I am not a Congress cultist.
Let me get that out of the way first, because in this country, apparently, you must be one of two things: a bhakt, or some misty-eyed fool who thinks the Congress is holy water. I am neither. I have read enough history (and lived through enough of it) to know that the Congress, like every serious political force in India, has played dangerous games. It has propped up people, used people, tolerated people, and been bitten on the arse by the very forces it midwifed. This is not a revelation. This is not particular to the Congress. This is not even uniquely Indian. This is just how politics works.
Which is why it irritates me no end when people react as though I am peddling some partisan fantasy. I am not saying the Congress is pure. I am not saying the Congress is innocent. I am not even saying the Congress is ‘good’ in any moral sense of the word. What I am saying is simpler, and far more uncomfortable to everyone, me, the fanbois, and the haters: the Congress has made this exact mistake before, encouraging or tolerating forces that later became monsters, and the bill, when it finally arrived, was catastrophic.
Look at the history.
Look at the Shiv Sena and Bal Thackeray: the little bargains, the mutual conveniences, the winks across the aisle; the Sena supporting the Emergency, of all things; the Sena and the Congress finding common cause whenever it suited either of them, all of it feeding, eventually, into a much uglier story than anyone signed up for.
Look at Bhindranwale. Look at the political environment that ended in tanks rolling into the Golden Temple, and then in Indira Gandhi lying dead in her own garden, shot by her own guards.
Look at Rajiv. Look at Laldenga. Look at Prabhakaran. Look at the Shahi Imam. Look at this entire gallery of men who were, at one time or another, useful, or necessary, or convenient, or tolerated, or strategically allowed to flourish; and who then turned into liabilities, monsters, or outright catastrophes.
And look, above all, at the one everybody politely forgets: the Hindutva project itself is, in no small measure, a Congress production. The BJP did not kick open the doors it walked through; the Congress had already unlocked them. It was the Congress that overturned Shah Bano to appease one set of clergy, and then threw open the gates of the Babri Masjid for puja to appease another. It was the Congress that played this wretched balancing act for decades: something for the Muslim, something for the Hindu, something for the Muslim, something for the Hindu, as though a republic were a ledger you could keep squaring with communal sops. That see-saw did not produce balance. It produced the Ram Mandir movement, and the Ram Mandir movement produced the India we now live in. The biggest monster in the whole gallery was reared, fed, and legitimised by the very party that today claims to be its only credible opponent. I know this. I am the one saying it.
That is the point.
That is the whole damned point.
I am not saying all these men were the same; I am not making some lazy equivalence. I am saying that Indian politics has a long and well-documented habit of creating or empowering disruptive actors to split votes, occupy spaces, or manage some short-term advantage, and then pretending afterwards that the consequences were unforeseeable. They were not unforeseeable. They were obvious. They were sitting there in plain sight the whole time. The only thing that changed was that the snakes they had reared in their backyard finally turned on them. No opponent has ever needed to score against India; we have always been generous enough to do it ourselves. Sportsmanship is in our blood! Even Dhurandhar knows this. Or is it that slimy character played by Madhavan; I keep mixing up RW wet dreams. Anyway, Aditya Dhar would be proud of this paragraph, even if he would loathe the rest of this essay.
Which brings me to the BJP. When I look at it today, I do not see a party that is merely ‘strong’. I see a party that is structurally destructive; a party that feeds on fragmentation; a party that does not simply oppose its enemies but actively profits from the multiplication of smaller, more manageable ones. It raises some, persecutes some, humiliates some, demonises some, and in the process turns them into exactly the sort of figures who attract the desperate, the impatient, the politically starving, and the educated gullible who are forever hunting for the next saviour.
And yes, that is what infuriates me.
Because people keep assuming I am making some crude sectarian argument. I am not. I am not saying Owaisi is a BJP B-Team man, or Kejriwal, or Chandrashekhar Azad. Or that they are evil. Their purity is not the point. Their personal virtue is not the point. The point is that they can be politically useful to the BJP even while opposing it, because they split the field. They siphon off energy. They manufacture the illusion of choice. They give angry, frustrated people somewhere to go other than the one place where that anger actually needs to be consolidated.
And then the responses come. Always the same responses with the same triumphant little flourish at the end.
‘But they are diametrically opposed to the BJP.’
‘Look, they are being persecuted.’
‘Do you know how much they have suffered at the hands of the regime?’
Yes. Exactly. That is the trick. That is the whole game. If the end result is still a fragmented opposition, then the public theatre of conflict matters far less than people think it does. The BJP can afford to be seen fighting these men because the larger arithmetic still works in its favour. It can demonise them and make them relevant in the same breath. It can attack them and profit handsomely from their underdog halo. That is not an accident. That is politics: ugly, cynical, very old politics, and we have watched it play out before, in this very country, within living memory.
And the worst part? The people most vulnerable to this are not fools, not in the simple sense. They are often the most intelligent, the most well-meaning, the most desperate for something better. They want change so badly that they will project that hope onto anyone who looks remotely credible. That is why the trick works. Not because the public is stupid, but because the public is tired, and angry, and starving for an exit; and a starving man does not inspect the menu.
So no, I do not buy the lazy argument that every alternative is equally valid. I do not buy the idea that a thousand little oppositions are somehow better than one actual front. I do not buy the suggestion that the Congress should graciously step aside and let every self-styled challenger have a turn on the national stage. If the question is who can actually take on the BJP nationally (and that is the only question that matters right now), then the answer remains what it has been all along: the Congress is the only national party with the scale to anchor that fight. Not because it is perfect. Not because it is sacred. Simply because the arithmetic says so, and arithmetic, unlike politicians, does not care about your feelings.
And yes, I know the Congress has done all of this itself. That is precisely why I am not a cultist. I know the historical costs, if not where the bodies are buried. I know what happens when a party mistakes tactical cleverness for strategic wisdom. I know what happens when you convince yourself that you can use a force without ever being used by it. You cannot. Not forever. Eventually it bites back; and sometimes it bites hard enough to kill. Like, literally.
But here is the thing, and this is where both the fanbois and the haters get off the bus: today’s Congress is not yesterday’s Congress, and today’s BJP is not yesterday’s BJP. The Congress of Rahul Gandhi is a vastly different party from the Congress of Shah Bano and the unlocked gates; and the BJP of Modi is a vastly different, and vastly more dangerous, party than anything that came before it, including the BJP of Vajpayee, which in itself wasn’t the paragon of right wing virtue. Judging either by its ancestors is lazy. We ought to recognise both of those facts, hold our noses where we must, and fight the larger evil standing in front of us. Everything else is commentary. Or signalling. Or both.
Meanwhile, Rahul keeps holding up that red leather-bound Constitution at every rally, and I keep wishing, only half in jest, that it were a red card instead; that somebody, anybody, would finally send a few of these players off the field.
That is what I am saying. Not that the Congress is pure. Not that its hands are clean. Not that every old decision was wise. I am saying that the BJP now belongs to the same broad category of political force: one that believes it can manage every contradiction, every faction, every token opposition, every split vote, every manufactured alternative, and somehow walk away from the consequences. It may get away with it for a while. It may even limp back into power. But that does not mean the strategy is stable. It means the rot has simply not surfaced yet.
And that is why I am angry.
Because I can see the pattern. Because the pattern is not a theory; it has a body count. Indira Gandhi did not see it until her own bodyguards turned their guns on her in her own garden. Rajiv did not see it until a young woman bent down to touch his feet in Sriperumbudur. In both cases, it was too late. And we, who have all of that history available to us for nothing more than the effort of reading it, watch the same pattern repeating in front of our eyes, watch the ball roll into our own net for the hundredth time, and call it strategy. Sigh!
