Anti-Congressism

By Anil

Nauriya

[For all its rhetoric, Hindutva cannot afford to give up on the concept of nationhood that the freedom movement led by the Congress fostered. To give it up would set the country aflame, as happened last year in Gujarat.] FOR AROUND 36 years, India has had strong intermittent currents of antiCongressism. Two main types of anti-Congressism sometimes get entwined. One type is historical anti-Congressism. This consists in diminishing, denying or decrying the historical role of the Congress in its various aspects. Another type is contemporary political anti-Congressism. This is geared primarily to excluding the Congress, for contemporary reasons, from the centres of political power in India. Ram Manohar Lohia's anti-Congress activism was a post-independence phenomenon primarily of the second type. It was one of the few varieties of antiCongressism that was not strongly entwined with historical anti-Congressism. The causes for historical and contemporary anti-Congressism are often scrutinised. But anti-Congressism has itself not been sufficiently scrutinised. And, particularly in the case of historical anti-Congressism, there have been few attempts within the traditions sponsoring these tendencies to define the possible limits to the phenomena. The Congress itself has been neglectful of its history. Even on contemporary issues, its own leaders have come uncritically to internalise the narratives of its opponents. Thus, the Congress leaders were convinced that the Gujarat election could not be fought unless the campaign was placed in the hands of former BJP men. In considering the limits upon anti-Congressism, it is necessary to bear in mind that Congress history and the formation of the Indian nation are interlinked in a way in which nation formation and no other party is or can be linked. Historical anti-Congressism itself has had many varieties. There are, for example, the anti-Congressism of Hindutva, the Muslim League, the Ambedkarite section of the Dalits as well as the anti-Congressism of the pre-independence CPI. Most important, there was in addition the anti-Congressism of the colonial state and of the imperial apparatus. These varieties often intersect in contemporary writings. Thus British anti-Congressism, for example, sought to present the historical anti-Congress trends among the Dalits and Muslims as being the only trends within these sections that are worthy of note. The historical anti-Congressism of Hindutva is built around a few talking points. One such point circulated by the RSS among its cadres involves a selective portrayal of the Khilafat issue of the 1920s. There is a tendency for many varieties of anti-Congressism erroneously to refer to the non-cooperation movement of 1920-22 interchangeably with the Khilafat movement. The noncooperation movement, led by the Congress, was based on three issues: The Punjab wrongs (1919), the demand for `swaraj' and support for the Muslim

grievances related to Khilafat. And the last, it is well to remember in the current context of the United States' attack on Iraq, involved not simply the question of the Caliphate but the impropriety of Indian troops being used against countries towards which India had no animosity. Hindutva anti-Congressism attacks the Congress on Khilafat, but some leading Hindutva figures were part of or supported this movement. B.S Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha was a signatory to the October 1921 manifesto, which called for non-cooperation with the British. Hedgewar, who later founded the RSS, was arrested in 1920 for his participation in the movement. Subhas Chandra Bose, who Hindutva spokesmen seek to appropriate, approved of the Khilafat issue being raised as part of the movement. His only objection, by hindsight, was an organisational one. For all its rhetoric, Hindutva cannot afford to give up on the concept of nationhood that the freedom movement led by the Congress fostered. To give it up would set the country aflame, as happened last year in Gujarat. The realisation will dawn on the BJP, in the interests of its own-self-preservation, that to abandon Indian nationhood for Hindu nationhood would be not only a moral disaster, for which it may not care, but also an economic one, which it cannot ignore. The Muslim League too attacked the Congress. But there were certain Congress programmes on which it discreetly withheld criticism. The `khadi' programme was one of them. Thousands of Muslim spinners, weavers and artisans benefited from it. No movement for freedom had ever been able to put together a major programme of this kind even before it attained power. The Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, speaking at the Bombay Congress session in 1934 about his tour of rural Bengal, observed that where the `khadi' programme had reached, it had brought an awakening and enabled people to get at least one meal a day. Again, with independence, it was the Congress that enabled the Muslim community, which, as Maulana Azad pointed out, had been left in the lurch by separatist politics, to overcome the trauma of Partition and seek a confident future in India. In contemporary writings, it is the communist Left which energetically seeks to own secularism. Its activities in this direction are creditable. Yet, the secular polity in India owes its existence to the Congress. It is not a gift of the preindependence CPI or of the Muslim League. Post-1947 League-oriented writings sought to discredit the historical Congress so as to vindicate the Pakistan movement. Spilled over in the Indian context, such writings were dysfunctional. Pakistan vindication and the establishment of a secular state in India were two distinct projects. The first project required the discrediting of the very movement which had attempted to guarantee a fair dispensation for Muslims in independent India. The Congress was targeted also in the historiography of the preindependence CPI. Yet it is through participation in the Congress movements that communist leaders reached the peasantry. Although in the 1940s, the CPI, along with Anglocentricism, tended at the very least to equate the Congress with the Muslim League, the contrast between the land reforms conducted in India and Pakistan is tell-tale. The same goes for Dalit politics. The space for growth of Dalit power in India

was, in many ways, the product of Congress movements and Congress rule. The movements against untouchability, carried out at an all-India level, created the social atmosphere that made further change possible. Every other Congress MP in the first three Lok Sabhas had cut his teeth in activities of the Harijan Sevak Sangh or other programmes of related social reform. It was only in independent India that untouchability was abolished and its practice made an offence. This created an atmosphere, which made it possible for Dalits to make a bid for political power in the country's most populous State. Generations of Dalits recognised this role of the Congress. That is why they participated in the Congress-led struggles, went to jail for it and, in most of India, especially outside Maharashtra, continued to support it for several decades after independence. Significantly, the BSP has repeatedly come to power in Uttar Pradesh not on the basis of the separate electorate that the British sought to provide, but on the composite electorate system for which the foundations were jointly agreed to by Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar in 1932 and put into final shape by the Constitution drafted under the stewardship of Ambedkar. Denial of the Congress role has led a section of Dalits to deny their own history and for a section of, largely Anglocentric, scholarship to connive in this denial. It is necessary for Dalits to reclaim this history, for it is theirs too. The various traditions of anti-Congressism may have their claims to validity. But it is well for the Congress and also all Indian varieties of anti-Congressism to recognise that there are limits to this tendency. [ Published in The Hindu , March 28, 2003, http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2003032801431000.htm ]