The shoe must fit

By nominating Jagdish Tytler & Sajjan Kumar as its LS candidates, Congress runs the risk of losing a significant chunk of the vote in Delhi and Punjab

Facing shoe-throwers seems to have become an occupational hazard for politicians and even judges. While P Chidambaram demonstrated remarkable sangfroid on Tuesday, and adopted an admirably forgiving attitude later, it is also a comment on Indian tolerance that the shoe-thrower was on TV networks by the end of the day, appearing suitably contrite, while the original shoe-thrower in Iraq is serving time in jail. Throwing shoes as an expression of extreme emotion is of course completely unacceptable, it goes without saying, and the democratic discourse has to follow along more traditional lines. So there can be no defence for what Jarnail Singh did at the AICC headquarters on Tuesday. But having conceded all this, the more serious introspection has to be by the Congress party, which did the inexplicable when it chose to nominate Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar as its Lok Sabha candidates from two of Delhi’s seven seats. If nothing else, the danger of annoying Sikhs and losing a significant chunk of the vote in Delhi and Punjab should have been considered, as a part of the normal election arithmetic.

 

Even more substantially, there is the issue of what the party stands for and whether it believes in what it professes. The Sikh killings in 1984 were bad enough, but it is the lack of justice since then that has made matters worse—exactly the same story as it is with the Muslims in Gujarat. The question that will not go away is that if the Congress pillories the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) on account of Narendra Modi and the Gujarat killings, then how were the Sikh killings in Delhi in 1984 different? To argue that neither Mr Tytler nor Mr Kumar has been convicted by any court is a technically correct point, but politically it does not wash, because neither has Mr Modi or any of the others of the BJP in Gujarat been convicted of wrongdoing. If the Central Bureau of Investigation has cleared Mr Tytler and declared that there is no evidence against him, as much has been said about those considered most guilty in Gujarat. In these and other cases, the fact that the law enforcement machinery has been suborned is of no help; but then it is no political alibi either.

What the Congress has to recognise is that a candidate’s perceived winnability is not everything, especially when there is no shortage of candidates and when some basic issues of right and wrong are involved, if (that is) it claims to be different from the BJP on the communal issue. In the same way that the CPI(M) got caught in the crossfire for associating itself with some dodgy Muslim leaders in Kerala, the Congress too will find that its own support base will start asking uncomfortable questions, and the BJP will then have the ammunition to say that there is no difference, because Gujarat was no different from Delhi. Surely, the last thing the Congress would want to do is to allow the BJP to say just that; yet that is what it has just done.