Secularists’ sham on Sisodia’s arrest

I view the secular credentials of national parties with deep suspicion, because all have chosen to lean right or fall silent when issues afflicting the minorities have cried out for a strong voice

Ipressed NOTA in Delhi’s municipal election in December, believing the Aam Aadmi Party, despite revamping the Capital’s education and healthcare sectors, should not get my vote for its rightwing shift. The party had been mum over the release of those convicted in the Bilkis Bano rape during the 2002 Gujarat riots and for killing her family members. Silence had become the AAP’s default mode on the Muslim issue.

Friends asked: Why not the Congress? I said the party did not seem interested in winning, completely focussed on Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. Its ideological transformation also seemed suspect, muted as it too had been on the release of Bano’s tormentors, as Shashi Tharoor recently pointed out. Why should Congress’s silence or equivocation on secularism be considered better than the AAP’s?

Yet I do not share the barely concealed glee with which a large segment of the secular-liberal brigade has greeted the arrest of minister and AAP leader Manish Sisodia. Few have written signed pieces condemning his arrest as yet another example of the Modi government’s politics of vendetta. Just desserts for its ideological shift, many mutter.

Their feelings have been articulated by the Congress’s response to the arrest. After a day’s silence, the Congress spokesperson generically condemned the misuse of the Central agencies to target Opposition leaders. But Delhi state leaders were jubilant, not least Ajay Maken, who claimed the slush money generated through the Delhi government’s liquor policy was utilised by the AAP to enhance its national footprint at the Congress’s expense. In other words, the AAP is accused of playing the BJP’s game.

Also read: No fruitful purpose would be served keeping me in custody: Sisodia in bail plea

This is the charge the Congress flings at other non-BJP parties emerging in the states where it still is No. 1 or No. 2. In Gujarat, the AAP was accused of upsetting the Congress’s applecart even though its campaign there was barely visible. No wonder then, the AAP walked away with 12.9 per cent of votes.

The Congress muffed up its prospects in Punjab—and then, injudiciously, borrowed from the BJP’s playbook to dub the AAP as the party of Khalistanis. Reluctant to unequivocally speak in favour of Muslims, the Congress panics at the sight of Asaduddin Owaisi. Organisationally moribund, the Congress is responsible for its shrinking base—and for its likely failure to milk Rahul Gandhi’s walkathon for electoral benefits.

Sure, the AAP’s mainstreaming is dismaying; its silence on the minority issue perturbing; yet it is a hyperbole to portray it as the horse reared by the BJP to run amok in Congress ranks. Why would the Modi government, since 2014, have instituted 169 cases against 49 AAP MLAs? Or arrested Sisodia, even though the first charge sheet, signifying the end of the investigation, did not name him as an accused?

It was AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal who walked into Narendra Modi’s den before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, challenging the Gujarat model of development. When most thought Modi’s BJP could not be defeated, the AAP won, in 2015, 67 out of 70 Assembly seats, becoming a darling of the secular-liberal brigade.

He challenged the Modi government’s claim of having launched a surgical attack against Pakistan, attacked the demonetisation policy and the hasty implementation of the Goods and Service Tax regime. And Kejriwal was among the first to condemn the first case of lynching in 2015—Mohd. Akhlaq. Around that time, Congress leader Digvijay Singh had tweeted saying the Congress was the first to ban cow slaughter, in the 1950s!

The AAP’s failure to win even one seat in Delhi in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections saw the party shift its ideological gear. The party voted for the reading down of Article 370, kept silent on the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, and was inert during the 2020 Delhi riots. This shift in Kejriwal’s positioning arose from his facetious understanding that the only way to defeat the BJP was to persuade Hindutva followers that he was not pro-Muslim. Expediency turned into conviction as the AAP won the Delhi elections in 2020—and then swept Punjab. That said, his government passed a resolution against implementing the CAA, nor has he demonised Muslims.

Hold on, the Congress’s manoeuvres, too, can send you into a tizzy. Gandhi attacked the Sangh on his yatra for spreading hate, but his party did not depict Maulana Abul Kalam Azad among its principal leaders during its recent plenary meet. The party had welcomed the Ayodhya judgment, and its leaders favoured the reading down of Article 370. Like a born-again Hindu, Gandhi embarked on a temple visiting spree before the 2017 Gujarat elections. The party even projected him as a janeu-wearing Shiv-bhakt. And Kamal Nath’s 2019-20 budget in Madhya Pradesh allocated R130 crore for gaushalas.

Gandhi has belatedly acquired ideological clarity. Since his organisation is still not in fine fettle, he has been speaking of Opposition unity. Yet, the Congress has been rejoicing at AAP’s plight. And, anyway, if Sisodia can be held guilty on the caged parrot’s testimony, then so would the Gandhis be in the National Herald case—and Robert Vadra in the land deal cases. With hindsight, my decision to press NOTA rather than vote for the Congress was correct.

The writer is a senior journalist

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