(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)
I do not usually read the comments on my weekly blog because they are mostly so illiterate, misspelled and ungrammatical as to make any perusal of them a waste of time. But I did go through every comment on my last blog explaining the BJP's resounding defeat in the Delhi elections. One theme running through the comments did, I thought, deserve consideration - namely, what did I have to say about the Congress failing to open its account and 63 of its 70 candidates losing their deposits? I intend to do this today, but only after clarifying that I write this column not on behalf of the Congress, but as a way of airing my own opinions on issues of the day. Some of the time, I daresay, this coincides with the official Congress position, but it is precisely because much of the time I am out on my own limb that the Party takes such great care to ensure that I am not its official spokesman. I have too much of a mind of my own to toe anyone else's line.
I think it was evident to every Congress supporter after the December 2013 Delhi elections that the Delhi voter felt that after giving the Congress three straight wins, it was time for a change. That is par for the course in a democracy. Can you immediately think of any party having won four elections or more in a row? Apart from the Congress' own record of five straight wins in the first five general elections, when our democracy was still very young, I can only think of one: the Sikkim Sangram Parishad. Perhaps the CPI-M will equal that record next time in Tripura and the BJD in Odisha. The point is that defeating the ruling party after giving it three straight wins is the norm in a vigorous democracy.
What was telling, however, about the December 2013 defeat was the scale of the Congress defeat - down to 8 from a huge, consistent majority. That had everything to do with the reverberations of the India Against Corruption campaign that had caught the imagination of the people of the capital -although, curiously, it had failed to click anywhere else, perhaps because the political elite is nowhere more visible than in Delhi. At a time when IAC was abusing every politician in sight, I had advised Arvind Kejriwal on a TV programme that if he wanted to make a difference, he should stop trying to do it from within civil society and instead enter the political arena. At the time, he appeared to demur, but subsequently formed a political party and threw himself, with energy and innovation, into the only proper sphere for politics in a democracy - which is politics. We knew in the 2013 campaign that his appeal had traction in the city, but I am sure it came as a surprise - albeit a welcome surprise - to Kejriwal himself when he won as many seats as he did. The lesson the Congress had to learn then was that while Delhi's voters were shying away from the Congress they had voted to office for 15 long years, they would not vote for the BJP if they had a credible alternative. That alternative was Kejriwal, then in the wings.
Although the defeat of the Congress was crushing in 2013, at least it was not a double whammy: the BJP did not get Congress votes and that was a huge relief. For our enemy could never be the up and rising AAP; it was at best a regional rival. The real enemy of the Congress (I deliberately do not use the word "opponent" but "enemy") is the BJP. The BJP and its army of Sangh Parivarists and assorted communal fanatics stands for an India that is the polar opposite of everything that secularist socialist Nehruvians like myself stand for. They represent those who encouraged and caused the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. They venerate the likes of VD Savarkar, author and philosopher of the word "Hindutva". They are those who emulated the massacres of Hindu minorities in Pakistan by carrying out at partition a similar pogrom against Muslim minorities in India. It is their politics that is based on a denial of Indian pluralism, particularly in the religious sphere, of the synthesis and the sharing of spiritual ideas that has characterized the evolution of India's civilization for five millennia. It is they who have nutty notions of the history of India, in particular of the 666 years, from 1192 to 1858, that there was always a Muslim sultan on the throne of Delhi - a period that witnessed the rise of the Bhakti movement, climaxing in the Ten Gurus of Sikhism, under the influence of the egalitarian ideas that had invaded the Indian psyche with the advent of the Message of the Prophet (PBUH), leaving the Hindus in a majority of 76% after close to seven centuries of Muslim political rule.
It is also they who ignore the entire history of Buddhism being driven out of the country of its birth and Buddhist shrines desecrated that characterized the end of close on a millennium of India having been less a Hindu than a Buddhist and Jain country. It is they who know not that India was the first country in history to have an organized Christian church - the Syrian Christian church that flourishes to this day in Kerala. It is they who have bizarre notions of technological development in ancient India which obscure real achievement with fantasies. The BJP and its cohort comprise an omnipresent threat to the India that all Indians (other than the sanghis) want. Hence, my choice of the word "enemy" to describe them. To all other opponents of the Congress - and they are legion - I restrict myself to the term "opponent".
In some measure, most Congress supporters recognize that while our fundamental idea of India is shared by the entire non-Congress spectrum from extreme left to right, the Sangh Parivar represents all that we most fear about the future of the India of our dreams. That is why any Congress voter disillusioned - for whatever reason - with the Congress, looks first for anyone other than the BJP to shift his allegiance. We saw that dramatically happening in 1977, when the Congress vote shifted bodily out of the Congress but went to the Jana Sangh only to the extent that the then Jana Sangh dissolved itself in the alternative secular identity of the Janata Party. We also saw it in the decisive rejection of the Jana Sangh, reincarnated as the BJP, at the elections of 1984 - an elections which returned fewer BJP MPs to Parliament from the whole country than the BJP won from Delhi alone in the recent Delhi elections. In the states too, over long years, we have seen the Congress vote repeatedly drift to regional parties and Left Fronts but not towards the BJP until the mid-90s where credible secular alternatives to the Congress did not emerge (Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh etc.). When a credible non-Congress, non-BJP alternative emerges, the Congress vote largely shifts to the secular alternative, not the BJP. We saw this with the long rule of the Samajwadi in UP, of Lalu/Nitish in Bihar, of the Left Front in Kerala, West Bengal and now most spectacularly in Tripura. We have seen this also with the two Dravidian principals in Tamil Nadu and regional parties like the BJD, the Trinamool, the Sikkim Sangram Parishad and the NC/PDP in J and K (generally, if not today, in tandem with the Congress).
It was, therefore, only to be expected that when a credible alternative to the Congress/BJP emerged in Delhi in the shape of the AAP, some of the disillusioned Congress vote should drift to the secular AAP, whose fundamental philosophy reminds one so much of the pristine Nehruvian Congress. The trouncing of the AAP (and of the Congress) in the country and in Delhi in 2014 was a giant breath of relief at Modi projecting himself as the Sikandar of Development rather than the Forerunner of Hindu Raj. Since the last eight months have seen no development, only slogans, but a great deal of Hindutva, the Delhi Congress voter, who was temporarily deceived into voting for Modi in the general elections, found that with the restoration of credibility to the AAP, he did have a secular alternative to the Congress - and so voted for the AAP. Disillusioned BJP voters also voted for AAP since the committed BJP voter would never vote for the Congress for the same reason that the Congress voter, except exceptionally, does not vote saffron.
Which still leaves unanswered the question as to why I am gloating over the AAP victory instead of shedding copious tears over the resounding Congress defeat? Very simple, really. When the Delhi voter gets disillusioned with the AAP, he will come back to the Congress, not to go to the BJP. So, assuming the AAP stumbles, as I am inclined to believe it will, we only have to sit it out for five years. That may seem a long time to the BJP. But for the Congress, which has seen many ups and downs in its life of 129 years, five years is but a wink of time. To the distress of those who week after week abuse me, I am sorry to tell them that we will be back, sooner than later. Our preference is always for the last laugh.
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