modi-tharoor-tewari-congress-at-ideological-crossroads

A picture, showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi deeply engrossed in some serious conversation with Congress MP Manish Tewari while Shashi Tharoor and some other MPs are looking on, is currently going viral on multiple media platforms. Most of the newspapers also carried this photograph, which was taken during the dinner hosted by the PM for members of various delegations, which went across to different countries to put forth India’s point of view in the wake of Pahalgam terror attack and the subsequent anti-terror action. The MPs belonged to all the parties, including the BJP and the Congress.

 

Since then, there has been palpable discomfiture within the Congress over the circulation of this picture, although there should be none. The Congress should rather feel proud of its leaders who represented the country during the BJP government. The party could score a political point over its archrival that when it comes to defending and protecting the national interest, the Congress never lags behind. And the Congress has a glorious record at that. It has lost two Prime Ministers, Ms Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi, and one Chief Minister Beant Singh, among so many leaders and workers, to terrorism.

 

In fact, Manish Tewari’s father Prof Vishwa Nath Tewari, a former MP and a close aide of Ms Indira Gandhi was shot dead by terrorists outside his house in Chandigarh in April 1984. And not to speak of the freedom struggle the Indian National Congress led. It was a nationalist movement, so much so Muslim League leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah described it as a “Hindu communal organisation”.

 

With such a great legacy and sacrifice for nationalism, the Congress is today finding itself at ideological crossroads. There are murmurs within the Congress that it should take action against leaders like Tharoor, Tewari, Salman Khurshid and Dr Amar Singh for leading/joining various delegations to represent the country against the party’s wishes.

 

Here lies the crux of the problem. The Congress has finally come down to believing that representing the country means representing the BJP or the Prime Minister. That is what some of its leaders seek to suggest. Otherwise, why would they demand action against their own leaders who have made the country feel proud?

 

Interestingly, this is what the BJP and its leaders also try to assert that the BJP’s interest is the nation's interest and anyone criticising or opposing the party or the Prime Minister is deemed to be opposing the national interest. The Congress is only seconding the BJP’s misplaced belief by suggesting that its leaders represented the BJP and not the country when they went around the world to explain the country's position, rather they spoke the BJP’s language.

 

The BJP and the Congress are so polarised and regimented against each other that they resort to any sort of vague allegations against each other without bothering whether these will echo with the public sentiment. Only yesterday, when the visuals of an Indian student being pinned down in Newark airport in the US by the authorities there went viral, the Congress spokesperson Ms Supriya Shrinate, instead of condemning the incident blamed the “failure of India’s foreign policy” for the incident. How can Indian foreign policy be held responsible for it, nobody asked her nor did she explain it on her own.

 

The same is the case with many BJP leaders also, who have been hurling vague allegations against the Congress starting from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and blaming him for everything that has gone wrong in the country.

 

Manish Tewari, obviously aware of the ruffles his and other party MPs’ visit abroad have caused within his own party, explained it the best way possible, by writing on X, “I cut my political teeth on the frontlines of the political battle against violent extremism, separatism and terrorism in the mid- 1980s in Punjab when you were not sure that when you went out in the morning, you would even come back in the evening. That is what defined us. More than 30,000 people fell to the depredations of terrorists between 1980 and 1995 in Punjab, including our own kith and kin. Terrorists were trained, resourced and armed by Pakistan. For us, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is not an esoteric academic discussion but an existential challenge. It was therefore but a sequitur that we would have played our part as we have done over the past 45 years in exposing the perfidy of Pakistan”.

 

For feeling like that, one does not need to be a BJP supporter or speak the BJP language, as one of the Congress spokespersons said about Shashi Tharoor, which was seconded by Pawan Khera. This is when the Congress, particularly its first family, has been the worst victim of terrorism, having lost two members, Ms Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi to terrorism.

 

Congress has deliberately surrendered its unparalleled and unmatched stand on nationalism to the BJP for some unexplained reasons, best known to its current leadership. Only if those at the helm right now and deciding the policy, strategy and the messaging of the party, dust their own history books, will they be reminded that the space the BJP has been occupying today, has actually been occupied once by the Congress and for better reasons, and with greater credentials of sacrifice.

 

So, when leaders like Tharoor, Tewari and Khurshid represent India against terrorism sponsored by Pakistan, they are not only representing India, but what Congress once held so dear and for what its leaders laid down their lives. BJP during those days was just sprouting out of the seeds.