By issuing a Communal Award promising reservations to religious minorities (read Christians and Muslims, since Parsis and Jains are too negligible to count) on the day of the sixth phase of voting, when two-thirds of the election is over, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has effectively conceded defeat. She took the next morning’s newspaper headlines away from the spectacular road show of the BJP numero uno in Varanasi on Thursday, but also exposed the fact that the Congress has realised that it no longer commands popular support and is hurtling towards irrelevance.
Injecting lethal communal poison into the remaining portion of the parliamentary election, the sub-manifesto promises that future delimitation of constituencies will be done in a manner that ensures ‘weightage’ to minorities, and promises to set up an Equal Opportunity Commission to ensure that minorities are adequately represented in “all public positions” and academic institutions (where much of the venom against the BJP is concentrated).
Having given up the quest to form the next Government, the Congress matriarch is now concentrating on tripping Narendra Modi’s charge towards South Block, preferring the anarchy of unworkable coalitions to a stable regime headed by her bête noire. Two days ago, party sources made it known that they were so determined to stop the Gujarat veteran at any cost that they were willing to abandon the prestige of leading the next coalition at the Centre in favour of any permutation and combination that could do so. So far, no political party has responded to this bait.
By all accounts, after the third phase of polling, a sense of panic gripped the party, which has since escalated with each subsequent phase, which the nearly 100 per cent pro-Congress print and electronic media has not been able to mitigate. It is not as if the party was not aware that this was a tough election and that it faced a formidable opponent in Narendra Modi. That is why, on April 2, Sonia Gandhi met with the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid and asked him to ensure that the community votes were not split (against Congress), a demand that he accepted, though it met with resistance in his own family.
Various Christian pastors have issued letters to their congregations, asking them to vote in the election. But two days before the sixth phase of polling on April 24, Father Frazer Mascarenhas, principal of St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, sent an email to his students urging them not to vote for the BJP.
The appeal was widely seen as a desperate response to information that the Congress-NCP combine was on the back-foot in the first two phases of voting in Maharashtra on April 10 and 17, as a result of which NCP leader Ajit Pawar even threatened villagers to vote for his cousin, Supriya Sule, daughter of the veteran Sharad Pawar. Mascarenhas specifically warned against “communal forces coming to power” and asked the students to vote for those “who commit themselves to a pluralistic culture in diverse India” (read Rahul Gandhi and Congress).
Now, with the election process nearing an end, the Congress on Thursday launched a last ditch attempt to ensure minority polarisation against the BJP by promising to find a way to include former Scheduled Castes among Muslims and Christians (though this is cleverly left unstated) in the Constitutional quotas for Scheduled Castes. Issuing an additional manifesto on “empowerment of minorities”, the party promises to work towards providing a sub-quota of 4.5% for backward Muslims in the existing reservations for Other Backward Castes (OBCs). This is despite the fact that the Constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, and the UPA’s attempt to impose such a quota was stalled by the courts.
The move may prove counter-productive for the party as the existing beneficiaries of the SC and OBC reservations are bound to resist a dilution of their benefits. Nor will the BJP support a Constitutional amendment to facilitate the move as Christianity and Islam do not recognise castes in their theology, and both faiths are wealthy enough to take care of their humble flock.
The ugliest attempt to communalise the public discourse, however, is the sub-manifesto’s assertion that in the event of Congress returning to power, it will virtually ensure that the next Delimitation Commission ensures that minorities are not “disenfranchised” by constituencies where their population is equal or more than backward castes or tribals being declared as reserved.
This is nothing short of a Communal Award, an unofficial reservation of minority constituencies, and thus a ‘weightage’ to minorities in Parliament, in return for allegiance to the Congress. This is worse than the infamous award of Ramsay Macdonald, which laid the foundations for the partition of India, and it is surprising that it has not drawn the attention it deserves.
As though this were not bad enough, the Congress has promised to ensure “adequate representation of minorities in all public positions” and in student and faculty positions in educational institutions. The Equal Opportunity Commission will be created and will ensure there is no discrimination against minorities in employment and education opportunities.
The party’s no-holds-barred communal card includes a promise to pass the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2013.
In conformity with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s declaration that “minorities have the first claim on national resources”, the Congress’s backdoor manifesto promises to ensure that funds are earmarked for minorities in a “population-proportionate manner”. The dangers of this approach need hardly be emphasised, particularly in States bearing the brunt of demographic invasion from neighbouring countries. It adds that a Minority Commission will be set up in every State to safeguard the interests of minorities.
The promised Committee to enquire into the socio-economic status of all Minority groups, which include Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Muslims, to ensure equitable access to government benefits for the welfare of Minorities is an eyewash; all benefits will be cornered by the two giant groups (Muslims and Christians). Any benefits to other minorities can only be incidental, and may even be less than what they could acquire for themselves without the ‘minority’ tag.
Niticentral.com, 25 April 2014
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/04/25/sonia-gandhis-communal-award-a-poisonous-gambit-216511.html