Finally, the heir to the throne has spoken and given his people what they had been clamouring for long—his take on Indian politics. We were told that he is being tutored and for someone who has been to Cambridge and Harvard, his education seemed to be taking a lot of time, much to hiscourtiers' consternation. One is left wondering though if the country, or atleast the Muslims of UP don't deserve something better than a cynical charade.
"Had anyone from the Gandhi family been alive then (on December 6, 1992), it (the Babri masjid demolition) would not have happened at all,"said Rahul Gandhi. And the reason for this confidence—"I have heard from my father telling my mother that he would have stood in front of the masjid to protect it." Leaving aside the small quibble as to when exactly did Rajiv Gandhi say this and if he was already aware that his disastrous flirtations with Hindu (and Muslim) fundamentalism would inevitably lead to a situation where the very structure of the Babri mosque would be under threat, one is left to wonder at the sheer political naiveté and the historical ignorance ofthis assertion.
It is then followed by a rather juvenile demonstration of dynastic arrogance when Rahul Gandhi declaims, "If one Hindustani tries to harm another, I promise I will come in between. Please remember that I am the grandson of Indira Gandhi." One doesn’t remember hearing even a squeak from this grandson of Indira Gandhi when Muslims were being massacred in Gujarat in 2002. And it is precisely because he is the grandson of Indira Gandhi and the son of Rajiv Gandhi that one should be wary of his claims that he or his family is suited to upholding the secular credentials of Indian polity.
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India continues to survive as a secular, democratic republic not because Indians are blessed with one particulardynasty but despite it. Because the founding fathers of India were prescient enough to build political institutions sturdy enough to withstand the occasional upheavals. They are not perfect and they have let us down a number oftimes—be it, to randomly list events easy to recall, in 1984, 1992 or in 2002—but they do provide us the opportunity to rectify the political imbalance. The inability of the Congress to find its footing in northern India and the voting out of the NDA government is a testament to the continuing vibrancy of these institutions.
By invoking his family as the sole guarantor of India’s secular fabric, Rahul Gandhi has indeed demonstrated what Sushma Swaraj, in one of her rare perceptive outbursts, called "the feudal mentality." So, the reason that Babri masjid demolition happened was that India had the misfortune of being governed by a Prime Minister who was not from thedynasty and so was not worthy of the august office? It is almost as if the events of December 6, 1992 happened in a political vacuum, as if the locks of the Babri masjid were not opened in 1986 by the Rajiv Gandhi government, as if the VHP was not allowed to perform shilanyas in 1989 on the so-called "undisputed" land, as if Rajiv Gandhi himself did not launch the Congress campaign for the 1989 polls from Ayodhya. The government of Rajiv Gandhi, however, could not be blamed for its lack ofeven-handedness, though, for it was not only in cahoots with Hindu fundamentalists,but also going out of its way to appease their Muslim counterparts by overturning the verdict of the Supreme Court on the Shah Banocase and banning a book that nobody possibly have cared less about.
But of course that is not the history that the loyal foot-soldiers of 10 Janpath would like us to remember. The only way the Congressmen and women of today can absolve themselves of what happened in 1992 is by laying all the blame on P V Narasimha Rao. So now Subodh Kant Sahay informs us that Congress leaders were unhappy with Rao’s handling of the situation. For all weknow, this might well be true. But did anyone in the top hierarchy of the Congress party resign after the incident?No; the only defections, by Arjun Singh and Co, took place much later and that too when they felt that they were losing political influence even as Rao was going from strength to strength. And let us also not forget that our present Prime Minister and a number of his cabinet colleagues were distinguished members of the Rao government all along.
Ever since the Congress party’s political debacle in 1996, Narasimha Rao has become for Congresswallahs of all hues a favourite target, a source of all that was wrong with the Congress during those years when no one from thedynasty was available to take care of them. In their attempts to woo 10 Janpath, they have tried to paint Raowith as black a brush as possible. After all, the evil that men do lives after them;while the good is oft interred with their bones. However, Rao’s stewardship of India remains a highly successful one by any measure and it came at a time when India was facing extraordinary challenges on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. A lesser leader would have been overwhelmed and would have folded under such enormous pressure from all sides. It was to Rao’s credit that he navigated India through those turbulent times towards what many now see as its status of a major global power.
Manmohan Singh himself made it clear long back that the real architect of India’s economic reforms was Rao, as without his political acumen, the reform process would have got stuck at the very start. Rao laid the foundation of much of India’s contemporary foreign policies—his opening up to Israel, carefully balancing it with a partnership with Iran, strengthening ties with China, crafting "Look East" policy, and framing a new approach towards America. His deft handling of the problem in Punjab and his initiation of political process on Jammu and Kashmir gave India a certain stability that it badly needed at the time. None other than Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself has acknowledged Rao as the true father of Shakti nuclear tests of 1998.
Indeed, his inability to prevent the events of December 6, 1992 remains a singular failure of his leadership and his government. But it was a collective failure too, of the Congress party and of Rao’s predecessors who thought that they would be able to disembark from the tiger of fundamentalism that they were riding without being devoured. The result is for all to see.
But what will not work in this day and age is an attempt by the Congress to wave the flag of thedynasty and hope that its past would be forgotten. The more Congress tries to search for a short-cut to power in UP by resorting to historical amnesia, the more difficult it will find to effectively tackle present challenges because only by an honest acceptance of the past, can one alter it. It was hoped that the new generation of politicians would bring with them a new political agenda to the political mainstream, an agenda that focused on good governance and went beyond the mandir-masjid-mandal-kamandal quartet that seemed to have made UP a prisoner of the past. Instead what we get is a desperate attempt by Rahul Gandhi to don a skull cap at Deoband and raise the ghost of Babri masjid,in what can then only be seen as an utterly cynical communal political move, that is as despicable as the BJP’s recent attempts to revive Hindu nationalism as its main election plank.
If this is what amounts to Congress’s electoral strategy and if Rahul Gandhi isthe best it has got, and if this is what he has to offer, then not only the party but the future of thedynasty itself seems to be in peril.
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Harsh Pant teaches at King’s College London
