Rahul Gandhi says he loves ‘all living beings’. Is that a sufficient response to BJP’s sharp attack?
For days after an Urdu newspaper reported that Congress President Rahul Gandhi had said that his organisation was a “Muslim party”, the Nehru-Gandhi scion remained silent. His purported comment was first picked up by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who used to it to offer a dire warning. She claimed that any communal violence from then onward would be the fault of the Congress. The claimed comment was then brought up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a rally, where he took the attack further and asked if Congress was a party only for Muslim men.
The meeting with Muslim intellectuals, at which the remarks were said to have been made, took place on July 11. The report in the Urdu paper Inquilab appeared on July 12, with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders picking it up right away. Sitharaman’s comments came on July 13, and Modi made his attack next day. Yet, even though Congress party spokespersons denied that Gandhi said any such thing and claimed the BJP was simply trying to distract the public, the Congress president himself still did not say anything.
As far as responses go, it was boilerplate. It had some echoes of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous ambition to wipe the tear from every eye. It was expansive, non-specific and more than a little odd (“I love all living beings” and “I am the Congress”?). But, more than anything else, it was belated and it was bloodless.
This might have been a fine tweet to put out the morning the newspaper picked up the story, or as soon as BJP leaders started mentioning it. It might have even made sense after Sitharaman’s ridiculous assertion that law and order was now the responsibility of the Opposition party. But coming five days late, it came with the distinct smell of having being worked over in a committee room, with every word measured to provoke the least blowback.
Muslim party?
Some have questioned the wisdom of Rahul Gandhi going to the meeting with Muslim intellectuals at all. The Wire reported that the person who wrote the story in Inquilab was not even present at the meeting. Other participants say Gandhi said something else entirely, with one putting it this way, “Congress Party belongs to the Muslims as it belongs to every other Indian.”
So there was enough reason for Gandhi to respond right away, either to refute the report or to set the record straight. One may argue that the BJP is simply setting a trap by hoping to conduct a Hindu-Muslim conversation, yet it is one that the Congress cannot ignore. The BJP has already spent years arguing that the Congress is a party built around Muslim appeasement. As work by political scientist Suhas Palshikar has shown, the embrace of the BJP by most other sections of society has meant that the Congress is indeed today identified by its affinity for minorities more than any other group, though even that “vote bank” is no longer loyal either.
Rahul Gandhi’s Congress seems set on changing that impression by reiterating that the party is also the protector of Hindu interests, as proven by the president’s willingness to visit temples ahead of an election. This rather blatant attempt at refuting the BJP’s claims that the Congress is a party only for Muslims has been called both necessary and counter-productive.
Belated and bloodless
Regardless of which direction the Congress wants to take with this question, it is one that the party needs to have answered by now, because the query will keep coming up. Yet, when it dominated national headlines this week, it took the president five days to come up with a statement.
Gandhi’s tweet will hardly feel like a clarion call for Congress workers hoping to see their leader respond forcefully to the prime minister and the BJP on a topic that might define this election. He barely engages with the question at hand, about Muslims, and his “I am the Congress” line also comes off as odd.
The day after Gandhi’s tweet, it became clear that his team wanted to use this as some sort of 20-questions template, but it was too late and too clever by half. The impression it gave was of an unhurried committee somewhere being asked to draft a response that ends up being smart but also insipid. Who is this going to enthuse?
Maybe most importantly, the response altogether ignores the sharper attack from Modi. The prime minister suggested that not only is the Congress a party of Muslims, but is it a party of Muslim men. This is a reference to the Congress party’s official stance on a government bill seeking to outlaw the Muslim practice of instant triple talaq, a practice that allows men to divorce their wives by simply saying the word “talaq” three times on a single occasion. The BJP, grabbing the baton from Muslim women who have been campaigning against the practice, has portrayed itself as the party that is willing to take on the Islamic clergy in order to make women’s lives better. The Congress has raised genuine questions about the Bill, of which there are a few, but its general response has been wishy washy on the situation.
The Congress can’t bring itself to support triple talaq and yet it does not want to openly support a ban on the practice either. There are several possible reasons for this: because it doesn’t want to hand the BJP a victory, it is concerned about letting Parliament step into this domain or is afraid of the impact this might have on its Muslim voters.
The answer is probably a mix of the three, yet this approach is boneheaded. The BJP has fully embraced this supposed role as champion of Muslim women’s rights, even attempting to spread the idea that Muslim women vote for it though there is no evidence of this. Yet the Congress remains mostly incoherent on this subject. Again, it seems to have developed a position via committee: We don’t want to annoy the conservative Muslims, yet can hardly support the practice so let’s not say anything.
The Muslim question
Had Rahul Gandhi been able to openly support the ban on triple talaq, his attempt to take charge of the narrative by demanding the government pass the women’s reservation bill would also have been more successful. Instead, now both are most likely stuck in a stalemate, with Gandhi’s initiative blunted by the most obvious counter-attack.
The BJP seems poised to win any argument that becomes about religion, but that is mostly because the Congress simply has no consistency to its approach, no principles that it has held dear. So the Congress would rather not have the debate at all. That too might be a fine tactic if it took the fight to the BJP: continuing to attempt to drive the conversation back to the question of jobs, development, the economy. Instead, this in-between approach achieves almost nothing, responding with a bloodless tweet that doesn’t really say much. Rahul Gandhi may love all living beings, but he’ll have to work harder if he wants them to love him back
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