Jawed Naqvi
THE BJP returned to power in the Delhi assembly after 27 years, making it incumbent on the fractious opposition parties to decide the way forward — to fight together to save the future, or be taken apart one party at a time.
Disunity in the opposition INDIA alliance has indeed inflicted a self-goal, allowing the BJP to sweep the Feb 5 contest in terms of seats though not votes cast against the Aam Aadmi Party. Inevitably, AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal has accused the Congress of subverting what could have been his third straight victory in Delhi.
By joining the elections separately, the Congress did adversely impact AAP in at least 10 seats. The party has its own reasons to be peeved with AAP whom it accuses of robbing it of a possible victory in Haryana by cutting into Congress’s votes. The Congress has been harmed also by AAP’s quest to expand into Gujarat and Goa, effectively undermining what remains of opposition unity.
Regardless of the sour emotions, the facts on the ground show that removing Narendra Modi from power remains wishful thinking for the opposition without accepting the Congress party’s unrivalled geographical sway, the reason why Modi relentlessly targets Rahul Gandhi, aware that he alone unites the party’s powerful regional satraps into a major force.
Significantly — if ironically for the opposition — Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi are the rare politicians who have spoken out steadfastly against Modi’s patronage of crony capitalism reflected in his controversial ties with the Adanis and the Ambanis. But AAP must also know that it’s the Congress’s enormous geographical reach that really rattles the ruling party, which has been dreaming eternally of a Congress-free India.
Despite the ongoing challenges, the Congress, unlike any other opposition party, holds power in three states on its own — Telangana, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh. No other opposition party rules more than one state and there are only a few that hold power, that too in single states. West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Kerala come to mind.
AAP needs to realistically engage with the Congress as the largest opposition party.
Equally crucially, the Congress remains the principal opposition to BJP’s rule in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Haryana, Kerala and Uttarakhand. With its loss in Delhi, AAP is left with just Punjab. AAP’s Congress complex is perhaps best illustrated by a mushaira in Lucknow at which Firaq Gorakhpuri was the main poet. A young versifier was reciting his poem when Firaq interjected.
“That’s my verse that you are reading, young man.” The young poet missed the backhanded praise, and instead, began to explain. “Firaq sahib,” he began earnestly, “It must be an intellectual accident that you and I think similarly.” Firaq’s reply was withering. “We know of bicycles crashing into bullock carts. But an accident between a bicycle and an aeroplane?”
Having said that, AAP needs to realistically engage with the Congress as the largest opposition party. It deserves to be treated as such. However, one doesn’t see any reason to believe that Arvind Kejriwal is an RSS agent or that AAP is a Hindutva asset that some Congress sympathisers and leftist friends claim. True, the RSS helped Kejriwal launch a robust campaign that tainted Manmohan Singh’s second government as corrupt, and which eventually helped clear the way for Narendra Modi’s ascent to power.
However, the fact is that everyone from the left to the right has played footsie with the RSS in their day. That’s how the entire opposition eventually, if unwittingly, enabled Hindutva to become the unwieldy challenge it is today.
How then can anyone moping at the steady erosion of democratic institutions in the country not be beholden to the Herculean role Kejriwal played in stopping the Hindutva juggernaut in February 2015? Was it not Kejriwal who vanquished Narendra Modi’s make-believe invincibility in that make-or-break contest?
That particular Delhi election would become the turning point for the pulverised and demoralised opposition. Modi not only became prime minister in 2014, but he also straightaway waded into state polls in Maharashtra and Haryana, delivering them handsomely to the BJP. It’s worth remembering that Hindutva had not yet become India’s new normal, and the middle classes still knew how to feel terrified by the thought of a religious fascist takeover of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s land.
It’s difficult to forget the cold December morning at Delhi’s India International Centre in 2014 when historian Romila Thapar delivered her inspired exhortation to India’s public intellectuals to stand up and defend their democracy.
Thapar spoke of India’s ancient tradition of questioning the dominant trope. She illustrated her point by citing Buddha and Socrates as the prototype dissenters of their times in different spaces. Indian public intellectuals, Thapar said, needed to shun fear or craving for rewards so as not to be co-opted. The lecture on the dank morning did lift the fog somewhat and Kejriwal, who was not there to hear Thapar, did the rest.
The AAP’s energy burst has since lost its sheen, and its transformation of the discourse from one about improving healthcare and education for the less privileged has dissipated into playing catch with the BJP in religious symbolism. AAP, which called for a white paper on the assault on Muslims in Haryana in its early days and created a legal framework to go after the unpunished killers of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, now preferred to keep silent when Hindutva fascists attacked Muslims in Delhi in February 2020.
But let’s be honest. AAP, unlike the Shiv Sena, which is readily accepted as an essential part of the opposition today, never exhorted communal riots in Delhi. It sounds laughable to describe Shiv Sena as democratic but AAP as communal.
Identifying the real foe then holds the key. Is it Modi’s handpicked election commission? Or is INDIA’s weakest link the lurking closet supporters of Adanis and Ambanis from within the fold? These questions need to be kept in mind together with Firaq Gorakhpuri’s allegory of the bicycle and the aeroplane.
C. Dawn
