‘The Municipalities’). In the decade that has since gone by, India has emerged as far and away the world’s most representative and least gender-biased democracy.

Yet, to go by The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times, you would not know. For contemporary Panchayati Raj must rank as the world’s least commented-on political and social revolution. Just how revolutionary has been borne out by one partial survey in Karnataka which has shown that although reservations for women in the gram panchayats is restricted to 33 per cent, the proportion of elected women members in the panchayats at the most grassroots level of all – the village level, the allegedly most backward level – is a staggering 48 per cent. True, there is a bibi-bhanji brigade. But since when has there not been a beta-bhanja brigade? And whose son, after all, is George W. Bush?

Unfortunately, even political class perceptions of the role of grassroots institutions in our democracy have been shaped by an uninterested media. My present preoccupations have taken me not only to my Tamil Nadu constituency (where two rounds of local bodies elections have been held, in 1996 and 2001) but also afforded me the opportunity interacting with thousands of panchayat/nagarpalika representatives all over the country, from Arunachal Pradesh to Lakshadweep.

As I meet these thousands of young men and women in positions of real responsibility for the development and welfare of their localities, I am convinced that this is where the rejuvenation of our democracy is beginning – much more than in candidates filing affidavits swearing on oath that they are not the criminals everyone takes them to be, which animates most of the discussion over clean democracy at the talk shops of the India International Centre and the India Habitat Centre.

The problem is that we have a shell without substance. The mandatory provisions of the constitution have, by and large been fulfilled. But when it comes to empowering the elected local bodies to actually function as ‘units of local self-government’, specifically with regard to ‘planning’ and ‘implementation’ of ‘programmes of economic development and social justice’ in regard to the devolved functions, there is a huge gap to be covered.

The Congress is the only party in the country to have seized the opportunity provided by the tenth anniversary celebrations of the passage of the constitutional amendments to draft a detailed five-year action plan (2003-08) to fill the panchayat/nagarpalika shells with the substance of ‘self-government’. The draft plan is currently being taken (by me) to every state and union territory for discussion and ratification.

By about mid-August (around Rajiv Gandhi’s 60th birth anniversary on 20 August), it is intended to call a national convention of the party to adopt the draft action plan as finalised, first, by the state conventions, and then by the CWC. At that stage, lakhs of Congress members/office-bearers in the local bodies in every village and mohalla of the country will acquire a vital stake in a Congress Lok Sabha victory. Indeed, lakhs of non-Congress local body representatives, all elected and, therefore, opinion-makers with decisive influence on a large swathe of the people, would also see a personal interest in working towards a Congress government at the centre pledged to a specific five-year action plan for realising Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of poorna swarajya through gram swarajya, as translated into the Constitution primarily through the constitutional initiative taken by Rajiv Gandhi.

The integration of these elected Congress or Congress-inclined members of the local bodies into the mainstream of the Congress party’s organizational structure is an immediate and pressing need. Its fulfilment will provide the Congress with the cadres it requires to meet the new challenges which a mass base alone cannot guarantee.

The most difficult ideological positioning is over secularism. The choice for the Congress is not, as is often mischievously or maliciously projected, between secularism and soft Hindutva, but between soft and hard secularism. In terms of principle, the Congress has no difficulty in projecting a clear secularism easily differentiated from the idiom and concerns of the Hindutva brigade. But when it comes to the application of secular principles (over which there is no dispute) to specific issues (over which there is dispute), confusion does arise between the hard line and the soft line. Soft secularism is to be commended for its sensitivity to communitarian concerns, majority and minority. Hard secularism has the disadvantage of being easily portrayed as anti-religious in a country which is deeply religious.

Communal forces raise issues which are communitarian in origin and communal in expression. The classic example is the Ram temple at Ayodhya. The communitarian desire for a temple at the Ramjanmabhoomi is perfectly understandable. A secularist need have no difficulty with the demand. But when this communitarian demand is projected not as ‘mandir banayenge’ but as ‘mandir wahin banayenge’, and that too as ‘Ram ki saugandh ham khate hain/Mandir wahin banayenge’, the communitarian demand becomes communal for ‘wahin’ does not refer to the location in general but to thegarb griha being built at the exact location of the mirab, entailing the dismantling of a minority place of worship for the construction of a majority place of worship. That is when a communitarian demand becomes a communal demand.

That is also when a secular response become imperative. But that, alas, is usually when the Congress shies away from or inordinately delays a response. What the Congress must realise is that an imitative response makes no ideological or even political sense – for the issue has been chosen by the Other, it is being played out by the Other on a field of its choosing, and if, by omission or commission, we yield ground to the Other, it will always and invariably be advantage BJP – because the BJP is sincerely communal and the sangh parivar/VHP unabashedly so.

Therefore, on issues raised by the BJP and its sangh parivar/VHP, a rapid action hard secular response is the only valid response possible. When, however, we are projecting secularism on our ground, on issues raised by us as distinct from responding to issues raised by the Other, the Congress must combine, as Mahatma Gandhi particularly did, an unyielding secularism with sensitivity to religious sentiment and communitarian considerations.

Fortunately, the Congress does have a body of straightforward secular answers to tough communal questions. The questions were culled from sangh parivar/VHP propaganda and raised by Congresspersons themselves at a high-level training camp held in Bhopal in June 2002. The questions were responded to by, first, a panel of non-Congress experts in secularism and, then, by a panel of Congress experts. The camp also adopted a Secular Creed, a charter for secularism. The work done in Bhopal can be filtered by the party into a manual of secularism which would arm the average Congress worker to take on the malice of communalism.

The fact is that the inner-party dialectic between soft and hard secularism is almost as old as our century-old party. It is after all, the same party which produced Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose which also produced Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai, both of whom were Presidents of the Hindu Mahasabha, not to mention the Ali brothers and Jinnah himself, who were ardent Congressmen till they chose to slide down the slippery slope of communalism.

In the immediate aftermath of independence, once the nation had got over the immediate shock of the Mahatma’s murder at the hands of an ardent Hindutvist, a furious argument over soft and hard secularism arose between the Nehruvians, on the one hand, and the soft secularists, on the other, over the response to the exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan in the summer/monsoon months of 1949; the Nehru-Liaqat pact of April 1950 (over which an infuriated Shyama Prasad Mookherjee resigned from the Nehru cabinet and went on to found the Jana Sangh); the election of Purushottam Das Tandon over Acharya Kriplani as Congress President at the Nasik session in September 1950; and President Rajendra Prasad attending the opening ceremonies of the rebuilt Somnath mandir, but only in his personal capacity not as President, because the Council of Ministers had formally advised him not to go as the presence of the nation’s President at a revanchist Hindu ceremony would compromise the secular character of the Indian state.

In September 1951, a year after Nasik, Nehru, taking a leaf out of Mahatma Gandhi’s tactic at Haripura, got all the CWC members to resign from Tandon’s team, thus obliging Tandon himself to resign. Then, in the same month that the Jana Sangh was formally launched (with both Vajpayee and Advani present), Nehru, who had become Congress president after the resignation of Tandon, pronounced the bottom line of the secular creed at a meeting in Ram Lila grounds on Gandhi Jayanti, 1951: ‘If any man raises his hand against another in the name of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, whether from within the government or outside.’

The litmus test of this hard secular line came in early 1952 when the country went to the polls for the first Lok Sabha elections. These were the first-ever elections held in India on the basis of universal adult suffrage. Virtually every voter had a searing personal memory of Partition. The Hindutva challenge came from a pincer movement of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jana Sangh. Both were worsted. Secularism was restored both in the Congress party and in the governance of the nation. Nehru’s hard-line secularism not only won the day, it made both the party and the country safe for secularism for the next 35 years.

For the last 15 years or so, the party has once again been engulfed in an argument within over what one might call the Purushottam Das Tandon-Arun Nehru-P.V. Narasimha Rao line and the Congress party’s mainstream secularism. Rao’s attempt to be a better Hindu than the Hindutva-wallah ended in the disaster of Black Sunday, 6 December 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 36 hours of quiescence which followed when the Hindu fanatics who had spirited away the murtis of Ram lalla were given cover and protection to restore the idols at the site of the obliterated masjid. It was the final straw for the Muslim minority. They abandoned the Congress en masse. It is only now that they are beginning to edge their way back.

The lesson to be learned is that there are times when ‘those on the middle path are knocked down by traffic from both ends.’ I owe the felicitous phrase to K. Natwar Singh on Atal Bihari Vajpayee: it applies also to the choice the Congress must make to re-emerge as the standard-bearer of secularism as Nehru did half a century ago. Soft secularism of the V.N. Gadgil-K.M. Munshi kind (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan secularism, I call it) will not make the Congress the champion of the secular cause. In the face of today’s challenge, a hard secular line of the 1949-51 kind a la Jawaharlal Nehru will not only get back the vast secular vote we have substantially lost, more important than winning elections it is the only way of once again corking the communal genie for the foreseeable future.

I am confident the strong secular line will prevail for India is secular because its people are secular. They are not into the building of our contemporary nationhood at the behest of sadhus or mullahs or padres; it is a secular India at peace and harmony with itself that they want. Gujarat December 2002 was an aberration brought on by the Congress campaign on the ground not matching the secular professions of its rhetoric. The choice between Narendra Modi’s communalism and a Nehruvian brand of secularism was not starkly placed. The electorate, therefore, plumped for the ‘asli cheez’. Fortunately, the Himachal elections of February-March 2003 have shown that our electorate is back on the secular track. The Congress would be well advised to follow suit.

We may now turn to the third pillar of the party’s ideological construct – socialism, more strictly speaking, the ‘socialistic pattern of society’ envisaged at Avadi 1955, deriving from Gandhiji’s ‘talisman’, summed up in Indira Gandhi’s immortal 1971 slogan, ‘Woh kehte hain Indira hatao; hum kehte hain garibi hatao’. Till the economic reforms of the early 1990s, the poor saw the Congress as their party, the party of the poor, however much economists might have seen the party’s policies as doing little to actually remove poverty.

With the launch of a ‘new economic policy’ in 1991, designed apparently as making up for the mistakes of the past rather than building on the successes of the Avadi process, the Congress, after the successive defeats of 1996, 1997 and 1999 went into an intensive phase of introspection over the course and direction of reforms. That exercise in introspection ended with the economic resolution adopted by the plenary of the Congress in Bangalore in March 2001, after which the simmering inner-party argument over reforms has ceased. Now that there is consensus within the party on the content and presentation of economic reforms, the Congress needs to concentrate on an agenda for repositioning itself as the party of the poor.

In my view, the key to such repositioning lies in pledging the party to the three Fs in order to attain the three Es. The three Fs relate to the simultaneous devolution of functions, functionaries and finances to ensure effective devolution to the elected panchayats and nagarpalikas. This is elaborated in the draft action plan (2003-08) mentioned earlier. The objective is to attain the three Es: empowerment; entitlements; enrichment.

‘Empowerment’ needs little elaboration: it refers to ensuring that elected local bodies effectively become units of local self-government undertaking the planning and implementation of programmes of economic development and social justice in respect of devolved functions, as envisaged in the constitution. Grassroots development through grassroots democracy.

‘Entitlements’ refers to the level, structure and pattern of government spending on the poor and, in regard to devolved functions, ensuring that it is not the bureaucracy but elected representatives who become the delivery agent for development. A cursory reading of parliamentary standing committee reports on Tenth Plan allocations for pro-poor programmes shows that allocations for rural and urban development, especially for poverty alleviation and employment generation programmes, are a derisory fraction of the sums required to eliminate the grossest forms of poverty within a reasonable timeframe.

In contrast, the Planning Commission treats with much greater generosity the demands of ministries whose direct impact on the poor is marginal or staggered over time. Worse, the mid-term appraisal of the Ninth Plan shows that the still bureaucratically-driven delivery mechanism for pro-poor programmes results in only a small fraction of budget grants being actually spent, besides spending being concentrated in the last quarter of the year to the detriment of evenly spread development over the whole of the year.

The Congress president has already publicly proclaimed that under a Congress government at the centre, funds for devolved functions will be channelled direct to the panchayats/nagarpalikas (that could amount to some Rs 20,000 crore a year!). She has also announced that a Congress government at the centre will ensure that bureaucratically-dominated DRDAs (District Rural Development Agencies) will be merged with representatively-run district panchayats (zila parishads) under the chairpersonship of the ZP president, not the collector/CEO. The two steps together, elaborated in the draft action plan, will galvanize the poor and those who depend on the votes of the poor. It is the only way to get from BDO raj to panchayati raj.

Now, the Congress needs to work on its sums to present to the poor a truly dramatic contrast between present NDA spending and proposed Congress spending on programmes of immediate relevance to the poor, that is, the entitlements of the poor. A key component of this must relate to food security to take advantage of overflowing foodgrains stocks and foreign exchange reserves; another key component must relate to public investment and employment generation to revive farm and non-farm rural economic activity (particularly handlooms) and compensate for the staggering decline in growth rates of both rural and urban employment (including educated unemployment among the youth) which have plagued the economy over the decade of the nineties and worsened dramatically as we wheeled into the 21st century.

‘Enrichment’: Agriculture and related activities (horticulture, pisci-culture, animal husbandry, minor forest produce etc.), especially in drought-prone areas which grow oilseeds, pulses and coarse cereals, must be seen to receive a massive boost if the Congress comes to office. Exercises in this regard have been underway within the party for a while and the Congress needs to unveil its plans soon.

Additionally, the Congress should aggressively project the deeply disappointing performance of both GDP and employment growth rates in the last quinquennium, not only the setback since the ever-expanding growth rates of the period 1992-97, but also the fall in key indicators of growth compared to the eighties, the decade of the comeback of Indira Gandhi and the blossoming of Rajiv Gandhi, the last decade of socialism before we embarked on the first decade of reforms.

The last six years have seen a collapse of both performance and expectations. Scandal after scandal has plagued the process of LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation). We have moved in one go from stodgy socialism to crony capitalism. The Bangalore economic policy resolution shows how Congress will put reforms back on track. The next step is to incorporate grassroots development through grassroots democracy at the heart of the economic reforms process instead of consigning Panchayati Raj to an adjunct status as has been the regrettable story so far.

When the three Fs are seen as the road map to the three Es, that is, as the direct and perceptible outcome of the reforms process, public support can be harnessed for the next and much more painful phase of reforms. Not otherwise. It is the failure to appreciate this that has turned to ashes the hopes for growth vested in the NDA. The Congress must show that it appreciates the significance of fashioning an economic policy for a democratic polity.

Finally, the conundrum of non-alignment in an un-aligned world. We need to understand and explain that while relations between the East and the West have changed as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, relations between the North and the South remain as they were. Nothing has changed for us. Our problems and preoccupations are what they were. Worse, the naked unipolarity of the evolving world order has already constricted our diplomatic space and threatens to constrict it further. Foreign policy is the external expression of our internal sovereignty. But we cannot in isolation recover our freedom of thought, expression and action in international affairs. We need friends in similar need. Therefore, we have to reinvent non-alignment, not so much as a doctrine but as a movement.

We and NAM should start building bridges to the European Union which, over Iraq, has demonstrated its disquiet over unilateralism based on one law for the superpower and quite another for the lesser breed. Europe, let us remember, is the western peninsula of the same landmass whose southern peninsula is our subcontinent. It is the whole of the Eurasian landmass, not just the developing countries of Asia, that are under siege by the forces of unilateral hegemony. A pan-Eurasian endeavour to restore multipolar balance is a key imperative of contemporary diplomacy. That is the enduring lesson of the war on Iraq.

Friendly relations with the US are desirable but the tilt to Talbot initiated by Jaswant Singh desperately needs review. A self-respecting country of over a billion people, comprising a sixth of humankind, cannot and should not look to others, however powerful, to pull its irons out of the Pakistani fire. The Congress road-map for a peaceful, negotiated resolution of our differences with Pakistan is necessary.

So must the Congress prepare and present foreign policy options that impinge on and appeal to ordinary folk in different regions of the country. Thus, for the east and north-east, cut off from the rest of the country by the dog-in-the manger refusal of Bangladesh to grant surface transit facilities, subject to relentless demographic pressure from neighbours, inflicted with destructive floods which cannot be contained without a river waters augmentation agreement with Bangladesh, power starved in the absence of an agreement with China to harness the 60,000 MW of power which can be generated at the bend the Tsang-po makes as it becomes, first, the Siang river of Arunachal Pradesh and then the Brahmaputra of Assam, and denied access through Myanmar to the lucrative markets of south China and ASEAN, a new framework of regional cooperation with Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan is of far greater import to the people of the east and north-east than the quarrel with Pakistan.

In the south, Sri Lanka is, of course, a perennial but given the south Indian presence in the Gulf and south-east Asia, it is ‘Look East’ (through the Bay of Bengal community and Indo-ASEAN relations) and ‘Look West but not too far west, i.e., Gulf-wards’ that is of immediate importance. The dynamic growth centres of western India need, of course, to look further west for they are best placed to exponentially increase foreign direct investment in the economy (the record in respect of which has been deeply disappointing in recent years). For Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal, Nepal is where foreign policy begins and domestic peace (an end to neo-Maoism in Nepal) and economic development (flood control and power-generation) depends.

The Congress must think through these ideological issues with all deliberate speed, translate its positions into a manifesto drafted and approved months before the general elections, and then communicate the essence of its positioning in readily understood words to the electorate at large through well trained Congress workers and its elected cadre in the local bodies. Such an ideologically candid and coherent Congress, which takes the organizational steps flagged earlier, will be a Congress which cannot be beaten. Seeing that is, however, easier than getting there. That is what calls for high statesmanship and bloody hard work. It is going to be a very long, very hot summer!

* The author is an office-bearer of the Congress, but the views expressed here bind none but him.