Marriage of convenience
What was touted as a trigger for Kerala’s second renaissance, an issue of great rational pride in 2018, is now a matter of regret, something that should never have happened, according to the temple affairs minister, who explained the changed stand of the Marxist government on the entry of women of menstruating age into the hilltop shrine of Sabarimala. Marx and Engels may not have accounted for ‘objective reality’ getting transformed in two years while elucidating dialectical materialism. But what changed for the Marxists of Kerala was the rout in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the fear of a repeat performance in the April 2021 Assembly elections.
If the BJP has shed its ideological pretensions of organisational integrity in West Bengal, the Congress and the Left seem to have forgotten their primary enemy.
The only objective reality in Indian public life is the inherent and all-pervading hypocrisy of the political players of the Left, Centre and the Right persuasions. If the power-hungry feel that pillorying the Hindu upper castes would fetch them minority votes, they would turn a sacred temple into a battlefield for activists and atheists — and when they realise that they could lose their core Hindu OBC votes too in the bargain, they would shamelessly take a U-turn. While the Left took about three years for the U-turn, the BJP, which had initially welcomed the Supreme Court verdict on Sabarimala, did it within weeks, when it saw its core constituency taking to the streets.
While the BJP brazenly sheds all its ideological pretensions and offers Assembly tickets to Trinamool Congress turncoats in West Bengal, the Congress and the Left have given an altogether new definition to secularism. First of all, the bitter enemies of Kerala are in bed together in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Assam — all this in the name of annihilating communalism and celebrating secularism. So, let us analyse state by state to understand how the Left and the Congress propose to achieve this grand objective.
The all-out attempt by the CPI(M)-led government of Kerala to push activists into the Sabarimala temple was seen by many observers as an attempt to radicalise the Congress voters among the upper caste Hindus and to push them into the waiting laps of the Sangh Parivar. Kerala’s elections are always decided by just about a 2 per cent vote swing, and if the Congress loses its upper caste votes to the BJP, it could result in a Left victory. Theoretically, yes. But unfortunately, people do not make their choices according to vote bank theories. The NDA’s vote share increased from 10.85 to 15.25 per cent in 2019, as expected, but the Congress-led alliance won a landslide victory with a jump in vote share from 42.08 to 47.25 per cent, forcing the Left, which lost about 5 per cent votes, to drop its Sabarimala renaissance project.
The Indian Union Muslim League — the legatee of Jinnah’s Muslim League that sought a separate nation claiming that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together — upholding religious identity as its primary political platform is a big partner in the Congress-led United Democratic Front in Kerala. To counter the Muslim League, the Left, apart from accommodating the splinter group of the Indian National League, had even flirted with terror accused Abdul Nasser Madani’s People’s Democratic Party. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress, the Left and the Muslim League are partners in the DMK-led alliance fighting against communalism.
When they reach West Bengal, interestingly, the Congress and the Left seem to forget their primary enemy. The BJP is on the verge of capturing West Bengal; its vote share had surged to an all-time high of 40 per cent in 2019 from just 17 per cent in 2014. And unlike in other states, the BJP has unabashedly poached Mamata Banerjee’s close aides and cabinet colleagues in what is seen as a final push to saffronise Bengal. And a saffron Bengal with a provocative communal agenda could wreak havoc in the border state with about 30 per cent Muslims. All these grave concerns do not seem to have touched the great champions of secularism. Instead, the Congress and the Left seem to have devised a plan to defeat Mamata Banerjee and thereby ensure the victory of the BJP — for the Left with just 7.5 per cent and Congress with 5.5 per cent vote share cannot hope to replace TMC, which has 43 per cent votes, according to the last Lok Sabha poll results. The argument of the Congress-Left combine trying to capture anti-incumbency votes, which would have otherwise accrued to the BJP, is facetious because in that case it would not have attempted to split Mamata’s Muslim votes by roping in the influential cleric of Furfura Sharif of Hooghly district, Pirzada Abbas Siddiqui. Every Muslim vote that the Congress-Left alliance’s Siddiqui wins is a vote lost for Mamata and a fillip for the BJP.
Another intriguing aspect of this naked communal politics of the minority variety is its claim to the secularism label. The Congress and the Left seem to be bereft of secular or democratic politics without the props of clerics or Muslim vote contractors; if it is Siddiqui in Bengal, it is Maulana Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front in Assam. Ajmal, before floating his party and chipping Muslim votes away from the Congress, was the president of Jamiat Ulema in Assam.
Thus, from Kerala to Assam, secularism during polls seems to be a coded message inviting priests, religious leaders and peddlers of identity politics.
Minority communal politics might help the Congress and the Left accrue some short-term electoral gains, but eventually it would only help consolidate and legitimise the BJP’s majority communal politics. This politics of labelling the one-way street for minority votes as secular will only de-legitimise secularism as a grand idea, enshrined in the Constitution. For, every Muslim cleric wooed in turn makes a Yogi Adityanath acceptable. Identity politics is a double-edged sword that cuts the wielder down to his communal identity.
