Afzal Guru, Congress, Rahul and Modi

VIEWPOINT

AMITABH SHUKLA

Politics leads to Government. Every action which the Government takes or intends to take has political overtones and the benefit-loss analysis is carefully calculated to the last electorate.

As that is the case, only the naïve would think that the hanging of Afzal Guru has nothing to do with electoral politics. I am sure the way this is going to play out in the next few months in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections would have been worked out to the minutest details before the Government took a call on hanging Guru after the President rejected the mercy plea of the Parliament House attack convict.

After procrastination and indecision for several years, the execution of Guru comes at a time when national politics is entering a crucial phase in the second month of 2013 with several Assembly elections lined up followed by the battle royale of 2014. As the hanging followed that of the Mumbai butcher Ajmal Kasab, with two strokes, the Congress Government has successfully removed the disgraceful tag of being "soft on terror".

It has also sought to remove the tag of being a "soft state" which could have been an electoral disaster in the long run after Pakistani intruders killed two Indian soldiers and beheaded one of them, leading to a flashpoint on the Line of Control and a diplomatic row.

Its rival BJP will no longer be able to target Congress on the issue of Guru and will lose a vital issue to score brownie points during election campaign. Also, it will be difficult for the opposition party to use the beheading incident of January 8 in election campaign even though the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj wanted India to get at least 10 heads from the other side for that of martyred soldier Hemraj.

Though Congress won in 2009, it was very difficult for the party to answer the questions of BJP on Afzal Guru who had practically become a symbol of "soft state" in that election campaign.

Finally, the Congress had to dig out the Kandahar hijacking case and the release of terrorists in lieu of Indian Airlines passengers to blunt the BJP line of attack. It no longer will have to answer any questions on Guru now in any election. In 2009, Congress used to say "law will take its own course" on Kasab, now it conveniently says "law has taken the full course".

With this move, the Government also silenced the right wing groups who had been baying first for Kasab's blood and then for Guru.

It has also silenced a series of campaigns on the social networking sites for hanging Kasab and Guru, several of which had predicted that both the terrorists would die of old age when they are in their 90s. Now, the campaign of the laptop and Smart Phone generation would end and they will have to find some new cause to rally behind.

The Congress and the Government must also have calculated that they would not lose any minority vote on this count as no Muslim would ever sympathise with Guru.

There could be some sympathies for the hanged terrorist in Kashmir valley but in any case the state is hardly significant for the Congress in the bigger scheme of things when it comes to electoral politics.

Now, we can understand the context of the use of the word "saffron terror" of Home Minister Shushilkumar Shinde during the Jaipur conclave of the Congress aptly. It was not an innocent statement out of nowhere. He obviously wanted to win over the minorities with the slur.

The comment was made in the interregnum after Kasab was hanged and Guru was yet to be hanged. Shinde must be aware what was in fate for Guru in the second week of February and obviously wanted to win over both the Hindus and Muslims.

Though no one would admit it, I suspect that Congress played the communal card deftly here. With the hanging, it wanted to endear itself to a section of the right wing Hindus and with the use of the calculated word "saffron terror", it wanted to pander to the sentiments of naïve Muslims.

How far the party succeeds would be visible only in the polls results, first in a series of Assembly polls this year which would obviously be the semi-final before the battle of 2014. Political observers and senior journalists who have seen the Congress functioning for the last over four decades say

that earlier attempts of the party playing the communal and caste card was quite "crude" and was too obvious even for the common man but now there is a lot more "sophistication" to the exercise.

Also, Congress clearly wants to give leverage to its newly appointed vice president Rahul Gandhi and remove the obstacles in front of him so that he does not face the barbs, likely from Narendra Modi and BJP in the race for prime ministership in 2014.

I am sure, Rahul would never comment on the hanging of the Parliament House convict as he has not spoken on any issue of significance in the last several months. His flag bearers would have to do that on his behalf.

The last he spoke was at Jaipur and it was a "sob story" how his family sacrificed for the country and how as a young child and a teenager he faced the deaths of his grandmother and father.

A few days later after the Jaipur conclave of the Congress, Modi, likely to be his main opponent in 2014, tried to build the India story, show optimism and gave a way forward during his talk at the SRCC, Delhi University.

While Gandhi went back to the past to the days of his grandmother and father, Modi went ahead with a vision of what the country could be in the next few years. In fact, Modi was speaking the language of Rahul's father Rajiv Gandhi when he talked of computers, electronics and the new century when he became the Prime Minister in 1984. It is a different matter that Rajiv could not build on the vision and platform even after getting 4/5th of majority in Parliament, the biggest ever since the country became a Republic.

Rahul will be addressing four public meetings on Monday, February 11 in Tripura. It would be interesting to note the national or the local issues he takes up in the State.

He will have to fight the "voter fatigue" against him which is fast becoming a reality and invent new jargons and methodology to counter Modi amongst the You Tube and Smartphone generation. The party cannot depend on Afzal Guru's hanging to get votes. In any case, the law has taken its own course on the issue. 

(February 11, 2013)

 http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/chandigarh/126815-afzal-guru-congress-rahul-and-modi.html