Prashant Kishor on the Opposition weakness

 

'From where did Rs 20, 000 crores or $ 3 Billion come to Adani's shell companies'?

 

'Rahul Gandhi does not lust for Power': Yogendra Yadav

 

Raghuram Rajan interviewed by Rahul Gandhi

 

Democracy and Indian Political Parties

 

Rahul Gandhi is back. Now with two economists, a migrant aid pack and an ethical hacker

Zainab Sikandar in The Print






It takes a lot to be defeated twice over, ridiculed for years and still care enough to show up for your country, the majority of which has rejected you for a national leadership role. Rahul Gandhi continues to surprise us. He simply won’t give up. He just doesn’t turn cynical and walk away.

He keeps coming back with his empathy as well as his willingness to find viable solutions to pressing issues induced by the pandemic: an economy in doldrums, a huge migrant workers’ problem that’s slowly turned into a humanitarian crisis as well as transparency of the government’s Arogya Setu app being used to map Covid positive patients. Rahul Gandhi’s comeback is all the more conspicuous against the backdrop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unwillingness to have a press conference

Rahul is ready to talk

Rahul Gandhi is the eternal unputdownable comeback kid. He has managed to hold the attention of the media by continuously participating in the process of finding answers to the problems that Covid has thrown at India. He has had two conversations with two economists par excellence, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee. Add to this, the migrant aid pack that Sonia Gandhi offered, where the Congress party would have paid the train fare for every migrant labourer who wants to go home. This “masterstroke” has made the fiercest of critics of the Congress party applaud the Gandhis. The Gandhis are consciously and conspicuously placing themselves polar opposite to Narendra Modi. Whatever Modi is avoiding, the Gandhis are accepting and dealing squarely.

Right-wing editorials are claiming that Rahul Gandhi is trying to come off as an “intellectual”. This, for a man who till recently they caustically made fun of. But this perception is cracking because for the first time, the entire BJP PR machinery is being used to not make fun of Rahul Gandhi, but to discredit his interactions with the two economists by either calling the interaction a “repackaged Socialist snake oil” or by spinning fake news related to the guests. MoneyControl.com and News18 misquoted Abhijit Bannerjee as criticising UPA’s schemes, which the BJP had embraced. Banerjee had said no such thing.

Ending obsession with Modi

Then there’s Rahul Gandhi’s two press conferences (via Zoom). We got to see a visibly more calmer and zen Rahul Gandhi who is neither shaken nor stirred by the six-year-long vicious slander by the BJP or the media, which has more often than not dealt rather unfairly with him. He has significantly altered his behaviour from the Rahul of yore, who would either attack Modi with his ‘Chowkidar Chor hai’ jibe or give him a hug in Parliament and say that he loves the prime minister.

Rahul’s detachment from Modi is palpable when he urges the government to transfer direct cash to the poor, as envisaged in Congress’s NYAY scheme, by saying “Call it ‘nyay’ (justice) or call it by any other name but do it.”


Rahul, it appears, has specifically distanced himself from acts of political pettiness and his statements reflect a sense of political maturity: “We can defeat the virus if we fight it together, we lose if we fight with each other”. Even though he also unapologetically added that he does not agree with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on most things but wanted to offer “constructive suggestions”.

Gandhi’s well-directed tweets with suggestions to the government are now also being affirmed by experts.

Turning Aarogya to his advantage

While the BJP is in pathological denial of anything substantive that Rahul Gandhi or the two economists had to say, an ethical hacker had the government promptly take notice and admit to its mistake. French hacker Elliot Alderson on Twitter looked into the Aarogya Setu app and confirmed Rahul’s fear that it was nothing more than a “sophisticated surveillance system”. The app’s user agreement states that the data can be used in the future for purposes other than epidemic control if there is a legal requirement. The privacy policy of the app states that the data on the app may be shared with as many agencies as the government sees fit.

Alderson went on to confirm and tweeted to the government that “A security issue has been found in your app. The privacy of 90 million Indians is at stake.” He ended the tweet with a post script that read; “@Rahul Gandhi was right.”

Although the Modi government confirmed that there could be no security breach in the app, they thanked the ethical hacker on engaging with them. Alderson on the other hand has confirmed that some of the issues he reported were fixed in the app and that he did receive calls from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT), both government bodies.

In fact the press note of Aarogya Setu thanked Alderson for engaging with them. “We thank the ethical hacker on engaging with us. We encourage any users who identify a vulnerability to inform us immediately.” Anderson, however, maintained that the app should “stop lying, stop denying”.

Rahul’s initial warning, as early as 12 February, foreboding the government of ignoring the contagion almost seems prophetic today. The BJP can go on to dismiss him but it’s getting harder for the party and the government to ignore Rahul in these Covid times.

Congress - The party of Hinduism?

Liberals hoping that Rahul Gandhi’s Congress would rescue them from Hindutva may be in for a rude awakening writes G Sampath in The Hindu


The stage is all set for Assembly elections in five States — Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram and Telangana. Described as a ‘semi-final’ for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, they offer a foretaste of the electoral strategies likely to be on view next year. Though State and national elections often have their own specific dynamic, some useful inferences may be drawn from the campaigns of the national parties, especially the Congress.

An important conundrum is whether the Congress can emerge as a meaningful alternative to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu majoritarian politics. On the evidence of its campaign so far, especially in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the party appears to have chosen the path of least resistance. Given that these two States also happen to be among those where the BJP’s Hindutva dimension is in full bloom, they presented the Congress with a good opportunity to test its political counter to the divisive agenda of its adversary. The combination of high anti-incumbency and a two-way contest with the BJP meant that the Congress could have taken the ideological battle to the Sangh Parivar.

Wooing the upper castes

But the Congress did nothing of the sort. It steered clear of the BJP’s majoritarian depredations, and opted to woo the same upper castes that constitute the BJP’s core vote base. It has embraced what has come to be known as ‘soft Hindutva’. In Madhya Pradesh, for instance, the Congress has promised to build cow shelters in every village if voted to power — this in a State where desperate farmers were fired upon by the administration. In Kerala, its State unit has played along with so-called religious sentiment, opposing the entry of women (between the ages of 10-50) in Sabarimala instead of standing by the constitutional principle of equality.

In Rajasthan, too, the Congress’s game plan is to retrieve the upper caste vote from the BJP. Hindutva politics has queered the pitch in such a way that today no party can specifically woo the savarna voter without pandering to communal sentiment. In effect, this means not confronting the infusion of religion into the heart of democratic politics. Conversely, challenging it would require two things from a party: certain ideological non-negotiables, among which, in the case of the Congress, would be the Nehruvian legacy of secularism and a politics of caste rooted in the principle of social justice.

Given the cynicism that has become commonplace in public discourse, it is fashionable to scoff at any expectation of principles in politics. But it is delusional to imagine that the very realpolitik that unleashed the genie of communal hatred on national politics will also be able — now that its disruptions are coming home to roost — to put that genie back into the constitutional bottle. In fact, the most troubling takeaway from the Congress’s approach to these Assembly polls is that even an outright victory for a Congress-led alliance in 2019, however improbable it may seem at present, may not really signify a defeat of communal forces.

The clearest indication yet that the Congress cannot be expected to counter the normalisation of Hindu majoritarianism came during party president Rahul Gandhi’s campaign tour in Madhya Pradesh, where he stated that the “Congress was a party of Hinduism”. He prefaced it by saying that it was “not a party of Hindutva” but the fact that he felt compelled to paint the Congress in Hindu colours marks a clear shift in the party’s overt political line.

For some time now, there has been a debate on the Congress’s use of ‘soft Hindutva’ as a counter to the BJP’s presumably ‘hard’ Hindutva. Mr. Gandhi’s supporters have argued that what has been labelled as ‘soft Hindutva’ is nothing but a free and open expression of his personal faith as a devout Hindu. Even if this were true, his temple visits, which rarely seem to take place without a photo-op, the recent emergence of vermilion on his forehead, his pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar, and his coming out as a Shiv bhakt, are all gestures saturated with political significance.

Smart politics?

They could either be read as a smart political response to the widespread ‘Hinduisation’ of the socio-political sphere, or as an admission of defeat to Hindutva forces, for this is exactly what they seek — an India where Hindu identity would be the starting point of any mobilisation for political power.

Last month, a Rajasthan Minister was booked for violating the Representation of the People Act after he gave a speech asking all Hindus to vote for the BJP. Mr. Gandhi has never verbalised such a plea with regard to his own party. But can we truly characterise his description of the Congress as a “party of Hinduism”, or his embodiment of Hindu symbolism on the campaign trail, as actions in keeping with either the spirit of the Representation of the People Act or the secularism the Constitution speaks of?

There are other aspects of this symbolism-driven ‘soft Hindutva’ that are as troubling: an overriding anxiety not to be seen as sympathetic to Muslims; and a low key yet consistent messaging that underscores Mr. Gandhi’s position at the apex of the caste hierarchy as a “janeu-wearing Hindu”. The phrase, used by a Congress spokesperson after Mr. Gandhi’s visit to the Somnath temple last year, was invoked by a BJP leader recently in the context of yet another temple visit by Mr. Gandhi, when he asked, “What kind of janeu-dhari are you? What is your gotra?” The focus on Mr. Gandhi’s caste pedigree once again reveals how temple politics is never without its attendant caste politics.

Put simply, it gives the lie to Mr. Gandhi’s self-serving distinction between Hindutva and Hinduism, a distinction that is also becoming increasingly popular among an influential section of Indian liberals who, much like Mr. Gandhi, seem to have suddenly woken up to their Hindu identity in the last four years. For these ‘proud Hindus’, one of whom has recently penned a bestselling book on why he is one, the classical secularist position that one’s religion is a private matter and not an instrument to garner social or political capital is, of course, past its sell-by date.

The distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva — which only matters because of the political uses of religion —rests on two premises. First, that Hinduism is inclusive and progressive, while Hindutva is exclusionary and regressive; second, that Hinduism is individualistic and preaches tolerance, whereas Hindutva is a supremacist ideology that deploys angry mobs to subjugate other religious communities.

On Sangh Parivar’s page

While this is, no doubt, an interesting distinction, it is even more interesting that no Hindutva ideologue has ever expressed any discomfort with this definition of Hinduism that categorically rejects Hindutva. If anything, representatives of the Sangh Parivar have been pleased with the transformation of the Congress president into a tilak-wearing, temple-hopping ‘Hindu politician’.

The Congress becoming more ‘Hindu’ is but another sign of savarna consolidation, a movement of which Hindutva is the flag-bearer. Mr. Gandhi’s version of non-threatening Hinduism and the Parivar’s aggressive Hindutva are in complete agreement on one issue: caste. They both want to be the party of choice for the upper castes, and so long as this remains the case, the Congress cannot be expected to operationalise in its politics the principle of equality. In other words, liberals and other good-hearted people hoping that Mr. Gandhi and the Congress would rescue them from Hindutva may be in for a rude awakening. As is well known, god doesn’t help those who don’t help themselves.

The Opposition to Rahul Gandhi is Disturbing and Dark

Tabish Khair in The Hindu


As far back as the ascension of Sanjay Gandhi, much before the coming of the (more likeable) Rajiv Gandhi, I felt that the Nehru-Gandhi family ought to graciously retire from politics and let the Congress proceed on its own. I was very young then, probably not even in my teens, and I belonged to a family of staunch Congress supporters, but I recall feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the notion of Sanjay taking over from his mother.

I have not changed my basic position on this matter, and yet I have to say that much of the current ‘opposition’ to Rahul Gandhi has a disturbing and dark side to it. While opposition to ‘dynasty raj’ is offered as an explanation, what really exists, more often than not, is a mix of envy, resentment, neo-casteist sentiment and a disturbing kind of racism, most of it indirectly supported by major BJP politicians.

This is barely camouflaged in many online cartoons and ‘jokes’ about Rahul Gandhi, which often refer derisively to the Italian side of his family. Frequently, he is dismissed — unfairly — because he has a parent who came to India from elsewhere. This dismissal is in tandem with the dismissal of Muslims and Christians by the same elements.

Not only does this present a destructive kind of nationalism, it often verges on racist prejudice. The perpetrators of such jokes — and I use the word ‘perpetrator’ on purpose — seem to relish degrading Rahul Gandhi. Very often this is done literally, for instance in cartoons of doubtful humour that place Rahul Gandhi in an abject ‘Baba-like’ position against a ‘towering’ BJP politician. Hence also, the ‘language’ jokes about him by people who speak fewer languages than him.


The case with Nehru

This drain of resentment runs a long way. Jawaharlal Nehru encountered it too, but in more restrained ways. And for similar reasons: in his writing and lifestyle, Nehru repudiated the entire structure of upper-caste prejudices. He also repudiated the strong structure of endogamy that still sustains the caste system, and not just within Hinduism. Elements of these prejudices are visited upon Rahul Gandhi too.

But there are other elements too, of which one was probably less of an issue with Nehru: Nehru appears to have faced far less envy for his personal, educational and class advantages. This might seem surprising; after all, Nehru was a more cultivated and talented person than Rahul Gandhi or, for that matter, any other major national leader today. And yet, Nehru’s difference was largely respected by the voters then.

Some of it had to do with the person: Nehru had spent years in jail and organising for independence among ordinary people. Some of it had to do with the age: Nehru lived in a less envious age, perhaps because the discourse of easy riches and the magnifying glasses of TV and such media — which take us into houses we cannot enter in reality — was not prevalent in the period.

And yet, some of it probably has to do with character — or lack of character. No, I am not talking of Rahul Gandhi. I have no reason to suppose that he has less character than any other national leader. Actually, he seems to have more than most. I am talking of people who obviously envy him, his exposure to the world, his space of living, even (subconsciously) his lifestyle.

This is the taluk middle and lower middle class to which I belong. These are people with education and at times professional careers whose formative years were spent in small towns of India, or who are still based there. It is among these people that you find the greatest resentment of Rahul Gandhi, not among farmers or workers or born metropolitans. I have spoken to such people. I am convinced that what they unconsciously resent in Rahul Gandhi is the structural lack that keeps them where they are.


Mores in taluk towns

A taluk town has never been cut off from the rest of India, but it is now wired not just to India but to the entire world. On the other hand, the mores and social skills that prevail in taluk towns are not those that enable its denizens much space in the world. To take just one example: English. Every time I visit my home (taluk) town, I am asked not about my books, but about how to become fluent in English. This is the genuine concern of people who have English, but not sufficient fluency in it to capitalise on their other talents and skills in the world. For people like this, the easy access that Rahul Gandhi has to the world — perhaps without even the kind of hard work they have put into their own education — is deeply galling. The best among them overcome it, but the worst simmer with envy against all the Rahul Gandhis of India.

Given the sharp educational and social stratification of India, and the vast chasm between not just the rich and the poor but between metropolitan/international education and taluk education, I suspect that Rahul Gandhi has a far steeper mountain of resentment to overcome than Nehru ever had. I can understand the resentment, but I cannot accept it, for it brings out the worst in us. Politicians who capitalise on this are doing us — and India — a disfavour.

Amartya Sen and the ayatollahs of secularism

by Minhaz Merchant in the Times of India

Dr. Amartya Sen compels me to return to a subject India should have long buried: secularism. Dr. Sen’s definition of secularism is as misty-eyed as that purveyed increasingly by secular liberals who – in the classical sense of those terms – are neither. 

As I wrote in The Ayatollahs of secularism - part 2, Indians six decades ago had to make a choice between a theocratic Pakistan and a secular India: “On a cool spring day in 1950 at a California college campus, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tall, angular man of 22, was in a garrulous mood. He told my father: ‘Ah, Pakistan. See what we will do with my wonderful new country.’ My father, like young Bhutto, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was unimpressed. ‘A country founded on theocracy,’ he told Bhutto, ‘will never work.’ Bhutto walked away in a huff.” 

Sixty-three years later, has India lived up to its secular promise? The short answer: yes. The larger question: why is India secular? The answer: because the majority community is intrinsically secular. If it wasn’t, India would have been, in Shashi Tharoor’s words, a “Hindu Pakistan”: the kind Bhutto would have understood. 

So what is Amartya Sen’s definition of secularism? 

In his 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, Dr. Sen devoted 23 pages to explaining his views on secularism – without coming to a definitive conclusion. This is what he wrote in one passage: 

“Secularism in the political – as opposed to ecclesiastical – sense requires the separation of the state from any particular religious order. This can be interpreted in at least two different ways. The first view argues that secularism demands that the state be equidistant from all religions – refusing to take sides and having a neutral attitude towards them. The second – more severe – view insists that the state must not have any relation at all with any religion. The equidistance must take the form, then, of being altogether removed from each. 

“In both interpretations, secularism goes against giving any religion a privileged position in the activities of the state. In the broader interpretation (the first view), however there is no demand that the state must stay clear of any association with any religious matter whatsoever. Rather what is needed is to make sure that in so far as the state has to deal with different religions and members of different religious communities, there must be a basic symmetry of treatment.”  

Symmetry of treatment is crucial: What does symmetry imply? Clearly, equality for all, special privileges on the basis of religion to none. That is not Dr. Sen’s conclusion at the end of his 23-page chapter on secularism. And it is certainly not the secularism that – for example – the Congress practises today.

In an interview with The Economic Times, on July 22, 2013, Dr. Sen said he would like a “secular person to be prime minister” and added: “I would not like to see Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister and I’m speaking as a citizen of India.” 

Dr. Sen, on being probed further, clarified why not: “(He) generates concern and fear on the part of minorities.” 

But surely it is parties which preach secularism but practise an insidious form of communal separateness which feed a false fear among Muslim voters? 

Such “secular” parties don’t care for Muslims. They care for Muslim votes. If they had “real concern” for Muslims – a key quality in a prime minister according to Dr. Sen – Muslims would not be as poor, as deprived, as backward, as alienated and as stigmatised as they are today. 

After 54 years of Congress governments, each preaching secularism but practising the opposite, the appalling state of Muslims is a telling indictment of faux secular governance.

                                             * * *

Dr. Sen is surprisingly coy about Rahul Gandhi. When The Economic Times asked him what he thought of Rahul, Dr. Sen parried the question instead of taking it head on as would be expected of an independent mind. 

Here’s what he said: “I haven’t assessed him in that way. I know him as a different figure (not a politician). I know him as a likeable young man who was a student in Trinity College (Cambridge). We have met when I was Master of Trinity. We spent a pleasant day together. I did ask him then if he was interested in politics or not. At that time he wasn’t. However, I haven’t assessed him as a politician or a potential prime minister.” 

That’s an extraordinary answer. Rahul, the Congress vice-president, has been in electoral politics for over nine years and Dr. Sen, so knowledgeable and outspoken otherwise about Indian politics and economics, hasn’t “assessed him” yet as a politician or a potential prime minister? Surely, Rahul deserves more of Dr. Sen’s attention. 

Dr. Sen’s kerfuffle with Professors Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University over growth vs. inclusion is meanwhile a red herring. Good governance is the real answer: both economic growth and inclusion are intrinsic to it. 

The real issue is entitlement vs. empowerment. Profs Bhagwati and Panagariya rightly argue that economic growth, allied with welfare schemes which build productive capital assets (rather than the NAC-Sen-Dreze formula of handouts which create dependencies) is the most efficient development model for India. 

Who can best create that model? Certainly not those who advocate a policy of entitlement with its attendant fiscal profligacy that has so severely damaged India’s economy. 

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Earlier article

On a cool spring day over 60 years ago in California, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tall, angular man of 22, was in a garrulous mood. He told my father: “Ah, Pakistan. See what we will do with my wonderful new country.” 

My father, like young Bhutto, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was unimpressed. “A country founded on theocracy,” he told Bhutto, “will never work.” My mother, among the first Indian women-students on the Berkeley campus, agreed. Bhutto walked away in a huff.

Those were heady days after independence. Bhutto went on to become Pakistan’s youngest Cabinet Minister, at 30, in 1958. My parents returned to India after four years at Berkeley and got married. My father took charge of the family’s petrochemicals business which, thankfully, he was later liberal enough never to coerce me to join.

The difference between Pakistan and India today is the story of how a great religion, Islam, has been distorted by those entrusted to protect its liberal ethos. Pakistan and several countries in the Middle-East have used Islam not to liberate but imprison their people. But it is in “secular” India that the damage has been most insidious.

Jawaharlal Nehru was a secular man. He would have been mortified at what passes off as secularism in modern India. In its purest, most classical sense, secularism requires treating religion as a private matter. It must not enter the public domain. Pray in public or pray in private. But keep your faith at home.

Politicians who have little to offer by way of development – 24-hour electricity, water, housing, sanitation, roads, infrastructure, jobs – will use religion to divert the attention of the common man. According to the latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), over 60% of Indians consume less than Rs. 66 a day in cities and less than Rs. 25 a day in villages.

These form the poor whose grandparents were promised Garibi Hatao by Indira Gandhi during her victorious 1971 Lok Sabha election campaign. It should shame the Congress that, 41 years later, the constituency Feroze Gandhi – Indira’s husband – first entered the Lok Sabha from in 1952, Rae Bareli, and from where succeeding generations of Gandhis, including Indira and Sonia, have been elected, is one of the most backward in India. Over 70% of children below the age of 5 in Rae Bareli, for example, are moderately or severely stunted due to malnutrition (The Ayatollahs of secularism – part 1).

But secularism, not development, has been an article of faith for the Gandhis. The poor and the Muslims – the Muslims in particular – have been entrapped into a fear psychosis that warns them: vote for “the other” and you will not be safe.

The riots in Gujarat on February 28, March 1 and March 2, 2002 following the burning of kar sevaks on February 27, 2002, have come especially handy in deepening this paranoia.

Muslims from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, from Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, are in effect given this false choice: do you want to be with a “secular” party like the Congress that can guarantee your physical safety but not one square meal a day? Or do you want to be with a party where you must forever live in fear though you will have 24-hour electricity, good housing, roads, jobs and a reasonable standard of living? 

Rich electoral dividends have flowed from such fear mongering. In the process, over the decades, regional parties have grasped the fraudulent secular baton from the Congress: the Samajwadi Party (SP) may be the most notorious of these but others like the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have all dealt the duplicitous Muslim card.

Just as they eagerly copied Indira Gandhi’s destructive dynastic politics to enrich their future generations while impoverishing India’s, regional parties have effortlessly morphed into “secular” family firms engaged in exploiting Muslims by cocooning them.

                                                  *     *     *

My daughter, a budding designer, often visits areas in Mumbai to source raw materials for her work and commission artisans. Most of these artisans are Muslims. Most are very poor. Most live in buildings which could collapse any moment. She asked me: “Why doesn’t the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra, which wins elections based on votes from poor Muslims, do anything to improve their lives?”

The answer: because poor Muslims who have no time to think beyond the next meal will not have time to think of governance and development and how both have been sacrificed at the altar of secularism.

But then of course this isn’t secularism. It’s communalism, masquerading as secularism. What really can be more communal than keeping nearly an entire community of 175 million people in poverty for over six decades?

Theocratic countries like Pakistan have more liberal laws for their Muslim citizens than India has for its Muslims. Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have also reformed medieval Islamic canons.

Why not India? Because the Congress and its regional copycats fear the true liberation of the Muslim mind. That liberation could set off unintended consequences.

Electoral defeat haunts the Congress and its allies more than issues of governance and development – or even justice. That is why it has moved glacially to deliver justice to the victims of the 1984 Sikh pogrom in which over 3,000 Sikhs were killed by Congress-led hooligan-politicians.

At the same time, po-faced, it uses the 750-plus Muslims killed in Gujarat in 2002 in a riot (not a one-sided pogrom), where over 250 of the dead were Hindus, to extract cynical political advantage with the help of its NGO cottage industry.

Muslim leaders have been willing accomplices in this tragedy. Mullahs issue regressive fatwas against Muslim women and edicts against sensible civil laws. Instead of condemning such fatwas, the government maintains a studied silence, tacitly encouraging extremism and keeping ordinary Muslims stuck in a time warp.

The two real enemies of the Muslim – communal politicians masquerading as secular politicians to win votes and Mullahs deliberately misinterpreting the holy book to retain power over their flock – form a natural alliance. Together they have enriched themselves but impoverished India’s Muslims, materially and intellectually, in the name of secularism. These are the Ayatollahs of secularism.

                                                  *     *     *

That brings us to the third angle in this infamous triangle: the liberal, secular Hindu. Where does he stand in all this? He is naturally secular in the truest sense of the word: religion is a private matter, he rightly believes. It has no place in politics.

But he is also swayed by the plight of his fellow-Indians who happen to be Muslims: impoverished, illiterate, ghettoized, discriminated against. For every Azim Premji and Aamir Khan there are millions of weavers in UP and spot boys in Mumbai who have no place in corporate India’s organized labour force.

Liberal, well-meaning Hindus ask why. And the answer they come up with is: communal discrimination. Yet the liberal Hindu doesn’t dig deeper. The more politicians sequester Muslims into vote silos, the more the middle-class Hindu (not the liberal, well-meaning, Stephanian Hindu) resents them. Discrimination, petty or large, mounts.

The real culprits – communal politicians dressed up as secular politicians – get away scot-free in this narrative. The liberal, secular Hindu’s anger against anti-Muslim communalism is therefore misdirected – far away from these real culprits.

The liberal, secular Hindu meanwhile points to “Hindutva” as the real fount of communalism. Is he right? This is how the Supreme Court defined Hindutva when specifically asked to do so in December 1995:

Considering the terms Hinduism or Hindutva per se as depicting hostility, enmity or intolerance towards other religious faiths or professing communalism, proceeds from an improper appreciation and perception of the true meaning of these expressions. These terms (Hinduism or Hindutva) are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practicing the Hindu religion as a faith.”

                                                 *     *     *

Today it costs a candidate between Rs. 10 crore and Rs. 50 crore to fight a Lok Sabha election. Over the next 18 months, political parties will need to raise over Rs. 20,000 crore to contest 543 Lok Sabha seats. The potential from future scams has shrunk. Corporate cash donations have been hit – ironically – by the government’s own economic paralysis. Team Anna's decision to fight elections has introduced a new political calculus.

For "secular" parties, 2014 is an election in which they will now have to rely more than ever on raising a fear psychosis against leaders like Narendra Modi who threaten their hold on power – and the financial pipeline that accompanies it but never finds its way into developmental projects, especially for Muslims. After all, they matter only once every five years.

                                               *     *     *

Influential sections of especially the electronic media, suffused with hearts bleeding from the wrong ventricle, are part of this great fraud played on India’s poor Muslims: communalism dressed up as secularism. The token Muslim is lionized – from business to literature – but the common Muslim languishes in his 65-year-old ghetto. It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to SIMI and IM are most easily found.

Sixty years ago on that Berkeley campus my father told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto why Pakistan would fail as a state. Today, my daughter, as she visits Muslim-dominated ghettos for sourcing her raw materials, sees how Muslim India too has failed. The single biggest cause: communalism – but in quite the opposite way the Congress, SP and other “secular” parties define it.

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Earlier Article

Indira Gandhi introduced the term secularism in the preamble to the Constitution with the 42^nd Constitution Amendment Act, 1976, during the draconian Emergency.

Twenty-six years earlier, in 1950, the framers of our Constitution, led by Babasaheb Ambedkar, had not felt it necessary to include the word – despite the recent horrors of communal riots following Partition.

Ever since, the Congress has used secularism and socialism (a term also introduced into the Constitution by Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency) to define itself as the party of the aam admi.  

So how has the aam admi fared in over 53 years of Congress governments, 36 of them under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and their appointed CEO-Prime Ministers, P.V.Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh?

Badly. Poverty remains endemic. India is placed 134^th on the Human Development Index (HDI). Over 14,000 farmers across India commited suicide in 2011. Malnutrition persists. The Naandi Foundation released a report in January this year – at the hands of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – on widespread child malnutrition (http://www.naandi.org/)

In an edit page piece in The Economic Times (Rich MPs, Poor Voters), I wrote how, even as children and farmers die, politicians have become ever-wealthier. 

Who is to blame? Obviously, the Congress. It has run India for roughly 81% of independent India’s history. The Opposition, especially in the states, must share some responsibility for the Congress’ failure. But make no mistake: the responsibility for the poverty and malnutrition India suffers from 65 years after independence lies squarely at the doorstep of the Congress.

It has misused the term socialism to enshrine poverty, not eradicate it. The poorer the voter, the easier it is to win his vote without bothering about real development issues.

The second Emergency-origin term the Congress has misused is secularism. The word for “secular” in Hindi is panthnirpeksha. In 1977, when Mrs. Gandhi’s government was voted out soon after the Emergency was revoked, the new Janata Party government introduced a Constitutional Amendment Bill. The word “secular” was sought to be defined in the Constitution as “equal respect for all religions”.

The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha where the Janata Party held a majority. But it was defeated in the Rajya Sabha where the Congress had a majority. Why did the Congress reject 35 years ago the 1977-79 Lok Sabha’s definition of secularism – “equal respect for all religions”?

Consider now what UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi said during a lecture at the Nexus Institute in the Hague on June 9, 2007: “India is a secular country. The term means equal respect for all religions.”

How does Sonia’s definition of secularism differ from Narendra Modi’s? Who is really more secular? Modi? Or Sonia? Or Nitish, Digvijay, Lalu, Paswan, Mulayam, Karunanidhi, Omar Abdullah and Owaisi?