The decision of the Congress leadership not to attend the Ram temple consecration in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh has brought into focus the findings of the 2014 A.K. Antony committee that was formed by then party president Sonia Gandhi to find out the reasons for the party’s debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
The said committee, which apart from Antony had senior party leaders such as Mukul Wasnik, R.C. Khuntia and Avinash Pandey as members, had submitted their report on 14 August 2015 after working on it for close to 75 days. The said report, apart from pointing at other tertiary factors, had stated that the policy of appeasement of the minorities was one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Congress in the elections.
This stand of the Congress, as per the committee, had created a perception that the Congress was “anti-Hindu” and mixed with other reasons, led to the Congress slumping to its worst ever tally of 44 seats. Party sources, who had accessed the report, said the idea of the Congress leadership of making the 2014 elections a battle between secularism and communalism, created an image that the Congress was “prominority” to the extent that the whole idea became “antimajority”.
The findings of the said report were never made public. A senior party leader, who had accessed the findings of the report, stated that while minority-appeasement policy proved counterproductive, on top of that the minority voters too had a trust deficit with Congress as there was a huge gap between programme announcement and actual delivery on the ground.
Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who is perceived as among the most devout practicing Hindus in the Congress apart from being one of the strongest voices against what he calls “hard-line Hindutva”, in 2017, in an interaction with this newspaper, had stated that the findings of the Antony committee were “… discussed among the senior leaders of the party and Rahul Gandhi sat through the meetings.
This was then sent to the Pradesh and District Congress Committees. They held wider consultations and the reports have been submitted to Rahul Gandhi in February 2015 on the basis of which action is to be taken.” No mention of the Antony committee was made by any leader after that. According to party sources, the recent decision of the Congress leadership not to attend the gathering at Ayodhya, which was endorsed by party president Mallikarjun Kharge too, was based on Rahul Gandhi’s assessment and understanding that the party cannot stand with what he called “BJP and RSS using Ayodhya temple for political reasons”.
However, there are voices within the party who are not happy with this decision, especially as it has come even as Congress leaders, including the members of the Gandhi family, Rahul and Priyanka, have been visiting Hindu temples on and off for the last few years. All such visits were announced well in advance and covered widely.
“This is a blunder on part of the Congress leadership and will be termed by our political adversaries as a ‘hypocritical’ stand. Any way you look at it, the consecration is the biggest Hindu religious event that is taking place in living history. One can blame the BJP by saying it has turned the religious event into a political event, but still no gains would be achieved by not attending it. Common people, the majority of it, will see it as a ‘boycott’ of Lord Ram. How is that going to help us?” a senior Congress leader from a Hindi belt state told The Sunday Guardian.
A section within the Congress believes that Rahul and Mallikarjun Kharge should have announced that they would go to the temple after 22 January, while giving an exact date. This would have achieved Rahul’s objective of not attending the “RSS-BJP” event and also saved the party leaders difficult questions that they are facing on the ground.
In view of Rahul’s decision not to attend the event, party leaders have suggested that reliance should be placed on the fact that the temple was still “incomplete”, something which has also been raised by top Hindu religious bodies. It is expected that Rahul will be going to the temple once he enters Uttar Pradesh as a part of the second phase of the Bharat Jodo Yatra that will begin from Manipur on 14 January, a date considered to be auspicious as per Hindu rituals.
However, party leaders are sceptical as to how much of this delayed visit (if it happens) to the temple will repair the anti- Hindu perception that is being created on the ground. “It is true that we went overboard pre-2014 as far as minority appeasement is concerned. Who does not remember the statement (by Dr Manmohan Singh) that minorities had the first claim on the nation’s resources? We deviated from ‘fair treatment’ as is expected from the government. What we did wrong was that we sought to extract favours from Muslims by promising them the moon, all in the name of ‘secular’ government and as the data shows, we failed to deliver that too. I remember reading an op-ed by an editor who wrote that our brand of secularism addressed only the minorities and ignored the fairness expectation of the majority. This is exactly what happened. And as things are moving now, it is clear that leaders in the decision making position have not learnt from their mistakes, nor have they taken the findings of the A.K. Antony committee seriously,” a former Union Minister told The Sunday Guardian.
In November last year, former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and one of the closest members of the Gandhi family, Kamalnath, while campaigning for the Assembly elections, had reminded people about the role played by former PM and Rahul father’s, Rajiv Gandhi’s with regards to the Ram Temple.
“Taala khola… Rajiv Gandhi got the locks (of the temporary Ram temple at the disputed Babri Masjid site) opened. Let us not forget history,” he had told the media. Rahul, though, clearly has different ways of looking at things, different from his father and his friends.