THE Congress party’s penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory has been on ample display in these state elections, but Kerala has pretty much taken the cake. A full ten days after it won the state handsomely, leading the United Democratic Front to a landslide victory (102 seats/140-MLA Assembly), the party finally rescued itself from public ignominy by naming six-time MLA VD Satheesan as its chief minister-elect.
Even Rahul Gandhi realised that catapulting his chief lieutenant into God’s own country — KC Venugopal, the powerful general secretary in charge of the party’s organisation, better known as the “eyes and ears” of the grand old party’s most powerful leader — would not go down well with Kerala folk. Yes, they would swallow the bitter taste with their morning coffee. After all, a majority of the MLAs who won had lined up on Venugopal’s side only a week or so ago.
And then the noises grew and grew and the tide shifted. Seems Priyanka Gandhi, Wayanad MP, weighed in, which would have definitely helped. But it was the chorus of suppressed dissent — because who would openly dare dissent against the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, whose skills at the jiujitsu martial arts are so intrinsic to his world-view that he even made Punjab Congress leaders Partap Bajwa and Raja Warring do push-ups at a party programme in Himachal Pradesh recently; but for that story you have to read my colleague Rajmeet Singh — that finally lit up the sky in favour of Vadassery Damodaran Satheesan (the first name is the ‘tharavad’ or house name, the second is his father’s name and the last his given name.)
But just as Kerala’s Congressmen and women break coconuts at the foot of the deity in Guruvayoor — as much in favour of Satheesan as the fact that Rahul Gandhi, not them, will continue to deal with Venugopal directly for another five years; also, what happens in Delhi must stay in Delhi — senior RSS leader Dattatreya Hosabale dropped a verbal bombshell with his comments on Pakistan earlier this week.
Despite “pinpricks” like the Pulwama attack, people-to-people dialogue “should be tried more and more now.” Civil society relations will work “because we have been one nation.” The security and self-respect of a country have to be protected, but “we need not close the doors. We should always be ready to engage them in a dialogue.” Trade and commerce and issuance of visas should not stop. There should be a window (open) always for a dialogue,” Mr Hosabale told PTI, mere days after the first anniversary of Operation Sindoor.
The comments are remarkable for a variety of reasons. First, as the RSS ‘sahkaryavah’, or second seniormost man in the organisation, Mr Hosabale is a powerful leader whose words cannot be taken lightly. Second, they indicate the RSS is constantly engaged with the issues of the day, that their leaders don’t live in a remote cave. Third, while the comments differ from the government’s line that “terror and talks don’t go together”, they can be seen as preparing the ground for a revision of that policy. (As of now, there’s no such change.) Fourth, they have been given to a news agency, PTI, indicating the RSS believed the interview deserved wide dissemination. Fifth, they came soon after Mr Hosabale returned from the US, where he likely met a wide variety of people, who must have given him a sense of the changing world order vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China — remember, the RSS has a strong presence in the US and is intimately connected with large sections of the Indian diaspora. Sixth, they have been greeted with a certain silence, indicating the country is still absorbing the weight of his words. Seventh, only former Army Chief Manoj Naravane and Jammu & Kashmir leader Farooq Abdullah have welcomed his comments (“we must always have dialogue to solve our problems,” Abdullah said). And eighth, Pakistan has described them as a “positive” development and expressed the hope “sanity will prevail in India.”
Certainly, Pakistan must learn the strategic lesson from Op Sindoor, which is that it cannot turn the terror tap on and off when it wants — India has suffered too much at Rawalpindi’s hands over the decades. Nobody knows this as well as Punjab, which, as a frontline state, has borne the brunt of Pakistan’s relentless policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts — terrorism morphs at wont into gangsterism and the infusion of deadly drugs. Certainly, Pakistan cannot be made to feel as if it has been let off the hook, even as Donald Trump woos his “favourite Field Marshal.”
And that’s been the irony of this week — which is, that the Congress, a self-avowed secular organisation, has offered only mealy-mouthed criticism of Hosabale’s outreach to Pakistan, instead of welcoming it. While the RSS, the self-acknowledged proponent of Hindutva, is reaching out to Pakistan’s Muslims, arguing the “Akhand Bharat” argument, that since “we have been one nation,” we should not hesitate to dialogue with them.
You could ask the question : Why is the Congress so afraid of doing the right thing? It barely rescued itself in Kerala, dumped its old ally in Tamil Nadu, the DMK, to ally with the ruling TVK which really doesn’t need it anymore — because it has the breakaway AIADMK, a former ally of the BJP, to support it. And in Bengal, it broke the INDIA bloc by fighting against Mamata Banerjee’s TMC — which helped fragment the Opposition vote — only for Rahul Gandhi to shut up his cadres once TMC lost.
The worst, mark my words, is yet to come. In Punjab, as most political parties polish their strategies for the upcoming elections, the Congress has hardly said anything worthwhile in response to the daily political drama around Enforcement Directorate arrests, defections and mergers — except looking bemused or supercilious, even as the party’s key leaders fight each other for the top job.
The faction-ridden party in Punjab is waiting for Rahul Gandhi to decide — a bit like waiting for salvation. Perhaps Punjab should take a lesson from Kerala’s Satheesan, who, as C. Gouridasan Nair writes, has won respect from both sides of the aisle by infusing his debating skills with data, besides crusading against the lottery mafia and in favour of protecting the ecology of the Western Ghats.
Question is, what does the Congress stand for in Punjab?
