‘What kind of patriotism and nationalism is it?’

 

‘What kind of patriotism and nationalism is it?’

The All-India Congress Committee (AICC) held its 85^th plenary session at Raipur from 24^th to 26^th February, 2023. This session of India’s Grand Old Party that led the freedom struggle against the British Raj assumes historical significance in the context of current political quagmire. The Congress Party, re-energised and reinvigorated after its successful conclusion of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, has launched a scathing attack on the Modi government, calling upon its workers and leaders to work with discipline, solidarity and unity to defeat the divisive politics.

 

The Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, in his inaugural address, pitching for a Congress led alliance to take on the BJP in the 2024 polls, said, ‘In the prevailing difficult circumstances, Congress is the only party in the country that can provide capable and decisive leadership …from 2004 to 2014, our alliance served the people effectively. We once again look forward to forging a viable alternative by aligning with like-minded parties to defeat the anti-people and non-democratic BJP government…will make whatever sacrifices that are required for our goal for the upcoming state assembly elections and the 2024 elections.  Our aim is to stop the use of money power, muscle power and the misuse of government agencies in toppling governments’. He accused the ruling party of breaking parliamentary and constitutional traditions and misusing the central government agencies like ED, CBI and IT. The pollical resolution adopted at the plenary session states that the Congress would make all out efforts to identity, mobilise and align like-minded secular forces as there is an urgent need for a united Opposition to take on the Modi government on common ideological ground and that a ‘Third Front’ would only benefit the BJP.

 

Lashing out at the Modi government for rising hate and polarization and expressing concern that ‘democracy is on the  verge of being expunged from India’, Sonia Gandhi promised that the Congress would bring a law to prevent and punish hate crimes and  prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, gender, caste and language in providing  services like housing, hostels, hotels, clubs etc., targeting the ruling party for ‘purchasing’ legislators to topple the opposition governments, and to bring about a constitutional amendment to eliminate mass defections. 

 

In his address at the concluding session, Rahul Gandhi attacked the Modi Government over its divide and rule policies based on hatred and favoritism, accusing it of allowing the Adani to plunder the nation’s wealth. It may be recalled that the US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research, in a report on 24 January, accused Adani of brazen accounting fraud and stock manipulation. Referring to his recent speech in Lok Sabha, Rahul questioned how  Adani rose from 609^th in 2014  to the second spot on the global billionaires list in eight years during the Modi government;  how India’s foreign policy helped the Adani Group in countries like Israel, Australia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and expressed concern about the shell companies, given the Adani Group’s involvement in the defence sector and other key sectors like airports and ports having national security implications (The Hindu 27/2).

 

And when Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge wanted to know the Prime Minister’s relationship with Gautam Adani, their speeches were expunged from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha records respectively by the Speaker and the Chairman on the pretext that they were ‘not authenticated’, despite Rahul Gandhi writing to the Speaker authenticating what he said in Lok Sabha. No such authentication of statements made by the Prime Minister and the Ministers was ever insisted upon. The Presiding Officers of Parliament continue to apply double standards and act in a partisan manner. It is important to understand that members of parliament have certain privileges and enjoy the right to speak on any issue on the floor of the House with immunity.   Rahul Gandhi retorted: ‘I only asked the Prime Minister what is the relationship with Adani…They say those attacking Adani are antinational. So, Adani has become the country’s biggest patriot, and the BJP and RSS are protecting him…the PM could have simply said that there is no relationship between him and Adani. But he didn’t’, because there is a relationship. Adani and Modi are one. And the wealth of the entire country is going into the hands of one man...You can not ask about Adani in the Indian Parliament, but we will ask, not once but a thousand times, till the truth comes out’. He likened the Adani Group to the East India Company. And ‘the battle for the country’s freedom was against one company (East India Company)-as it had taken away all wealth.  History is being repeated’ (FPJ 27/2). Today, the Adani Group is taking away the wealth of the nation.

 

He also took on the BJP’s nationalism plank by referring to External Affairs Minister Jaishankar, who, in an interview to the news agency ANI last week, when asked about the Indian government being soft on China that encroached on Indian territory, said: “Look they (China)are the bigger economy. What am I going to do? As a smaller economy, I am going to pick up a fight with bigger economy? It is a question of common sense.” To Rahul Gandhi, this is cowardice, the Savarkar ideology of bowing before the powerful. What kind of patriotism and nationalism is it? (ET 27/2). When the British ruled us was their economy smaller than ours? Do you not fight if someone is stronger than you?  An Indian Minister is telling China, your economy is bigger and we can’t fight with you.  Do you call this nationalism? What kind of patriotism is this? (The Hindu 27/2). It exposes the hollowness of nationalism of the ruling party.

 

The Raipur Declaration has come out with a 5-point ‘call to action’ programme- the vision document. The declaration ‘prefaced the subject, animating  a large section of the anti-BJP class by underlining the salience of Congress as the only party that has never compromised with the BJP  and RSS  and its despicable politics, and stating that it will continue to confront the BJP’s authoritarianism, communal and crony capitalist onslaught…to preserve and protect the Constitution in letter and spirit, and to address the three main challenges facing the country: growing economic inequality, intensifying social polarisation and deepening political dictatorship’ (TOI 27/2).

The Party adapted a separate resolution on social justice. It resolved to pursue a sharp social justice agenda, hoping to accommodate the poltical aspirations of the subalterns who shifted loyalty to other parties. Having lost out to regional parties in the post-Mandal era, the party is now aiming to woo the subalterns to its fold. It amended its constitution to reserve half of the seats in the highest decision making body -CWC- for SCs,STs,OBCs, women and minorites- a paradigm shift. The party has promised Sampoorna Samajik Suraksha- a social security framework that will have legal gurantees for minimum income and social security for the poor. And 'by acknowledging the fact that inequality is not merely material, and discrimination is not only along religious lines, the Congress has taken the debate beyond the secular-communal binary that has worked to the BJP's advantage in recent years'(The Hindu 28/2).

 

A former Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aditya Mukherjee, recalling the historical role of the Congress on the occasion of the Raipur Session, in an article A tryst with Destiny (FPJ 26/2), says democracy is in peril. ‘The current dispensation at the Centre is bent on subverting the structures of democracy in India. History compels us to ask who envisaged India as a democratic nation? It is obviously, the Congress, before and after the independence’. Then he raises a fundamental question: Why is the Congress duty bound to save the democracy in today’s India? And he answers: ‘The nation that was imagined by Indian nationalists was to be independent democratic secular, inclusive of all kinds of diversity and pro-poor- a vision that Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and others termed ‘the idea of India’…Indian nationalists were clear that India, with its enormous diversity, could be forged into a nation only if it was a secular inclusive democracy. Virtually since its inception in 1985, the INC was to consciously adopt an approach of not forcing the majority opinion…There was a consensus among entire spectrum of Indian nationalists-the Moderates, the Extremists, Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Subhas Bose, the Socialists etc.- that India could not be a democratic nation without being secular, just as it could not be secular if it was not democratic.’

 

It was the Congress which shaped India as a secular democracy. At the Karachi Session in 1931, the Congress adopted the Resolution on Fundamental Rights, drafted by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, that laid down the blueprint for independent India’s Constitution. The first major challenge to the notion of a secular democratic India came at the time of Independence itself. It was an effort at creating the mirror image of ‘Muslim Pakistan’-a Hindu Rashtra in India by communal forces. Nehru did not allow it to succeed.

 

However, as Professor Mukherjee says, ‘later the forces of communalism maneuvered their way in disguise.  JP movement bolstered them and provided legitimacy among people. This aspect of the legacy of JP movement haunts Indian democracy today, as it brought communal forces very close to state power at the Centre’. History once again entrusted the Congress, that made democracy a creed of independent India, the role of fighting the battle against fascism.