Kishore Poreddy Column : Rahul must discover the soul of India first

Unity in diversity:

this simple yet powerful phrase encapsulates the essence of India’s soul.  India has been, and will forever be, a rich tapestry of various languages, food, dressing, regions, religions, castes, rituals and customs.

History tells us that every foreign force that ever made inroads into India maintained its dominance by adopting a divide-and-rule policy that exploited India’s diversity to drive wedges among its people, weakening its unity. Not only invaders of the past but even today, foreign forces inimical to India try to exploit its diversity to foster and sharpen divisions amongst its people with a view to destroying its integrity.

Unfortunately, many politicians and political parties in independent India have been using a similar template of divisive politics to create and nurture vote banks.We can see two kinds of political entities and individual politicians – ones that stress unity while cherishing diversity and others that focus solely on diversity while ignoring unity.The second group has learnt nothing, even from the tragedy of India’s Partition – a tragedy without parallel that took lakhs of lives and uprooted millions of Indians.

The Congress scion, Rahul Gandhi, who belongs to the lineage of the second category of leaders, is undertaking a Padayatra with a theme that is diametrically opposite to what his party and especially his family have practised over decades to retain their family rule. The irony is that the Grand Old Party that should be blamed for breaking (thodo) the country in many ways is hosting a long walk, christened ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.

The occasion of the Bharat Jodo Yatra entering Telangana provides us with an opportunity to examine the dichotomy in the words and deeds of the Congress party – a party ruled and controlled by Rahul and his family, despite a recently concluded election to the party’s Presidentship.

Time and again, Rahul has proved that he paid little heed to what unites India, though his great grandfather and first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had at least attempted to understand the invisible glue that united the country. In his famous book, The Discovery of India, published a year before India attained Independence, he said: “Yet something has bound them (people) together and binds them still. India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.”

That is well said, but India has been paying a heavy price for Nehru’s good number of Himalayan blunders. Most of the critical decisions he or his family members made since then have only sowed divisions in the country.

Among them is how Nehru messed up the Kashmir issue and how his family subsequently dealt with the same. At the root of Nehru’s and his family’s distinct and disastrous approach towards Kashmir had been their lack of conviction in the “glue” Nehru wrote about in his book.They believed religion had a higher priority for a particular demographic than  Bharateeyata or Indianness (the glue) and that higher priority deserves to be preserved and nurtured as an example of India’s diversity.

That mistaken conviction led to Nehru internationalising the Kashmir issue and later institutionalizing  Art 370. As a result, the growth of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir has been on the rise till Narendra Modi came to power eight years ago. The mishandling of J&K has created a great divide between two communities in the country, for which Congress should take the blame in toto. Is this Jodo or Thodo?

Had Sardar Patel not taken proactive steps to liberate Hyderabad from the draconian Nizam rule, Telangana would have been another trouble spot. The Iron Man of India, devoid of Nehru’s confused attitude, ensured the unity of India with strong administrative acumen. Contrary to Nehru’s approach, Sardar’s approach was driven by the conviction that India’s Unity is paramount. That unity is not only not detrimental to India’s diversity but crucial for the very survival of that diversity  — a conviction validated by the demographic histories of our neighbours.

The Congress, led by Rahul’s family, divided people clinically on the lines of regions, religions, and caste for vote bank politics and political mileage. The powers that be from his family always focussed on the fragmentation of voters into vote banks, instead of unifying them. Rahul often talks about the uplift of women and providing them with real equality. But his father overrode the Supreme Court judgment that tried to provide to Muslim women rights similar to those of women from other religions. The diversity of religion was used to divide and segregate rather than to unite.

Apart from the examples above, any keen observer of recent politics can discern the cleavages that Congress had been trying to exploit and widen for vote bank politics. From Lingayats vs Hindus to Rajputs vs the Rest, Hindus vs Muslims to Dalits vs upper castes, no element of diversity has been left by the Congress for its divisive or thodo politics.

When 130 crore Indians were celebrating India’s 75th Independence with patriotic fervour, Rahul argued that India is not a nation but a union of States. Rahul would discover that “Jodo” would be an easier task once he understands what bonds us together: the “glue” in Nehru’s words or “Bharateeyata” in the rest of Indians’ words.

(The author is BJP TS spokesperson)