Dangers of Rahul Gandhi flirting with soft Hindutva

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi should have consulted the party’s old guard before following strategist Prashant Kishor’s electoral formula in Uttar Pradesh.

He would have learnt that the last time his father Rajiv Gandhi – erstwhile party supremo and former prime minister - flirted with soft Hindutva, the strategy brought disastrous electoral results for the Congress.

He would have understood that religious symbolism once used to garner political dividends doesn’t lend itself to successful repetition for political gains.

Rahul is committing the mistakes his father did. He is going down the beaten track of playing footsie with religious symbolism; he is mixing politics with religion – a dangerous cocktail - for the sake of votes.

There is much irony of history in what Rahul is attempting during his kisan yatra in UP. His visit to Hanuman Garhi temple in Ayodhya, his meeting with Mahant Gyan Das, is a grim reminder of how use of religion for political gain cost Rajiv and the Congress power and political heft.

It’s a bitter reminder to the Congress how the party lost its political and social base in UP and Bihar in particular, and the Hindi heartland in general, and how the Congress ceded political space to the BJP. 

In a reminder to readers, reports have pointed out that this is the first visit to the temple town of Ayodhya by a Gandhi family member since 1992, the year of the Babri Masjid demolition. The year the minority Muslims dropped the Congress as their first electoral choice in frustration and disgust.

Visit to Hanuman Garhi was not a one-stop choice. Rahul began his kisan yatra with a much-publicised visit to Dugdeswar Nath temple in Deoria, eastern UP. The message is clear. Temple visits are part of political strategy fashioned by Kishor. It’s an attempt to ingratiate the Gandhi scion with the estranged Hindu voter.

Also ironically, Rahul is using religion and a soft variety of Hindutva politics to target the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to combat communalism, to fight use of religion in politics and to take on the RSS.

This is a strategy that has failed the Congress in the past, it’s a strategy that helps the BJP, the very entity Rahul and the Congress want to fight and defeat.

Rahul’s UP strategy worked out by Kishor is full of holes. But for the sake of convenience, we will confine the ambit of this report to see how the repeated use of religious symbolism doesn’t bring votes. 

The soft pandering to religious sentiments didn’t help Rajiv's Congress. And if the tired use of religion in politics hasn’t helped the BJP - the self-proclaimed custodian of Hindu votes - it’s difficult to understand how it can help the Congress. 

Rahul’s visit to Ayodhya’s temple should have reminded the party strategists of how Rajiv fell between two stools of majority and minority communal politics, when he began pandering to them.

It was Rajiv’s government that let the genie of Hindu communalism out of the bottle when it opened the lock of the disputed Babri Masjid. To balance the supposedly hurt feelings of the majority after acquiescing to Muslim communal feelings in the Shah Bano case.

The BJP was quick to capitalise on the Congress’ blunder. At the party's Palanpur plenary in 1989 - on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections - the BJP passed a resolution to put the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya on its electoral agenda.

The strategy worked. BJP’s vote share increased from measly 7.4 per cent to 11.5 per cent and the seats jumped from a pathetic 2 to 85. Emboldened by the performance, its veteran leader LK Advani went on a rath yatra that so radically changed the landscape of Indian politics.

In less than two years in the 1991 elections, BJP's vote share jumped to 20.1 per cent and the seat tally went up to 119.

There was a lesson for the Congress in the new post-1989 politics. The lesson was that the strategy of pandering to communalism by democratic and secular parties couldn’t defeat the communal politics of the BJP.

But equally importantly, there was a lesson for the BJP too. The Ram temple card outlived its utility; in less than a year after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the BJP lost four major state assembly elections in 1993.

The BJP came to power at the Centre for the first time after that, but not on the basis of the Ram temple electoral card. Significantly, when Modi was voted to power, Ayodhya temple politics remained on the backburner.

Rahul should have realised his father had paid a price for using soft Hindutva. His grandmother Indira Gandhi too had used religious symbolism to appease Hindu voters.

She used to visit temples and sadhus and sants but she had the backing of the well-entrenched Congress political base and her own charisma to depend upon.

And ultimately, she too paid a heavy price - personal as well as political - when she began using religion for political gain in Punjab.

Rahul can’t hope to defeat the entrenched Hindutva politics by pandering to its soft version. He can’t hope to win back or erect the party base in UP by appealing to the BJP’s base. Even if it helps the Congress in the short-term, ultimately this strategy will help the BJP.

Rahul can’t fight the RSS in court and soft-pedal RSS's ideology in public for votes. It’s a politics that will further damage him, harm his party and above all the country.

Also read: Can Prashant Kishor make Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh shake hands in UP?

Also read: RSS-Rahul lawsuit belongs to the gutter