Mohabbat with Mandal
The north-south polarity is stark but addressable with a non-partisan appeal to unity. Rahul Gandhi’s message of love regardless of identity was a contrast with the divisiveness of the BJP and found support from all sections invested in the idea of India.
NEW DELHI: There are two main differences between Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra of 2022 and his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra that began on Sunday. The former was a north-south walk of love and the latter is a hybrid sojourn east to west. Then there is the addition of the word ‘nyay’ to the message of mohabbat. The two differences seem obvious, but they contain a world of significance. Together, they describe the challenges the Congress is facing in winning back the affections of north India and the tortuous moulting it is perforce undergoing since the BJP usurped its pre-eminence.
Travelling across the breadth of India is likely to be a very different experience from walking up its spine. The north-south polarity is stark but addressable with a non-partisan appeal to unity. Rahul Gandhi’s message of love regardless of identity was a contrast with the divisiveness of the BJP and found support from all sections invested in the idea of India. It helped considerably that the Bharat Jodo Yatra started off from the South where the BJP’s Hindutva appeal has no takers. Moreover, the South limits its concerns to development goals and has always resisted any temptation to ‘otherise’ minorities, whatever their identity may be.
East to west, Rahul Gandhi is likely to encounter a different country, a continuum of hues rather than colours. From North Bengal to Gujarat, India has been sown with the BJP’s bitter seed of Hindutva to which the Congress’s response until now has been to couch its essentially ambivalent attitude with romantic, but evasive urban-progressive ideas like Mohabbat ki Dukaan (bandwagon of love). The flirtation with soft Hindutva in the Hindi states has been rebuffed repeatedly, most recently in Madhya Pradesh. In Manipur, Assam and Bengal, the Congress party’s refusal to acknowledge infiltration as an issue alienates it from majoritarian voters.
Rahul Gandhi’s message of love is nice, but where there are sharply polarised issues, it makes him look like a man with sentiments, but no answers. In UP, the BJP’s Hindutva laboratory, he is likely to encounter this challenge more pointedly in the context of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir Pran Pratishta on Jan 22.
It is entirely possible that the appendage of ‘nyay’ to the Bharat Jodo Yatra is a gambit by the Congress to avoid being challenged on Hindutva, and instead change the conversation to social justice. Unable to come up with a credible response to the Hindutva onslaught, the Congress is moving towards Mandal politics, more out of desperation than conviction. Kicked out of the graces of the dominant castes in the Hindutva states, the party thinks it can inveigle itself into the favour of Other Backward Class voters by lisping Lohiaite ideology. But can it?
The Congress party’s discomfort with social justice politics is historic. Its high command has always been a Brahmin bastion and its preferred alliances in the states were with dominant castes. The backward classes began to desert the Congress as far back as the 1960s, and the challenges to Congress rule at the Centre at 10-year intervals came from what are now called Mandal parties. The Congress government of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi sat on the Mandal Commission report for 10 years in 1980s. Given such a history of uneasy relations with middle India, it is likely that the Congress party’s social justice pitch will be seen as yet another flirtation with unconvincing ideologies.
