A couple of years ago I had the misfortune of sharing the roof with a Congress party underling: a petty office bearer of its minority cell. He had nothing to his credit except his Muslim name. But that was precisely why the Congress needed him. And he needed the Congress party to earn his bread and butter. So the mutually beneficial relationship flowered. If the Congress party's tokenism ended with the Muslim man's inclusion into their peripheral outfit, his `pledge' to ``serve'' took a different route. We were inundated with telephone calls from harassed citizens who said they had coughed up large amounts of money to this office bearer for gas connections, telephone lines and school admissions and he had been playing hide-and-seek with them.This case shows how the Congress party plays a dangerous game with the Muslim community. Fifty years after independence, the party's minority gameplan seems to be folding up. The Muslims have at long last understood the politics of being exploited so that theCongressmen can mint money at all levels. The Babri Masjid demolition may have helped articulture Muslim disenchantment with the Congress, but surely the December 6 episode was only the last straw and not the beginning of the Muslim `no' to the Congress party. If the Congress wishes to introspect on its vanishing Muslim card, it needs to think beyond December 6. For surely the political developments of the last six years have made it clear that the Babri Masjid issue is not that of only the Muslims. It concerns all those who believe in the sanctity of the secular democratic fabric of this country. The real issues of the Muslims are their educational backwardness and their pathetic economic and social conditions.
But delinking the Masjid with the Muslim community and addressing the real Muslim agenda would mean transforming the Congress culture. A process no Congressman is willing to initiate. It is in this context that the politics of tokenism as is shown in the Congress manifesto becomes the last nail onthe Congress coffin as far as the Muslims are concerned. For the Congress, it was politically suicidal to issue such a manifesto. By making an apology for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and denying a ticket to Narasimha Rao for his failure to protect the mosque, the Congress has resolved not to address the real issues concerning the health, education and economic conditions of the Muslims.
The Muslims have moved much beyond the Babri Masjid and have begun to see through the Congress gimmicks. The Masjid issue -- no doubt an emotive one for the Muslims -- has been used to settle intra-party feuds and factional fights within the Congress party. It is more than clear that a beleaguered Narasimha Rao has been politically fixed by the upbeat Kesri camp ostensibly for a crime for which the entire government was responsible. By this logic, many (particularly the Muslim bandwagon of Kesri) who today call the shots in the party should also be denied tickets for their silence in 1992-93 when communal frenzygripped the country.
There is no doubt that bringing the Babri Masjid issue central to the Congress manifesto has alienated the north Indian Muslims from the Congress. One wonders how the Congress hopes to win over the south Indian Muslims by evoking the Babri issue. In Pondicherry, an ecstatic taxi driver, who also happened to be a Congress partyworker, explained to me at length how the BJP had no future in the South because, as he put it, ``Babri Masjid doesn't matter in the South -- not even amongst the Muslims.'' Little did he realise that the Babri Masjid would be central to the manifesto of a party the election slogan of which is: Poore Bharat se natha hai, sarkar Chalana Aata hai (Representatives of the whole of India, the Congress knows how to run the government).
The Congress party, far from having a sensitive finger on the pulse of the nation's largest minority, is not even able to read the bold message on the wall: quit gracefully or get hounded out.
The writer is an assistantprofessor of history at JNU
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
