Is The Congress, BJP Without The Lotus?

Is the Congress nothing but the BJP without the Lotus? Despite holding the secular of saffron banner, time and again it has faced the soft Hindutva charge. Such as now.

- Bula Devi

“Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me: ‘Bharat mata ki jai’, Victory to Mot her India. I would ask them unexpectedly what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted?... Bharat mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of this Bharat mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery.”

—Jawaharlal Nehru, in The Discovery of India

It cut to the quick, this question. Waris Pathan, an MLA of Asaduddin Owaisi’s party AIMIM, got unanimously suspended from the Maharashtra assembly till April 13 for refusing to say ‘Bharat mata ki jai’. And more than a few secularliberal hearts cringed at the fact that support for Shiv Sena’s loyalty test came from the party of which Pandit Nehru was the progenitor—the Congress. And when general secretary Digvijaya Singh piped his approval, the thought crossed many a mind: Was the Congress of 2016 playing its own version of Hindutva—albeit a soft Hindutva?