The residence of former Indian prime minister and Congress leader late Indira Gandhi, on New Delhi’s Safdarjung Road, is a treasure-trove of memories and moments from India’s political history, spanning almost three-quarters of a century. Dating back to the days of British rule and right up to May 21, 1991, when Indira’s son and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a human bomb, Indira’s residence, converted into a museum after her death, is a chronicler’s delight. Time indeed stands still at that very spot where two of her bodyguards sprayed Indira with bullets on that fateful morning of October 31, 1984. Drops of blood, still neatly preserved under a glass slab on the walkway, take one back in time. But more than the shock and awe it evokes, what is perhaps remarkable about Indira Gandhi Memorial is a sense of neutrality about religion that this monolith of a structure and its interiors convey to an average visitor — something that is truly representative of the social and cultural ethos that the Gandhi family in India has always claimed to champion and with a fair degree of success at that.
The compulsions of electoral politics notwithstanding, the Congress party has at least tried to pay lip service to its ideological moorings to secularism in all these decades.
On Saturday, when Rahul Gandhi formally took over as the Congress party president, he emerged the fourth-generation standard-bearer of a tradition that has always claimed to keep the institution, that of India’s oldest and largest political party, equidistant from all religious entities and affiliations.
Until the just-concluded Gujarat assembly elections, that is!
Political opportunism
In a bid to counter the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) shrill Hindu nationalist pitch, Rahul has walked into the trap of playing the religion card. Peddling “soft-Hindutva” (Hindu nationalism), in order to secure maximum possible traction with the voters in a battleground state like Gujarat, is a sign of blatant political opportunism that is unbecoming of a legacy that still seems to take a lot of pride in countering the ideological threat emanating from an ultra-rightist agenda in the world’s largest democracy.
It is shocking to see Rahul going on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting at least half a dozen Hindu temples in the run-up to the Gujarat polls — offering plenty of photo opps, sporting marigold garlands and his forehead resplendent in red. His party’s communications-in-charge even referring to Rahul wearing the ‘sacred thread’ as a tell-tale mark of his Hindu credentials. Irrespective of the Gujarat state election results, by committing himself to ‘proving’ his Hindu roots, Rahul has sought to beat the BJP at its game — without realising that quite like riding a tiger, it may be difficult for him and his party to shed this “soft-Hindutva” tag in the days ahead when harking back to secular ways could be the name of the game on a pan-India playing field.
In that sense, a victory in Gujarat could actually compound Rahul’s problems. It could create pressure groups within as well as outside the Congress fold to force Rahul to stick to the new-found success formula of pandering to the sentiment of Hindu voters, while the bigger canvas of a General Election could demand otherwise. A veritable Catch-22 that is of Rahul’s own making.
Moreover, Rahul ought to have realised that if the people of Gujarat are to junk the BJP and side with the Congress, then they will probably be doing so as a vote of no-confidence to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flawed implementation of demonetisation, a harsh rolling out of the Goods and Services Tax and a general sense of fatigue and anti-incumbency vibes generated by five consecutive BJP-led governments at Gandhinagar’s secretariat. Seeing the Congress trying to be a facsimile of the BJP, sporting a softer hue of saffron, is small mercy for those who may have found reason enough to prioritise the development agenda over a strident trident.
Taken overall, the Gujarat assembly polls this time have emerged as a harbinger of a bigger danger: That of the secular ideology ceding space to a milder version of firebrand Hindutva. Gujarat 2017 has shown that perhaps for the first time in India’s political history, secularism is no longer the antidote to a toxic concoction of religion-based politics and majoritarian absolutism. Rather, it is “soft Hindutva” that is being propagated to tide over this challenge. And it is indeed unfortunate that this ‘new’ template is being designed by one who was born to a Hindu father, a Christian mother and a Parsi grandfather!
