Antony is right: Why 'reservation secularism' is the definition of insanity

It has been nearly a year since Narendra Modi, then not even prime ministerial candidate, lashed out at the Congress party’s “burqa of secularism”. AK Antony might have forgotten that comment, so it’s worth digging out of the archives: “Whenever the Congress faces a crisis — whether it is corruption, inflation, directives from the Supreme Court or the rape of a young girl — it wears the burqa of secularism and hides in a bunker instead of coming forward and answering the people,” Modi had said .

The Congress is facing a crisis now, possibly of the gravest ever existential kind that brings in to question its very identity. And what does it do?

The Maharashtra Congress offers a good example of what passes for course correction within the grand old party. There’s a critical Assembly election coming up and every likelihood of the general election result being repeated in October, with legislators lashing out against Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan at the AICC fact-finding panel’s meeting on Saturday. In the midst of this chaos the Congress in Maharashtra is now banking on its newest batch of reservations, this time to Marathas and Muslims.

This latest announcement was likely on the mind of the former defence minister AK Antony when he argued that his party had played its secular card so badly   that most voters now equate it with minority appeasement. “People have lost faith in the secular credentials of the party. They have a feeling that the Congress bats for a few communities, especially minorities,” he told his audience in Kerala, while undoubtedly thinking of Maharashtra Congress legislators whose opinions he would be seeking soon in an attempt to analyse the dismal results in the state.

While all those legislators had enthusiastically welcomed the new quotas, senior leaders including Antony have clearly been doing some serious navel-gazing on the Lok Sabha election outcome. There is every indication from the numbers that the electorate, even the Congress’s committed supporters, have rejected both Rahul Gandhi’s leadership and the party’s version of secularism.

And still, staring at a most likely vanquishment in coming polls, the Maharashtra Congress gives its nod (with the consent of the high command, no doubt) to a quota for Muslims based on a study committee’s report that came in months back. Can you fault BJP patriarch LK Advani then who said the BJP’s stand had been vindicated ?

“Antony publicly said the Congress should introspect about its policy and practice … (on) secularism. He said … (it) is slanted in favour of minority communities and hinted that this has alienated his party from the majority community,” Advani is reported to have said in Surajkund. Der aaye, durust aaye, said RSS leader MG Vaidya of the late realisation. “The party’s policies must be equal for all communities.”

There is a fresh round of elections to key Assemblies including Maharashtra, Delhi and Haryana coming up in less than four months and Antony’s message is clear, including to the Chavans and others – the Muslim reservation card will not work. For one, the myth of a single strategic Muslim vote targetted at keeping BJP candidates has been busted long ago. And two, as reported earlier by Firstpost , while the Congress party insisted on retaining its identity politics slogan – playing up minority fears about Modi – the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s message of ‘sabka saath sabka vikaas’ carried the day.

A report in The Economic Times quotes an AICC functionary as saying the Congress proposing a quota for Muslims in UP and for Jats in Rajasthan did not help them in the Lok Sabha elections. “Such quotas only turn people angry with us,” the AICC member was quoted as saying. The fear is also that by leaning so hard on its Muslim votebank, Congress has made itself vulnerable to a simultaneous consolidation of the Hindu vote (which Antony referred to as “the entry of communal forces”).

In fact, Antony is not the first senior Congressman to air those fears of reverse mobilisation against the Congress. On May 20, at a CWC meeting on the poll outcome disaster, a small number of Congress leaders spoke out against the party’s pro-Muslim slant. Their reading was that the Congress was being seen increasingly as “anti-Hindu”.

On 22 May, in an interview to The Economic Times, former MP chief minister Digvijaya Singh said Congress’s brand of secularism was being seen as minority appeasement. “Large sections of Hindus felt they were getting a raw deal and they must unite to defeat all those secular parties. The word secularism is, unfortunately, being identified with Muslim appeasement,” Singh said.

To return to more quota-based politics, therefore, meets the Einstein’s definition of  insanity, ie “doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.

Reports suggest that the party is open to discussing Antony’s views. AICC general secretary and Congress spokesperson Shakeel Ahmed was quoted as saying Antony is a senior leader and his views would be considered carefully by the party.

The problem is in the nuances. If there is one simple takeaway from the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister, it is that electorates can pretty much shatter all expectations of votebank behaviour. Either because the caste calculations of an Amit Shah were better than hers or because votebanks simply did not behave as they are prone to do, Mayawati finds her BSP reduced to a grand tally of zero in the Lok Sabha. Ditto for the Samajwadi Party that barely managed to get four of its family members elected.

Of course, a number of critics also rightly point out that it is always the Muslim quota that is framed as problematic. Antony did not express fears about the Maratha quota which is no less absurd, perhaps more so given that the Marathas have never been deemed a backward community, as the Indian Express notes . Yet the BJP has made relatively little noise about such communities, be it Marathas or Jats, preferring to keep the focus firmly on the Muslims. A strategy that no doubt serves to shore up its base, and its ‘secularism=appeasement’ argument.

Back in 2003, Antony riled several sections of his own party by saying politically powerful communities including the Muslims should not indulge in collective bargaining in policy-making at the cost of other communities. But his brave start is not half adequate – he should have instead called for a party resolution against vote bank politics of all kinds. The BJP will have a far harder time countering that strategy, which will be all the stronger as it resonates with popular sentiment. If the party intends to take on Narendra Modi, it needs to counter his narrative, and not play right into it.