Mainline parties taking domestic battles off-shore is a low without precedence in our polity. It is difficult to recall instances of past leaders washing dirty linen on alien territory and in front of foreign hosts. Barring the odd case, such as the Indian Peace Force in Sri Lanka in late 1980s, there was a broad consensus on foreign policy during the regimes of Rajiv Gandhi, P V Narasimha Rao, V P Singh, I K Gujaral, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

Very much part of the diplomatic lore is Rao’s 1994 decision to send Vajpayee, then opposition stalwart, to defend India’s case on Kashmir at United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The high powered team led by the BJP leader, and including Farooq Abdullah and Salman Khurshid returned triumphantly.

When Prime Minister criticized Congress abroad, the Congress leaders were up in arms against Narendra Modi and the BJP. Now that Rahul Gandhi, speaking in Germany and UK, stepped up attack on PM, BJP and RSS, the ruling party leaders ferociously hit out at the Congress President.

Rahul, reportedly comparing RSS with the Muslim Brotherhood, has raised eyebrows. The comparison is interesting. A closer look will reveal that the two organizations do operate along similar lines. Both see themselves as socio-cultural organizations and are fronted by political parties. Both view their respective religions as the ideal basis for organizing the affairs of the state and society. Both engage in considerable charity works at grass-roots. And both organizations subscribe to an exclusivist vision where one religio-political ideology dominates, diminishing pluralism and secularism.

Rahul’s comparison appears to underline that either an organization is secular or it isn’t. Secularism can’t be a half way house where one professes to be secular yet flirts with fundamentalist elements. In this frame, both the Congress and the BJP have failed the secularism test. For Congress secularism has become deferring to sentiments of minority religious communities so that they become captive votes for the party. This has allowed BJP to accuse the Congress of pseudo-secularism, a charge that isn’t without merit. But the BJP is out and out a political party with a majoritarian world view.

The Rahul gambit is an interesting one moving the debate forward. It indicates that the contest between various religious identities adhered to in a fundamentalist way, where secularism takes the side of minority fundamentalist, but rather between religious fundamentalism itself against those championing a secular openness. In the latter outlook there are no “good” or “bad” religious fundamentalism—all are to be eschewed. But while Rahul may have started a conversation on the right track, what Congress observers do on the ground can be a different matter. (IPA Service)