Salman Khurshid has rubbed salt into Congress’ wounds

Congress leader and former Union minister Salman Khurshid’s comparison of “robust version” of Hindutva to the jihadist Islam of terror groups Islamic State and Boko Haram is a setback for his party that has been desperately trying to shed its pro-Muslims tag, especially after the beating it got in the 2014 (and 2019) Lok Sabha elections.

Since the 2014 defeat, the Congress has made many attempts to woo the majority community by playing what many liberals call a ‘soft-Hindutva’ card.

The Background

After the drubbing in the 2014 parliamentary elections, the Congress asked veteran leader AK Antony to identify the reasons for the party’s poll debacle. A few of the factors he had zeroed in were the strategy of pitching the Lok Sabha polls as a secularism versus communalism battle, and the perceived minority appeasement by the Congress.

Even Congress President Sonia Gandhi once openly admitted it though she blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for creating that perception. “The BJP has managed to convince and persuade people that the Congress is a Muslim party,” she had said in March 2018.

Temple Visits

Prior to that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi kicked off his countrywide temple run. In September 2016, he became the first member of the Gandhi family to visit Ayodhya since the demolition of the Babri masjid in December 1992. Former Prime Minister and Rahul Gandhi’s father Rajiv Gandhi had visited Ayodhya in 1990.

Rahul Gandhi later undertook frequent visits to temples in Gujarat during his campaign trail for the 2017 assembly elections. It did help the Congress in registering its best-ever electoral performance in the state in two decades, and coming in a striking distance of ousting the BJP from power.

While Sonia Gandhi justified her son’s temple visits, in 2017, Congress’ chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala referred to Rahul Gandhi a “janeu dhari (sacred thread-wearing) Brahmin”.

On many occasions, Rahul Gandhi insisted that he is a ‘Shiv bhakt’ (devotee of Lord Shiva), a Kashmiri Brahmin, and that his gotra (caste identity) is Dattatreya.

His temple run continued in subsequent elections though the BJP came back to power with a landslide victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Ayodhya Verdict

Another image makeover attempt was seen after the Supreme Court verdict on Ayodhya in November 2019. The grand old party of Indian politics not only welcomed the judgment, but also sought to take credit for paving the way for the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya.

The party claimed that it was a Congress-led government at the Centre in 1993 that acquired the 67-acre land outside the disputed 2.77-acre land, that it was the Rajiv Gandhi government had allowed the ‘shilanyas’ or a ground-breaking ceremony near the Babri masjid, and that it was instrumental in deciding to open the doors of the Ram temple in 1986.

The shift in its stance was too apparent. The Congress had throughout maintained that it will abide by the Supreme Court verdict while supporting any negotiated settlement arrived at by the parties concerned. At the same time, it had held that the demolition of the masjid was a “shameful and criminal act for which the perpetrators must be brought to justice”.

The Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, passed a unanimous resolution stating that it respected the Supreme Court verdict, and favoured the construction of the Ram temple.

Catch-22

Thus, Khurshid, a permanent invitee to the CWC, equating political Hindutva with jihadist Islam in his new book, Sunrise Over Ayodhya, will obviously rile a large number of Congress leaders who are currently on an overdrive to correct the impression that the party is no longer a pro-Muslim one.

Interestingly, the only leader who has so far spoken on his remarks is another Muslim leader in the Congress, Ghulam Nabi Azad. Azad dismissed the comparison as “factually wrong” and as “an exaggeration”, and went on to talk about the composite culture of Hinduism.

The discomfort in the Congress is not only about the contents, but the timing as well.

UP Elections

Khurshid’s remarks come barely a few months ahead of the assembly elections in India’s politically important state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, remarks by various leaders, including Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, on Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah has already heated up politics.

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is strongly following her brother’s temple-run strategy in Uttar Pradesh, and the remarks by Khurshid, who is the chairman of Congress’ manifesto committee for the UP polls, are bound to derail her plan.

The remarks on Jinnah, and now Khurshid’s comment, are most likely to shift the narrative from price rise, unemployment, and COVID-19 deaths — and it is anybody’s guess which political party in Uttar Pradesh is going to benefit from this shift.

The Congress has consistently failed in driving home the point that minority and majority communalism are equally dangerous for India. More than ever this needs to be reiterated now. As for the Congress, it should realise that it does not stand a chance in beating the BJP in its game of mixing religion and politics.

Aurangzeb Naqshbandi is a senior journalist who has been covering the Congress for 15 years, and is currently associated with Pixstory.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.