Why is the 2024 Congress manifesto silent on pushing back against majoritarianism? History has clues

The Congress party’s manifesto for the 2024 general election has many claims and promises – some quite commendable. What is decidedly missing, though, is forceful pushback against the majoritarianism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

After the enthusiastic atmospherics created by the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Yatra and its messaging of a frontal attack on the BJP’s politics of hate, this climb down is disappointing. The manifesto elides the central concern in political discourse today – of a majoritarian takeover of India.

It is hardly the way to take on a political party, and its chief campaigner, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who repeatedly falls back on sectarian polarisation to seek votes, often directly inciting hatred against India’s Muslims.

What explains this unwillingness on the part of the Congress – India’s main opposition party – to take the BJP head on, on human and minority rights?

History provides some clues. The 10 years of BJP rule under Modi and its disastrous impact on civil and political rights and religious minorities is understood in popular memory as a sharp break from the past. Reality is more complicated.

The manifesto

A reading of the Congress manifesto makes it clear that there is no engagement with a major policy gap: that under BJP rule, the barriers that religious minorities have faced enormous difficulty in accessing social welfare programmes since then. Overcoming this will require nothing less than an anti-discrimination law.

However, the Congress is silent on this in its manifesto. The section on religious minorities makes tepid claims about scholarship programmes and bank credits, and promises a diversity commission. It does not provide any insights on how these promises will address the poor performance of the same schemes during the Congress’s own rule until 2014.

The sections on education, art and culture make no mention of the systematic erasure from history textbooks of entire sections during the decade of BJP rule and of misrepresentations of history. There is only a generic statement stating that revisions will not be arbitrary.

On internal security, while the party promises to put down hate speech and hate crimes with a firm hand, it provides no concrete plan to grapple with the now-normalised epidemic of hate against minorities, either through new legislation or policies.

At the same time, there is no mention in the document of the BJP’s laws on state cow protection and anti-conversion that have been weaponised by Hindutva vigilante groups to target minorities.

The Congress’s proposal for “reversing the damage” of BJP rule involves rolling back anti-people laws, including those “relating to workers, farmers, criminal justice, environment and forests and digital data protection”. There is no mention of citizenship laws and policies set in motion by the BJP that disproportionately hurt religious minorities, particularly Muslims, including the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.

Likewise missing is any mention of the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution that gave the former state of Jammu and Kashmir special status. This was accompanied by a brutal crackdown in the former state, legal challenges and an equally loud international outcry.

The silence of India’s principal opposition party on these and other controversial legislations shows how far the Overton Window – the range of political policies considered acceptable by the mainstream – has shifted to the right in India, effectively normalising majoritarianism.

The manifesto claims the party will end the weaponisation of laws, arbitrary and indiscriminate arrests, prolonged custody and custodial deaths. While these are hallmarks of 10 years of the BJP’s authoritarian rule, the Congress has a history of using the law the same way.

It did so against dissenters, certainly in zones where nationhood has been contested (Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, the North East and Central India), as also against the poor and marginalised across India.

The fact that the manifesto has no mention of human rights in all its 47 pages shows how the Congress’s promise of protection of civil rights comes across as mere lip service.

Finally, the manifesto promises the Congress will restore the voters’ trust in the election process. This is a necessary step given BJP’s attempt to undermine this last bulwark of democracy in India. Yet there is little on how, at the heart of a robust electoral system, lies the equal exercise of the will of the people and the question of representation.

Muslims make up just under 15% of India’s population, yet they make up a mere 5% of the 282 candidates put up by the Congress to contest elections to Parliament, demonstrating the Congress’s poor commitment to fighting Muslim political exclusion.

There is also no promise to bring forward state elections in Kashmir (the state assembly has been suspended since 2018), or to reverse the perceived damage to Muslim representation by the recent delimitation commission awards in Kashmir and Assam.

Constitution making

The past decade has been unique but it also shows many parallels with the pre-BJP period. A case could be made that Congress policies and practices in the early years of the republic, when the party enjoyed political dominance and when modes and habits of governance were still forming, may have paved the way for the BJP today.

This has allowed the Hindutva party to dominate the political space and leverage the instruments of power to serve its twin goals of authoritarianism and majoritarianism.

The Congress-led Constituency Assembly – the provisional Parliament – that adopted the Constitution in 1950, drew most of its provisions from the Government of India Act of 1935. The colonial-era Indian Civil Service, the Imperial Police and Indian Army were all retained.

Even as India was being hailed internationally as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the post-colonial world, its leaders were choosing not to sever ties with colonial tools and approaches.

Instead, they decided to use the repressive tools and instruments that they inherited to administer a democratic state governed by the will of the people. That set the scene for Parliament over the next decades to legislate a litany of repressive laws, all at the cost of freedoms and rule of law.

These included preventive detention provisions (Article 22 of Constitution), the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971, among others, that were expanded further by future governments.

All these had the effect of undermining civil and political rights, especially targeting dissenters. The BJP today is using the same laws to target freedoms as it pursues its majoritarian agenda.

The Constitution that was adopted failed to provide substantive protection to minorities. When the Constituent Assembly met for the first time in 1946, three options for protecting minorities were under consideration, as political historian Pratinav Anil shows in his recent book, Another India: The making of the World’s Largest Muslim minority, 1947-’77.

The measures were separate electorate for minorities, proportional representation for them and reservations in parliament, ministries and services.

These options – fantastic as they may sound today – had their provenance in the Congress’s own policy deliberations in the run up to Independence. But by the time the Constitution was adopted, on January 26, 1950, all three options had been dismantled.

While colonial-era reservations for members of the Scheduled Castes in educational institutions and government jobs were retained, they were abolished for all minorities.

This would have serious consequences for Muslims.

The same year, Muslims and Christians from the lowest strata of society were excluded by law from the Scheduled Castes category, depriving even the most marginalised sections among them from accessing preferential benefits in education, jobs, welfare programmes and protection against violence to which the Scheduled Castes are entitled.

History of abuse, impunity

In the parliamentary elections between 1951 and 1971, the Congress garnered an average of 45% of the votes cast But the first-past-the-post system it had helped adopt was enough to give it commanding majorities in the Lok Sabha, with some 70% of the seats, on average in the period. This ensured that in these early decades, the Congress had no political opposition at the national level.

At the local level, the Congress deployed many strong-arm tools to ward off dissent and counter political opposition – including the use of preventive detention laws and imposition of President’s Rule, as in Punjab (1952), Andhra Pradesh (1954) and Kerala (1959).

The first-past-the-post system is now rewarding BJP, the dominant party in power today, by exaggerating the share of seats of the leading party, while penalising smaller parties. In 2019, with 37.4 % of the votes cast, the BJP was able to secure 56 % of seats. In states it is unable to obtain a mandate, the BJP deploys unfair means to undermine elected governments.

Congress leaders, of course, brooked no challenge to the unity of India. Resistance to the integration of areas in North East India, including the Naga and Mizo hills and later Manipur and parts of Assam, were subdued by deploying the Army and enforcing the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, enacted in 1958. The act confers vast powers upon the armed forces deployed in “disturbed areas” and provides them immunity from prosecution.

This was extended to Kashmir in 1989 and used there generously alongside other measures such as the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 and the National Security Act, to keep order and control. What followed was a saga of human rights abuses and social dislocations of citizens, especially of communities in India’s peripheries.

Minority communities in the heartland also suffered the heavy hand of the state in its formative years. Emblematic of such atrocities was the brutal integration of Hyderabad, euphemistically called the Police Action. It resulted in the largescale killings of Muslims (between 27,000-40,000 according to a government-appointed fact finding), the widespread rape and abduction of women and forced conversion, among other abuses.

The Hyderabad atrocities became a template for mass anti-minority violence in the years that followed, of the collusion of political and administrative elites with anti-minority groups, as well of official denials and erasures. The first half of the 1960s saw repeated mass violence, often mischaracterised as riots, but that were, in fact, targeted violence against Muslims.

The year 1961 was a turning point, with a major conflagration in Jabalpur, in central India, and later in the north, in Aligarh and Meerut. Anti-Muslim violence was unleashed again in March 1964 across a string of sites in eastern India, resulting in scores of deaths.

These were followed in later years with some of the most infamous episodes of mass violence against minorities, most on the Congress’s watch – Nellie (1983), Bhagalpur (1989), Delhi (1984), Mumbai (1993), Kandhamhal (2007), among them.

Common to these conflagrations was the absence of any effort on the part of the authorities, including the seniormost Congress leaders, to acknowledge the atrocities and hold perpetrators to account. It demonstrated the lack of any commitment of the Congress leadership to come down firmly on the scourge of targeted violence.

Historian Manu Bhagavan has shown how this was the outcome early on of the ambivalence, sometimes active sympathy, within the Congress, for its members that espoused Hindu nationalist sentiments. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and affiliated groups, after a short ban for their involvement in Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination, were allowed to resurrect themselves and to develop their organisational capacity for further anti-Muslim violence.

The long-established culture of impunity for mass atrocities, the lack of any accountability, the official erasures, and the denial of justice for victims all play into the BJP’s hands today as it uses anti-minority violence instrumentally to strengthen its hold on power and realise its ideological goals.

Marginalisation to exclusion

A direct consequence of the absence of any protection for religious minorities is their poor socio-economic condition. The report of Sachar Committee – tasked by Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 to document the conditions of India’s Muslims – was the first official acknowledgement of Muslim socio-economic marginalisation.

The committee found that Muslims constituted the poorest sections of India’s population, along with Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Employment too was found to be poor among Muslims. Most were found to be engaged in the unorganised sector.

Muslims were the least literate among all religious communities, while Muslim women were among the most illiterate sections of society (47.3% illiteracy). The incidence of out-of-school children was highest among Muslims, correlating with the high incidence of child labour among Muslims (at 3%, higher than the national average at 2.4%). In public sector employment, Muslims represented only 4.9%.

Another aspect of the poor outcome for Muslims is the dismal representation in state structures and elected bodies – to the point of exclusion. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot shows, based on a new database, that the proportion of Muslims in the senior levels of the police was under 5% in the 1950s, falling further in the decades after.

Similar was the case with the higher civil service. In the armed forces, the Muslim presence was 2%. These figures have remained mostly stable to this date, even as the Muslim population has increased.

In Parliament, Muslim representation in the early decades was between 8%-10%. From 1980 to 2014, when Congress lost its dominance and the BJP was ascendant, the number of Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha decreased by more than half (from 49 to 25 in a house of 534), even though Muslim population went up. Jaffrelot blames this on the BJP’s reluctance to endorse Muslim candidates.

But rather than counter the trend, the Congress seems to have chosen to follow suit, itself fielding fewer Muslim candidates. In 2014, for instance, Muslims made up 6% of all candidates the party put forward. All parties, taken together, nominated only 8.9% Muslim candidates in 2019 elections. Fewer were elected and Muslims formed only 4.2% of Lok Sabha, with none from the BJP.

So far in the 2024 election, Muslims form only 5% the Congress roster of candidates though the community accounts for 14.2% of India’s population.

Blaming the victim

The existence of a modicum of cultural rights for religious minorities – including the right to establish religious charities (Article 26 of Constitution), and schools (Article 30), the right to preserving minority scripts and tongues (Article 29), and especially the protection of minority codes in place of common civil code – has been fodder for the false charge by Hindutva groups that the Congress has “appeased” Muslims.

This is, as we have seen, despite the absence of any political and representational rights for religious minorities, and the overwhelming evidence pointing especially to Muslim exclusion from socio-economic rights, and frequent denial of right to life, liberty and justice.

Historian Pratinav Anil shows that during framing of the Constitution, Congress leaders were surprisingly accommodative of minorities’ cultural rights in place of political ones. These cultural concessions have since been politicised by minority faith groups as well as Hindu groups. Rather than uphold the separation of state and religion, Congress governments have played a dangerous balancing game, making concessions to both.

Throughout, the Congress party’s response to the manufactured narrative of appeasement has been defensive, mostly avoiding the subject, rather than confronting the charges on facts. This perpetuates the victim-blaming of Muslims, even as it pushes secular parties even more to the corner.

How not to fight back

The Congress’s ambivalence in the past – the claim of secularism, unity in diversity and liberal democracy, whilst presiding over widespread impunity for grave abuses and the historical marginalisation of minorities – has allowed the BJP to build the infrastructure, the tools and the morality that it has now weaponised to serve its Hindu majoritarian goals.

Many have described the 2024 general election as the do-or-die struggle for democracy and constitutionalism in India. If the Congress believes in the significance of these polls, calling the BJP’s bluff will require it to go back to the roots and acknowledge its own mistakes to be able to offer a fresh start.

The Congress, or any other opposition party, will still not be able to get a chance to implement its plan for several parliamentary terms, given the vice-like grip that BJP currently seems to have on the electorate. But an honest reckoning will help it create the seeds of a challenge.

What is certain, though, is that trying to win elections by running away from difficult questions and pandering to all will never give the Congress the mandate of the people of India.

Sajjad Hassan is a researcher of conflicts and peace-building in an uncertain world.