Congress is known for its pro-minority stance in India. The Congress leaders have played a sinister game of not helping them but at the same time keeping the minority voter bases on their side. This policy of the Congress has proven to be detrimental to the growth and prosperity of not just the minorities but also to that of the majority Hindu population in the country. Their stance got busted in the Lok Sabha 2014 elections by the BJP and has continued to do so in the years till now. The Congress President Rahul Gandhi had tried to project himself as a pro-Hindu leader and had badly failed at the task. His defence mechanism from the Congress party too had been unsuccessful at changing his image. With less than a year to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi decided to meet 12 eminent Muslim intellectuals in the national capital. Their advice to Rahul Gandhi would have worried him and all the other Congress leaders too. The advices he received showed that the Muslim community as a whole has seen through the games of Congress and its appeasement politics.
Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, writer Rakhshanda Jalil, industrialist Junaid Rehman, chairman of Congress minority department Nadeem Javed, writer Farah Naqvi and Muslim intellectual Iliash Malik were among the 12 intellectuals from the Muslim community who met Rahul Gandhi. Historian S Irfan Habib told the ANI, “Today in the meeting, we advised Rahul Gandhi to not talk about the Muslim community in particular as it will give others an opportunity to polarise him as a leader. He should rather talk about poverty and education. If he does so it will affect 96 per cent Muslims like other Indians.” The intellectuals from the community also advised Rahul Gandhi to introspect on the policies he and the Congress have followed in the past few years and asked him to change it to the way in which “the Congress worked in the era of 1970s, when it talked about inclusiveness and Sajha virasat.”
Congress leaders and a few other Muslim intellectuals denied discussing anything remotely related to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with Rahul Gandhi. But if one thinks for a moment it will become clear that 2019 elections is what Rahul Gandhi had in mind when he called the 12 intellectuals from a specific community. The Congress has suffered in the recent elections owing to the apathy shown by Muslims around the country, projecting Congress as a pro-Hindutva party is anyways not possible for the Congress. This worrisome situation had led to this meeting by which Rahul Gandhi again wishes to bring back the angry Muslim community to its fold.
The biggest opposition party today has no dearth of people who indulge in Muslim appeasement politics. Starting with Kapil Sibal, the lawyer of the Sunni Waqf Board in the Ram Mandir Ayodhya case, to Abhishek Manu Singhvi who is the opposing counsel in a case which is fighting to stop the practice of female genital mutilation in the Dawoodi Bohra community to the comical Karnataka minister for minorities, Zameer Ahmed who wants Sharia courts opened all throughout India, Congress has it all. Try as much as it wants to, it will not be able to project itself as a party which can have a pan-India pro-majority image. It will fail drastically till it decides to introspect and begins the much needed cleaning from inside the party ranks as soon as it can. The upcoming elections could prove to be the final nail in the coffin for the dynastic party and Rahul Gandhi is trying hard to stop that from happening, he is just trying in the wrong direction, actions do speak louder than words after all.
