Rahul’s Jinnah Trap: Congress and the price of Muslim appeasement

THE FIRST THREE Nehru-Gandhi prime ministers—JawaharlalNehru, IndiraGandhi and Rajiv Gandhi—were not, strictly speaking, ‘Muslim-first secularists’. Nehru knew the deeply communal nature of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s politics but lacked the courage to codify Muslim personal law at the same time as he codified Hindu personal law soon after Partition.

Indira Gandhi was a tougher realist. She let younger son Sanjay Gandhi inflict a reign of terror upon Muslims with forced sterilisation in Turkman Gate during Emergency. She didn’t need a Muslim vote bank. Nor did Rajiv Gandhi. He appeased both Muslims and Hindus in 1986 by overturning the Supreme Court verdict on Shah Bano and opening the locks of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

Congress was still winning Lok Sabha elections comfortably without worrying about Muslim votes. That changed after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Congress would never again win a majority in Parliament: 140 seats in 1996, 141 in 1998, 114 in 1999, 145 in 2004, 206 in 2009, 44 in 2014, 52 in 2019 and 99 in 2024.

Why did this happen? After Sonia Gandhi seized control of Congress in 1998, the party saw Muslims as a secure vote bank. Appeasement became unofficial policy. Rahul Gandhi was not yet in politics. He had finished university at 22 in 1992 and was parachuted at 34 into Amethi as an MP in 2004. Few know what Rahul did in the intervening 12 years. He started a small BPO called BackOps in Mumbai but soon closed it down. He held no professional job, had no professional qualifications (besides an MPhil degree) and no administrative experience.

In contrast, his father Rajiv had joined Indian Airlines at 23 as a licensed commercial pilot. He flew complex jet aircraft on feeder routes across India, doing mandatory breathalyser tests at airports before a flight, often at 6AM. He did this consistently for 12 years from 1968 to 1980, from the age of 23 to 35. Brother Sanjay’s death brought him reluctantly into politics at mother Indira Gandhi’s insistence in 1981. He was 36 years old. Sonia would adopt the same route for 34-year-old Rahul in 2004. But Rahul had neither his father’s decade-long technocratic experience nor the discipline of working in a professional corporate organisation.

Congress had meanwhile positioned itself as a Muslim-first secular party. Rahul, in his 10th year in politics, was put in charge of the Congress campaign in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Congress suffered a historic defeat, collapsing from 206 seats in 2009 to 44. Rahul now shifted decisively to the pre-Partition Jinnah model.

What was that model? In a speech in 1940, Jinnah had declared: “Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority, and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction.”

It is the same ideology Pakistan’s jihadist-minded army chief Asim Munir follows: two irreconcilable nations, separated by faith, custom and culture.

To Rahul, the Jinnah model appeared attractive. It ensured that India’s 15 per cent Muslims would be a secure vote bank for Congress. He knew that Congress had won power in 2009 with just 26.53 per cent vote share and 206 seats. The Muslim vote bank, along with Christians and ‘liberal’ Hindus, would surely carry Congress to over 30 per cent vote share and a majority in future Lok Sabha elections.

Why did it not? Rahul had fallen into the Jinnah trap: the more you appease a small section of voters, the more decisively the majority will react. Muslim polarisation begets Hindu counter-polarisation. Rahul’s aggressive appeasement of Muslims—including choosing the Muslim-and- Christian-majority Wayanad constituency for Priyanka’s parliamentary debut—has split India into two just as Jinnah, in a different historical context, split India into two.

Rahul’s Jinnah strategy is an electoral mousetrap for Congress. Rahul can no longer abandon his Muslim vote bank which contributes over half of Congress’ national vote share of 21 per cent. As Congress sinks deeper into Jinnah quicksand, the Hindu vote—including the liberal Hindu vote—could be lost for good.