चालू घडामोडी - डिसेंबर २०१८

BJP’s real win lies in successfully setting the ground rules for parties to fight elections........It has ensured that no matter which way the mandate swings......political discourse will steadily shift away from pseudo-secularism to Hindutva as the new campaign metric. And parties will be judged (or so they might assume) by how close or distant they are to this theme.

This, as Yogi Adityanath has pointed out, is a total and complete ideological victory. When Rahul Gandhi is forced to flaunt his sacred thread and Brahminical parentage in a show of competitive Hindutva, the BJP is the winner. Fortunately for BJP, in its mission to replace the ‘idea of Congress’ that came to define the ‘idea of India’ during the past few decades of this independent nation, it has been ably supported by the new Congress president, who is working hard day and night to realise Modi and Amit Shah’s dream of making India 'Congress-mukt'.

..........However, it has completely escaped the Congress president that by trying to outdo the BJP at its own game and presenting Congress as ‘BJP 2.0’, he has hastened Congress’s identity crisis.

A political party is not merely an organised group of leaders, cadres and supporters that seeks to acquire and exercise power. It must have an ideological mooring to shape its policies and vision. A dislocation of that mooring has a ripple effect on the party that may reduce it to a cultish organisation centred around a clan or a dynasty. This system may keep the party temporarily afloat but eventually will be unable to prop up the party in a marketplace of ideas. By seeking to annul its belief in "secularism" (however cynical or subversive Congress’s idea may have been from the tenets of true secularism), Rahul has dislocated this ideological anchor. Congress has nothing to distinguish itself from its more powerful ideological opponent.

......The electoral rise of this new Congress may mark the final departure of the idea of the Congress — a move toward Congress-mukt Bharat indeed."