The rise and fall Cong role models including Nehru

Ravi Shankar writes: 

If the expedience of history perverts values, perversions of perception create history. The campaign against Narendra Modi as the ‘maut ka saudagar’ who seeks to turn India into a totalitarian Hindu state where Muslims live in fear started sometime in 1936. It marked the emergence of the Congress party’s schizophrenic politics—one aspect inspired by tragic emotion, the other by a cynical electoral calculus. It also indicated the rise and fall of India’s role models.

From the 1930s to 50s, the Congress was a work in progress, and the dramatic personae were Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Jinnah and the Indian Muslim. As Congress role models disappeared or were dwarfed through the years, and the party clung to a fading dynastic iconography, the seraphims of the Hindu gestalt continued to prosper. Sardar Patel believed India belonged to all religions, but could not be held hostage to minority policies. As the decades passed, the BJP pantheon only grew—Golwalkar, Nanaji Deshmukh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani and now Narendra Modi—as the Gandhis syntactically emasculated Congress stalwarts. This election is not a conflict of ideology but of isology; between a party that scatters its original inclusive values and one that consolidates the legacy of its role models.

Before Independence, Congress role models included Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Jinnah and Abdul Gaffar Khan. In the provincial legislative council elections held in 1936, the Muslim League (ML) fared badly, and Jinnah saw the chance to become an Islamic role model. In 1929, ML issued a charter of demands to Nehru that included reservation for Muslims, allowing of cow slaughter, abolition of Vande Mataram, Urdu as the national language, changing the Tricolour and more. Nehru refused. But in 1947, when the Partition riots erupted, he personally intervened to protect Muslims, becoming India’s first unifying role model. Across the border, however, Jinnah refused to intervene as Muslims mobs murdered and raped Hindus and Sikhs, and Pakistan’s first role model was born.
After the 1937 elections in UP, the Congress formed the government on its own, abandoning its poll partner, the ML. As a result, the Congress lost all Muslim seats in 1946. It desperately needed an enemy to regain minority support. The Hindu Mahasabha was the obvious choice and thus, the seed of communal politics was sown.

It is the caste factor that keeps the Indian Muslim backward. Lower-caste Muslims form the majority, and are the biggest minority vote bank. A uniform civil code does not exist because of the fear of losing this vote bank. Article 370 stays, also because of the same reason. This is the segment that populist politicans like Mulayam, Lalu, Nitish, Mamata and Kejriwal woo with reservations, job quotas and special privileges. Now Congress is promising a sub-quota.

There is little empirical evidence that Modi is a role model of hate. Ironically, the largest number of riots in which thousands of Muslims perished happened under the Congress rule—Bhagalpur in 1989, Ahmedabad in 1969, Moradabad in 1980 and Nellie in 1983, to name a few. Except that 2002 riots happened under Modi’s watch, there has been not a single communal incident in Gujarat. A National Sample Survey of the last seven years shows that in rural Gujarat, the number of BPL Muslims fell from 31 per cent to 7 per cent. In the cities, it declined from 42 per cent to 14.6 per cent. The maximum per capita expenditure of Muslims in rural Gujarat increased from Rs 209 to Rs 291, and in urban Gujarat from Rs 259 to Rs 328 in the last seven years. Seventy-four per cent of Muslims in Gujarat are literate. In UP and Bihar, however—where communal politics is the norm—one-third of the Muslim population lives below the poverty line. Refusing to wear a skull cap hardly negates development. Sonia doesn’t wear a bindi nor Rahul the sacred thread.

A true role model represents a universal truth whose roots are based in an enduring culture. Others merely occupy pedestals that topple in the storms of change.