Very few politicians in India can match Hyderabad MP and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Assaduddin Owaisi when he gets on to his soap box. At most times, his high-decibel sectarian proclamations and provocations are best ignored. But occasionally, the bombastic barrister can conjure some bitter truths.
Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, Owaisi is keen to have a showdown – an electoral duel to the finish line so to speak – to establish who is the guarantor of secularism in India. And Owaisi has identified his quarry.
“You keep giving big statements,” Owaisi intoned from the lectern recently, “(Rahul) come to the ground and let’s have a contest. People from the Congress will say a lot of things, but I am ready. Come and face this man with a beard and sherwani, you will know what a contest means.”
Owaisi is a perceived sectarian politician, who is a ferocious champion of Muslim and Dalit rights. That he thinks he can easily dent the Congress party’s secular credentials is a telling comment on the hollowness of the latter’s ‘Bharat Jodo’ pitch.
Rahul Gandhi’s 2024 campaign rests on the claim that the Congress’s “mohabbat ki dukaan” caters to the overarching yearning for communal amity. He alleges that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) supposed “ethnic nationalism” propelled by an “exclusionary Hindutva” has shattered inter-faith peace.
For evidence that the Congress best represents “sabka saath”, its media managers routinely point towards the party’s acceptability in constituencies such as Wayanad. This hill station is a Muslim majority Lok Sabha seat in Kerala. In 2019, Wayanad’s voters elected Gandhi to Parliament by a record margin.
To be sure, Gandhi’s victory in 2019 from Wayanad or those of other Congress candidates from similar minority dominated constituencies wasn’t strictly down to his or the party’s glowing secular credentials.
In 2019, the Muslim League, which has a grip over the Muslim vote, had allied with the Congress in Kerala. The alliance was a significant reason for Muslims backing Gandhi over the Communist party’s candidate. Now, after the formation of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) grouping, the Muslim League and the Communist party are on the same side. They are hoping that Gandhi will give up the Wayanad seat in the spirit of coalition dharma. Six months from the election, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen in Wayanad should Gandhi decide to contest against the wishes of his alliance partners.
Moreover, in 2019, Muslims voted en bloc nationally. Tactical voting, they reckoned, had a better chance at impeding a BJP re-capture of Delhi. Voting for the Congress party made sense. First, it was in direct contest with the BJP in 200+ seats. Second, non-Congress parties, although secular on paper, couldn’t always be trusted. Several of them have taken Muslim support only to strike deals with the BJP.
Even though fighting and defeating Owaisi in his bastion in Hyderabad would unambiguously demonstrate Gandhi’s secular credentials, the Congress is unlikely to let him.
The party, after all, has too much to lose. Owaisi is a master at grandstanding. On home turf, he will tear into the Congress for betraying Muslim voters with unkept promises and a raft of expedient sops. Owaisi has often claimed with proof that the Congress’s beneficence towards Muslims never went beyond empty tokenism.
In January 2006 for one, then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh announced at a meeting of the National Development Council that his government was in favour of devising plans to “ensure that Muslims get a first claim on the state’s resources”. The Congress failed to walk its ludicrous talk that clearly mocked secularism. And even when schemes were devised to privilege Muslims, they were plagued by poor implementation.
The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) open discrimination had another unintended consequence for Muslims. They became alienated from Hindus.
As the years went by, the chasm between Hindus and Muslims only deepened as the UPA thought up other iniquitous schemes.
The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 was yet another one. The Bill was the brainchild of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC). Had it become law, it would have served to disadvantage Hindus disproportionately. Largely because the protective umbrella against communal strife that the Bill was promising to offer would have extended only to linguistic and religious minorities, Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Hindus were left out, condemned to be cast forever as aggressors, even where they were in a minority. Absurd, but true.
In these ways the Congress party’s minoritarian-ism only served to trap Muslims in a “minority mindset”. Muslim minds held hostage by a sense of “exceptionalism” were destined to retreat inwards, which marred the community’s further integration into society.
The Congress may publicly blame the BJP today for vitiating the peace, but it privately knows that its purely self-serving vote bank politics left Muslims out to dry. Thankfully, the Hindu backlash wasn’t violent. Instead, Hindus expressed their frustration peacefully through the ballot by voting for the BJP’s poster-boy Narendra Modi. In 2014, Modi had made dismantling the Congress style-appeasement politics as a mainstay of his electoral campaign.
Ten years later and after being chastened by Hindus, would Rahul Gandhi now want to risk the ignominy of a Muslim backlash in Hyderabad? Doubt it.
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