Sonia Gandhi at the Sangam

By Harish Khare

LAST MONTH when in his belaboured defence of the BJP-VHP-RSS agenda of a ``Ram Mandir'' during the ``Ayodhya debate'' in the Lok Sabha the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, sought to invoke Dr. Rajendra Prasad's association with the reconstruction of the Somnath temple, he was immediately challenged by the Congress benches. The Congress MPs were quick to point out how President Prasad was chided by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for participating in an event which in the first Prime Minister's view was bound to distract from the Indian state's secular character. As the Congress MPs saw it, here was a Prime Minister, steeped in scientific temper, telling a thing or two to a President who subscribed to orthodoxy and obscurantist liturgy; hence, Mr. Vajpayee should not be invoking that unfortunate presidential indiscretion, that too to justify an agenda that unapologetically seeks to tap for political purposes society's majoritarian proclivities.

The debate, as could be expected, did not end with the vote in the Lok Sabha. The Congress ``intellectuals'' continued to berate the Prime Minister for his invocation of the Somnath parallel. Enlightened public was invited to read the ``Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru'', Volume 14 (Part II) and Volume 16 (Volume I). These Nehru family historians are right; the first Prime Minister's correspondence does reveal two clashing mindsets, modern and traditional; that he was enormously unhappy about President Prasad participating in a blatantly religious function; what is more, Nehru did not think a public functionary like the Head of the Republic could make a convincing distinction between his private and official roles.

It is a different matter that within three years, on February 3, 1954, Prime Minister Nehru found himself at the Maha Kumbh; that day the Sangam also saw a stampede, which killed 400 pilgrims. A few days later, on February 15, while making a statement in the Lok Sabha on the tragedy, Nehru confessed to having been fascinated by the sheer spectacle of a Maha Kumbh. He told the House: ``I was there in mela itself on the occasion and I can never forget that tremendous concourse of humanity, consisting of possibly 40 lakhs of people, on either side of the river. I have never seen anything like it in my life before either at the Kumbh Mela or in any other function in this country or anywhere else.''

It is this ``secular-religious'' family tradition that Ms. Sonia Gandhi was keeping up, according to the AICC image-consultants, when she made her much-publicised ``ardha snan'' at the Sangam. The official line is that the Sangam trip was entirely personal, nothing political about it. It would require yards and yards of credulity to accept that Ms. Gandhi was making a religious pilgrimage. To begin with, it was the AICC whisper-mongering brigade that first cranked up a controversy by suggesting how a BJP administration in Uttar Pradesh was trying, perhaps with a nod from the BJP Government at the Centre, to prevent ``Soniaji'' from participating in the Maha Kumbh. Far too many Uttar Pradesh Congressmen openly savoured the idea of projecting their leader as ``traditional Indian''; privately, they gleefully anticipated the restive ``upper castes'' abandoning the BJP for the Congress, now that Ms. Gandhi has laid claims to her ``Brahmanical lineage''. The Sangam spectacle was a demonstrative act, meant to proclaim that she had internalised all the rituals, beliefs and myths the orthodox Hindus associate with the Maha Kumbh. Nothing more, nothing less.

Admittedly, there can be no objection to a political leader performing a religious rite. Nor can there be any objection to the unavoidable use of official paraphernalia (the SPG entourage) or to the avoidable use of a Congress State Government's aircraft. But Ms. Gandhi's trip to the Kumbh Mela is nothing but a relapse into a political symbolism of the most insincere kind. This repackaging of Ms. Gandhi, a European by birth and temperament, as an Indian in search of that elusive spiritual equilibrium reeks of cynical manipulation.

What is perhaps more disquieting about this Sangam gimmick is the evidence of Ms. Gandhi's own political vacuity and her willingness to give in to any clever-clever suggestion from this or that `darbari'. The Sangam gimmick is one of a piece with her decision to allow herself to go to Ms. Jayalalitha's famous tea- party or with the entirely needless and entirely unedifying drama that was played out when she filed her nomination from the Bellary Lok Sabha in 1999. In the process, her advisers have completed the process of depriving her of her only USP, i.e. that she believed in political decency and that it was possible to pursue power and political office without giving in to unwholesome impulses and voices.

This `ordinarification' of Ms. Gandhi is primarily a matter between her manipulative advisers and the Congress party. But it also has implications for the entire struggle over secular values and the ethos of the Indian polity. By staging the Sangam prank, Ms. Gandhi has conceded the correctness of the Sangh Parivar's Hindutva-centric arguments all these years, i.e. that the country's culture and moral values are rooted in the ``Hindu'' identity narrowly - and exclusively - defined. The secular voices have consistently opposed the Sangh Parivar's strident attempt to use religion to impose a majoritarian paradigm, as well as rejected any attempt to use religion to generate political loyalties and civic divisions. The Sangam sleight is fundamentally flawed because it is premised on an assumption that the Sangh Parivar can be challenged and defeated on its own terms.

Ms. Gandhi is plainly flirting with soft communalism. The problem with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty's strategists is that the only successful model they know is the 1984 formula, which yielded the Congress its most bountiful electoral dividend ever. The 1984 formula was based on a subtle invocation of a pernicious theme of ``Bharat Mata in danger''; it was an unembarrassed pandering to the majoritarian prejudices. It was this heady success that prompted the Rajiv Gandhi establishment to try to calibrate soft Hindu communalism with soft Muslim communalism; if the Hindus were to be appeased with the unlocking of the Babri Masjid gates, the Muslims were to be rewarded with the undoing of the Shah Bano judgment. It was this cynically-calculating mindset that prevented the Rajiv Gandhi establishment from confronting the Sangh Parivar's communal offensive; instead, as Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi permitted the ``shilanyas'' and, then, like a gambler on a losing streak, began his 1989 campaign from Ayodhya, promising ``Ram rajya''. It was a misplaced confidence that the Congress could play the communalist's game without garnering legitimacy and credibility for the original communal crowd.

The Sonia pilgrimage is dripping with political calculations. After a recent opinion poll showing the Congress exhibiting signs of staging a comeback, the Sonia `darbaris' are in the same state of euphoria that gripped them in the first weeks of 1999, after a similar prediction of 280 seats for the Congress. Their argument goes like this: let us force the issue; Mr. Vajpayee would be constrained either to side with the `dharam sansad' hotheads or spurn them; the first response would trouble the TDP and Ms. Mamata Banerjee to break ranks, which would precipitate another Lok Sabha election, and then a repackaged Soniaji would be acceptable to the upper castes and the Congress would be swept back to office.

Ms. Gandhi has indeed put the secularist crowd in a veritable `dharam sankat'. Because, behind her Sangam ploy is a shrewd calculation: Mr. Harkishan Singh Surjeet and company have no place else to go. After all, these custodians of secularism have since 1992 persisted with the fallacy that anyone who opposed the BJP was ipso factosecular. Before it is too late, Ms. Gandhi should be made to realise that there are no short-cuts to noble ends and goals, as Mr. Vajpayee has discovered. Leadership is about convictions, commitment, compassion and competence, and not about cynicism, calculation, convenience and compromise. After the Sangam drama, Ms. Gandhi stands exposed.

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