For a whole barren decade now, the Congress party has tended to flounder, seeking ideological recourse to impromptu tactical moves.
The quite unprecedented mass contact marches across the length and breadth of the country, led by the brave and dogged Rahul Gandhi, have clearly brought both ground-level clarity and political confidence to the grand old party.
It has come to realise that there are public needs and policy options beyond the ones propagated by the right-wing that has sought ruthlessly to drown out the concrete realities of the overwhelming majority of Indians through money-driven, revanchist control of social and political articulation.
The central inspiration of the Congress manifesto for the 2024 election clearly is this: that the governance of India requires reorientation, so that its resources and distributive mechanisms are returned to the people to whom the republic owes its existence.
The sharply formulated theses of the manifesto about various forms of justice thus draw their strength and legitimacy from the Constitution of India’s preamble, the chapter on fundamental rights, and key provisions of the directive principles of state policy.
Most importantly, in view of the disingenuous propaganda unleashed predictably by the ruling party that the manifesto beckons back to the Muslim League of old, it needs to be emphasised with force that what the Congress says about the personal laws of minorities is wholly in line with Ambedkar’s own admonitions on the subject, Article 44 notwithstanding.
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In the constituent assembly, Ambedkar had emphatically cautioned that personal laws which indeed needed reforms must not be altered or set aside by the force of executive will but through a patient and democratic consultation with the parties involved.
Of the essence here was the concept of voluntary consent rather than coercive fiat.
That the party which led one of the most enlightened anti-colonial movements in modern world history has sought to re-inscribe the principal impulsions of that movement, namely, the idea of justice, social, political, and economic, within a framework of universal adult franchise and freedom of expression, puts the grand old phenomenon, the Indian National Congress, on course to rediscover the unique relevance and affinity its existence had for the mass of people across boundaries and communities.
As to the disingenuous polemics of the right-wing, the jibes are easily disposed of.
At the time that Maulana Azad and others were sweating to organise the Quit India movement, the head of the Hindu Mahasabha, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was forming governments in alliance with the much maligned Muslim League in Bengal, Sindh, and the North West frontier Province.
And the great V.D. Savarkar was admonishing young Indians to join the British army, with the devious purpose of preparing themselves militarily for the real fight to come, namely with the Muslims.
Nor, it should be known, does the Indian Union Muslim League of Kerala have anything to do with Jinnah’s Muslim League.
It was founded much later, in independent India, as a patriotic formation with a secular orientation, owing unclouded allegiance to the constitution and the tricolour.
By now, it should be obvious that the ruling right-wing peddles the following polemical lines:
That dividing Hindus and Muslims is most desirable, but pointing to social divisions within Hindus is heinous; thus any talk of a caste enumeration is anathema to its bipolar politics.
However, speaking of divisions, it is good policy to divide Muslims as between the Syeds/ Mughals/ Pathans and the Pasmanda rest, but most anti-national to draw lines between upper-caste Hindus and the majority 80% whom they have systematically relegated and oppressed over millennia.
To the extent that the Congress manifesto is upfront and sentient about this compendium of historical truths and policy requirements as mandated by the constitution , the republic can draw some fresh breath.
It is good to tell Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and all other non-Hindu Indians that their stake in the republic is neither secondary, nor deniable, and that indeed the bulk of oppressed Hindus are one with them, all endowed and protected by the republican constitution.
It is to be hoped that the grand old party and its allies have enough time and will to go frontally among the populace to convey what the manifesto says and means.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
