The coming Bengal elections have sparked off a very public war of words within the Congress on a matter that relates to the point on which the Congress sees itself as 'distinct' from the BJP: secularism as an idea.

Congress leader Anand Sharma took to Twitter to criticize the seat-sharing arrangement the Congress-Left alliance is stitching up with the Indian Secular Front, a party floated by Muslim cleric of the shrine Furfura Sharif Abbas Siddique. Siddiqui is believed to have pockets of influence in south Bengal.

The presence of Siddiqui at a Left-Congress rally at Brigade Ground in Kolkata on Sunday has come under criticism from within the party.

“Congress’ alliance with parties like the ISF… militates against the core ideology of the party and Gandhian and Nehruvian secularism, which forms the soul of the party. These issues need to be approved by the CWC,” Sharma tweeted. “Congress cannot be selective in fighting communalists but do so in all its manifestations, irrespective of religion and colour. The presence and endorsement of the West Bengal PCC president is painful and shameful.”

The question as to whether the Congress should be open to adjustments with a party seen as minority communalist got further complicated by the fact that Sharma is one of the leaders who had written a stinging letter to Sonia Gandhi last year on the need for reforms in the party. Another member of the group – known as G-23 – Ghulam Nabi Azad has already created a controversy by praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “someone who doesn’t hide his true self”. Later, sources close to him said he had been misunderstood.

Observers who know the party well see Sharma's tirade as part of a power struggle, as the 'dissidents' are believed to have fallen out of favour with Rahul Gandhi and are on a weak wicket in the party. Azad not getting another term in the Rajya Sabha and being replaced by Mallikarjuna Kharge as the Leader of the Opposition in the House are being seen as signs of this.

Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha and Bengal politician Adhir Chowdhury reacted to Sharma's comments by tweeting that the Congress was getting its full seat share, with the Left parties going for seat adjustments with the ISF. He added that calling the Left-CPM front 'communal' would just serve the 'polarizing agenda' of the BJP. Chowdhury also took a dig at Azad, without naming him, underlining that some 'distinguished leaders' should not just stay in their comfort zone and waste time praising the Prime Minister. Sharma brushed off criticism from Chowdhury, saying he believes in civilised debates.

Clearly, the question of secularism has got tied to the internal power struggles within the party, with some “dissidents”, already sidelined to an extent, taking on the party’s decisions. However, this also brings out the weaknesses of Congress' secularism. Both the alliance and the mutual potshots seem to suggest that secularism is an over-rated idea within opposition circles rather than an article of faith.

A spin on secularism

However, Chowdhury was spot on when he said the remark of Sharma would help the BJP. In fact, whenever dubbed 'communal' by the Congress in the last few decades, the BJP would accuse the Congress of being 'pseudo-secular' and guilty of 'minority appeasement'.

Sharma has, in different words, suggested the same. And, as it may turn out, many voters in Bengal are also likely to say the same and move further towards the BJP in a counter-polarisation.

West Bengal assembly election 2021: Poll in 8 phases starting March 27; result on May 2

Thus, the Left-Congress alliance with ISF is likely to further entrench the BJP in Bengal. The only electoral loser from such an alliance is the All-India Trinamool Congress, the only party that has a chance of beating the BJP in Bengal.

In other words, the Congress-Left-ISF adjustment can either pave the way for an easier BJP victory or cut no ice with Muslim voters, depending on how they choose to vote. It can, if successful, at best improve the Left-Congress tally slightly but at the cost of BJP gains in the state.

Short-term vision

The aim of the alliance is clear: to survive the coming state election and not be completely swamped between a rising BJP and the TMC.

The Left front has lost much of its support base in a state it once ruled for more than three decades at a stretch. While it lost Muslim votes to the TMC, it lost Hindu votes – and also the votes of many of its grass-root level workers – to the BJP.

However, the alliance with the ISF, aimed at damaging the TMC to stay afloat, is in the nature of a self-goal. The left and Congress have been complaining of the rise of majority communalism in India but have chosen to ally with a party that is being seen as a minority communalist platform. In this, while the left may perceive some short-turn gains, it has in effect endorsed the mixing of politics with religious identities.

The irony of the Indian Secular Front is this: it seeks, by its very name, to project secularism as minority identity politics rather than a distancing from the interference of religion in politics or even equidistance from all religions. Of course, like the AIMIM, it also claims to have people from all religions in its organisation, but few see this as evidence of a secular orientation.

The Congress, which had after the Bihar elections accused the AIMIM of Asaduddin Owaisi of mobilizing Muslims, damaging secularism as an idea and bolstering the prospects of the BJP, may be in a bind in explaining the alliance. Not sure which path to traverse, the party, which alternately plays lip service to majority and minority identities, is showing signs of the politics of the Rajiv Gandhi years, when the government would pander to conservatism Muslim as also Hindu opinions. The result was a steep fall in seats when compared to the 1984 tally of 403 and a loss of power.

While the Left-Congress alliance wants to primarily damage Mamata Banerjee through the ISF by weaning away a section of Muslim voters, what this really means is that the BJP’s task can get even easier. Moreover, given the fact that the left has decided to overtly ally with a Muslim platform, there are chances of a counter-polarisation of Hindus towards the BJP. Muslims being 27-percent of the state’s population, retaining Muslim votes is a must for the TMC. And it would perhaps have done so, but the left-Congress alliance seems intent on cutting into the TMC’s Muslim votes and thereby surviving electorally, even if this results in a clean BJP victory.

A Hindutva victory

In terms of ideas and perceptions, such alliances are a victory for Hindutva, which sees religious identity politics as legitimate. It has had Sadhus as its legislators. The Chief Minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, is also a mahant.

When opposition parties stitch together a politics mixed with minority identities defined by religion, they normalize identity politics. And when the language of politics is identitarian, the biggest winner is the largest identity politics, Hindutva.

There is another probable explanation for such an alliance. Bihar election results have perhaps been interpreted as a sign that in regions of high Muslim concentration, Muslim voters are willing to experiment with Muslim-centric parties. Consistent victories for the BJP, this line of thinking goes, have made other parties less open to discussing Muslim issues, leading Muslims to focus on electing Muslim candidates wherever possible. However, the problem with this line is that it is likely to bolster the BJP further and damage parties that see themselves as secular.

Secular opportunism

However, it isn’t as if secularism is just seeing the beginning of a crisis. Indian secularism has for decades been witness to political opportunism. Most of the parties that have worn secularism as a badge of honour have walked in and out of alliances with the BJP – which they have seen as communal when not in alliance with it – as per convenience. With the rare exception of a party like the Rashtriya Janata Dal, almost all regional parties – the TDP, the DMK, the AIADMK, the Lok Janashakti Party, the PDP, the BJD, the TMC, etc. – have allied with the BJP at different points of time to have a share of power.

However, whenever they are not in alliance with the BJP, they claim to be secular, thus damaging the credibility of secularism as a discourse.

The communist parties, which see themselves as more secular than the others, have also aligned with identity politics quite a few times. In fact, in the days of anti-Congressism in the 1960s, the communist parties did form governments in collaboration with the Jana Sangh, the ideological and organizational predecessor of the BJP, despite seeing it as 'communal'. In the 1967 elections, legislative arrangements made in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab after the elections saw Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal governments coming up as alliances that contained both the Jana Sangh and the Communist Party of India. These experiments, which were seen as opportunistic, were part of the idea of anti-Congressism floated by socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia and even the Swatantra Party, wherein parties that had nothing common in terms of ideology would collaborate just to keep Congress out of power.

However, when the BJP has replaced Congress as the prime political party of India, there aren’t too many signs of anti-BJPism beyond rhetoric. Rather, parties like the Congress, the CPI (M) and the TMC are more interested in short-term benefits to get a few more seats.

The VP Singh government in 1989 was supported from outside both by the BJP and the left parties.

Minority identity politics

A new development of the last few years was Muslim-centric parties, like the AIMIM of Owaisi or the party of Badruddin Ajmal in Assam, coming up and trying to wean away primarily Muslim votes in areas of large concentrations of Muslims from parties that call themselves secular.

With the Congress and the once mainstream but now almost decimated left parties joining the bandwagon during a polarized Bengal election campaign, identity politics seems to have become the defining language of politics. One can understand in terms of pure pragmatism the alliance of the Congress with Ajmal's AIUDF in Assam to prevent the splintering of Muslim votes, but in Bengal, the alliance with the ISF is aimed, ironically, at splintering the Muslim votes.

If the desire for secularism decades back was to ensure limits on the employment of religious identities in politics, the present mood is to employ one identity against another. But, in reality, one religious identity gets bolstered when employed against the other in conflictual terms.

If secularism – though it wasn’t deeply entrenched in political practice – was once the normative standard against which legitimate politics needed to be judged, identity politics is gradually becoming a sort of normative standard, with the gradual acceptance of a minority-centric politics as a “natural” counter to more Hindus veering towards Hindutva.

In fact, being too free from identities can be deemed to be a problem, though hardly any party can be accused of this at present, with even Priyanka Gandhi tweeting her open support for the Ram temple months back and Rahul Gandhi being projected as a ‘janeu-wearing’ Hindu.

Abbas Siddiqui has already had his set of controversies. Long before he shared the dais with the left leaders in Brigade Ground in Kolkata – where the Congress was also present – on Sunday, he was controversially being reported as saying after the Delhi riots that Allah should send a virus that kills crores of people in India. He later said he was misquoted and even tendered an apology.

The question for the Congress and the left isn’t just how they fare in a largely BJP-vs-TMC election in Bengal. It is also whether they will lose the battle of perception in the medium and long-term to a greater extent than they already have. For, the alliance they have stitched flies in the face of their normative political claims.

Vikas Pathak has been a political journalist for a decade-and-a-half and teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal. Read his other columns here.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)

First Published:Mar 4, 2021 3:19 PM IST