For the Congress, the challenge in Uttar Pradesh is to build on the gains it made in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, when it won 21 of the 80 seats in the State, while steering clear of both Hindu and Muslim extremist elements. (It now has 22 LS seats in U.P., as it won another seat in a by-election, wresting the Firozabad seat from the Samajwadi Party.) With Assembly elections due a year and a half away, that test is drawing closer.
The Congress must deal with the Mulayam Singh-led Samajwadi Party working hard to win back the Muslim vote, while countering the propaganda of the RSS that the Congress is an anti-Hindu party, bent on silencing “patriotic and nationalist voices in the country by wrongly implicating functionaries of the RSS.”
If top Congress leaders targeted the Sangh parivar at its recently concluded AICC session in Delhi, a senior party functionary here revealed on Saturday that Azam Khan, who has recently re-joined the Samajwadi Party in U.P., had been keen to join the Congress, but the party leadership had turned down his offer. Mr Khan had been a leading light of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee in the early 1990s and is known to be an intemperate – if powerful – speaker with a strong base in U.P.’s Rampur district, and a good following elsewhere in the State.
“Azam Khan, it was felt,” Congress sources said, “was too radical for the Congress. His kind of politics, like that of the RSS, does not lead to peace and harmony. The polity stands to lose, as communal harmony gets disturbed.” This view is in line with Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s oft-quoted comment, which he has repeated on many occasions: that the RSS is “fanatical” and is no different from the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) as, according to him, both hold “fundamentalist” views.
For the SP, which slipped from the 35 seats it had won in the general elections in 2004 down to 23 in 2009 (now 22 as it has since lost the Firozabad seat to the Congress), the keenness to get Azam Khan back is part of a long term strategy to win back the minority vote, as is Mr. Mulayam’s comments on the Ayodhya verdict. A few days after the judgment was delivered, the SP leader said the Muslim community was feeling sad and cheated by the High Court verdict as it was based on “faith and belief, rather than on the basis of evidence and legal positions.”
Since then, a Hindu Mahasabha activist in Meerut has filed a case against Mr Mulayam, saying his statement promotes enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, and a local court has now fixed November 12 as the next date of hearing in the case. If the case helps to polarise communal sentiments, the SP and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — down and out in UP — could gain electorally. In the LS elections in the State last year, the BJP just about hung on to the 10 seats it had won in 2004.
If Mr. Mulayam was critical of the judgment, the Congress was confused. It went from “welcoming” the Ayodhya verdict and urging all citizens to accept it to expressing “respect” for the judicial process and stressing that the judgment in no way weakened the case against those who had demolished the Babri Masjid. The second statement, made by the Congress Working Committee, came after the realisation that the minorities were upset by the verdict, party sources said. Whether the party’s change of line, reiterated by Congress president Sonia Gandhi at the recent AICC session will convince the Muslims of U.P. that their future lies with the party is yet to be tested.
Simultaneously, the Congress will have to take on the all-India bandh called by the RSS on November 10 against what it describes as “vindictive and politically motivated anti-Hindu and anti-RSS canards” politically and administratively. Ever since top RSS functionaries such as Indresh Kumar were found to be actively involved in acts of terrorist violence, the Sangh parivar has been on the backfoot, with the BJP embarrassed.
Congress sources indicated that the UPA government – which earlier had shied away from taking the RSS on, whether at the level of the party, or administratively against those who had been involved in criminal acts of terrorism – was now determined to be frontal on both scores. Will the Congress get it right, as it navigates through the choppy waters of fundamentalism? That remains to be seen.
