As he rolls up his sleeves
Jawed Naqvi
It will be 25 years since the destruction of the Babri Masjid on
December 6. Rahul Gandhi said in the aftermath if a Gandhi had been in the
saddle at the time the crime wouldn’t have been allowed. We don’t
mind taking him for his word. The young leader hasn’t described Muslims has
puppies prone to coming under the wheel of a speeding car. Nor has he poked a
Christian or a Dalit in the eye.
Gandhi is poised to become the new Congress party president. Far
from any power grab that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has accused him of, he
seems to be akin to a sacrificial lamb his mother has been reluctant to make an
offering of.
The mother knows that in the violence-wracked political
battlefield that India has become, the young Gandhi will be more, not less,
vulnerable to harm than his ill-fated father or grandmother were. Now that he
has rolled up his sleeves, however, his work ahead is multipronged, of which
two problems need immediate attention — economic loot and cynically stoked
social fault lines that have deepened with the advent of Mr Modi.
Economic villainy has strengthened its hold on politics, as has
religiously cloaked barbarism that brazenly poses as nationalism. The
combination licks into shape Gandhi’s fascist challenge. Rahul’s grandmother
took away the usurious banks of these challengers and then locked them up under
the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act. COFEPOSA
was one of the less disagreeable spin-offs of the emergency and it would have
deterred the rise of Hindu and Muslim Dawood Ibrahims had it not been
dismantled by Indira Gandhi’s hare-brained successors.
It was during the Congress party’s centenary celebrations in
Mumbai in 1985 when a squeaky clean Rajiv Gandhi sent out his inspired call to
get the culture of ‘moneybags’ off the backs of the Congress workers. The
moneybags retaliated swiftly, using his closest friends and trusted family
members, and through the media they owned. They successfully put the Bofors mud
on his face, which curiously and studiously spared the rogue friends and family
retainers, the real suspects in the crime.
Mr Modi was half right when he said during the ongoing election
rallies last week that the Gandhis have contempt for Gujarat. With Feroze
Gandhi, a handpicked Gujarati student of Mahatma Gandhi, at the foundation of
the family, Modi’s claim about the family’s aversion to Gujaratis simply
doesn’t wash. What he was perhaps referring to was the tradition, initiated by
Feroze Gandhi himself, of keeping a close eye on unscrupulous businesses, led
by the Gujarati ones shoring up Modi’s crony cabal. It may not be a coincidence
that the two big tycoons being made an example of today — Vijay Mallya and
Subrata Roy — do not fit in with the linguistic and regional profile of those
in ascendance under Modi’s watch.
After the centenary speech, the cabal seems to have resolved that
no one from the Gandhi family would again lead India. When Sonia Gandhi was
denied her bid for the top job at the last minute, it was Mulayam Singh Yadav
who pulled the plug on her. And we know his links with the moneybags that Rajiv
had warned of.
It is a welcome sign for the Congress and for India that we have
heard Rahul Gandhi naming names of some of the more unruly businessmen during
election rallies and in parliament. The new Congress leader has chided Modi for
unfairly favouring handpicked businesses, one of them named in a new French warplanes
deal.
There is one big name, the biggest perhaps, missing though among
those he named. This tycoon is the biggest bête-noir of the Aam Aadmi Party and
its leader Arvind Kejriwal. Under Rahul, there seems to be a sliver of hope
here, however. For the first time, as far as one can tell, Kejriwal directed
his supporters to vote for the Congress (garbed as ‘anyone’ who could defeat
the BJP) in Gujarat. As the so-called Radia tapes revealed, the political reach
of unscrupulous tycoons is deep. Rahul can perhaps already feel some of the
go-betweens surrounding him as they did his father. His fight begins in his own
sanctum sanctorum, therefore, which will immediately connect his larger battle
to rural distress, galloping unemployment and beyond. Does he feel up to it?
There is nothing particularly wrong about going to temples if that
helps Rahul Gandhi come close to the voters. That’s India. Rahul’s father did
one worse. He got his head kicked (thus blessed) by a maverick priest in
Ayodhya who would hang from a tree to grant boons with his foot. It was
something bizarre for an enlightened leader though not as disagreeable as his
opposing the Supreme Court’s secular hand of help to a Muslim divorcee, or as
unappealing as opening the locks of a disputed temple in Ayodhya to woo Hindu
votes, which he didn’t get.
The overriding challenge for Rahul Gandhi will be to confront
religious fascism head on. He may have to begin by restoring academic
institutions to the care of the country’s globally respected secular academics.
He may have to also fumigate these institutions of any sectarian and
obscurantist residue that has built up under Modi’s tenure. Reviving cases
against the politically powerful criminals in Gujarat and elsewhere will be a
challenge he cannot shy away from. And if he feels diffident, he should hand
over the job to someone who doesn’t. Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, or even
Mayawati are excellent allies. The communist chief minister of Kerala would be
another great comrade provided the latter’s party agrees to join the Congress
in the fight against the challenge of fascism.
It would all add up to building castles in the air, however, if
the opposition parties would not first come together to prevent another
Muzaffarnagar, the assured route to success of the present dispensation.
Changing India’s destiny for the better will require a closer scrutiny of the
electronic voting system, which appears to work for the cabal that is seen to
have falsified the people’s will. The pattern of electronically manipulated
results as reported from the recent civic polls in Uttar Pradesh is evidence of
the first challenge that Rahul Gandhi faces before he can begin his quest for
India’s soul.
Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2017
