(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)
I do not usually read the comments on my weekly blog because they are mostly so illiterate, misspelled and ungrammatical as to make any perusal of them a waste of time. But I did go through every comment on my last blog explaining the BJP's resounding defeat in the Delhi elections. One theme running through the comments did, I thought, deserve consideration - namely, what did I have to say about the Congress failing to open its account and 63 of its 70 candidates losing their deposits? I intend to do this today, but only after clarifying that I write this column not on behalf of the Congress, but as a way of airing my own opinions on issues of the day. Some of the time, I daresay, this coincides with the official Congress position, but it is precisely because much of the time I am out on my own limb that the Party takes such great care to ensure that I am not its official spokesman. I have too much of a mind of my own to toe anyone else's line.
What was telling, however, about the December 2013 defeat was the scale of the Congress defeat - down to 8 from a huge, consistent majority. That had everything to do with the reverberations of the India Against Corruption campaign that had caught the imagination of the people of the capital -although, curiously, it had failed to click anywhere else, perhaps because the political elite is nowhere more visible than in Delhi. At a time when IAC was abusing every politician in sight, I had advised Arvind Kejriwal on a TV programme that if he wanted to make a difference, he should stop trying to do it from within civil society and instead enter the political arena. At the time, he appeared to demur, but subsequently formed a political party and threw himself, with energy and innovation, into the only proper sphere for politics in a democracy - which is politics. We knew in the 2013 campaign that his appeal had traction in the city, but I am sure it came as a surprise - albeit a welcome surprise - to Kejriwal himself when he won as many seats as he did. The lesson the Congress had to learn then was that while Delhi's voters were shying away from the Congress they had voted to office for 15 long years, they would not vote for the BJP if they had a credible alternative. That alternative was Kejriwal, then in the wings.
It is also they who ignore the entire history of Buddhism being driven out of the country of its birth and Buddhist shrines desecrated that characterized the end of close on a millennium of India having been less a Hindu than a Buddhist and Jain country. It is they who know not that India was the first country in history to have an organized Christian church - the Syrian Christian church that flourishes to this day in Kerala. It is they who have bizarre notions of technological development in ancient India which obscure real achievement with fantasies. The BJP and its cohort comprise an omnipresent threat to the India that all Indians (other than the sanghis) want. Hence, my choice of the word "enemy" to describe them. To all other opponents of the Congress - and they are legion - I restrict myself to the term "opponent".
It was, therefore, only to be expected that when a credible alternative to the Congress/BJP emerged in Delhi in the shape of the AAP, some of the disillusioned Congress vote should drift to the secular AAP, whose fundamental philosophy reminds one so much of the pristine Nehruvian Congress. The trouncing of the AAP (and of the Congress) in the country and in Delhi in 2014 was a giant breath of relief at Modi projecting himself as the Sikandar of Development rather than the Forerunner of Hindu Raj. Since the last eight months have seen no development, only slogans, but a great deal of Hindutva, the Delhi Congress voter, who was temporarily deceived into voting for Modi in the general elections, found that with the restoration of credibility to the AAP, he did have a secular alternative to the Congress - and so voted for the AAP. Disillusioned BJP voters also voted for AAP since the committed BJP voter would never vote for the Congress for the same reason that the Congress voter, except exceptionally, does not vote saffron.
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