Digvijaya Singh and the Congress' unfinished ideological argument

There's more to Digvijaya Singh than just a closet Hindutva-vadi at best and a rabid anti-RSS politician at worst

He is one of the most senior members of the Congress. And yet, he periodically lands himself and his party in thought controversy, suggesting the Congress’ search to find its ideological self is ongoing and it continues. Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister and current Rajya Sabha member (his term ends later this year) Digvijaya Singh’s praise for the command-control-reward structure in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is once again roiling the waters in the Congress.

 

Attaching a picture of a young Narendra Modi sitting on the floor at the feet of BJP patriarch L K Advani, Mr Singh observed in a social media post that it was “quite impressive” that “the BJP-RSS allow grassroots workers to grow within the organisation to top posts like chief minister and prime minister”. In another post pulled up and cited by enthusiastic BJP supporters, he is said to have noted, addressing party leader Rahul Gandhi directly: “Like @ECISVEEP needs reforms, so does Indian National Congress … we need more pragmatic decentralised functioning”.

 

Some party members say the real question he is asking is: Why can’t the Congress be more like the BJP?

 

Before the 2018 state Assembly election, he launched a Narmada Parikrama on foot. Ahead of the 2023 Assembly elections, wearing saffron robes he did prayers and rituals at the Pitambara Peeth in Datia. Before that he walked in a 35-km-long Kanwar yatra, starting in Gwarighat and culminating in Kailash Dham in Jabalpur. More than 100,000 people took part in the yatra, and Mr Singh was seen walking barefoot and briefly shouldering a kanwar.

 

The same Digvijaya Singh, at the Congress plenary session in Burari in 2010, delivered a fire and brimstone speech on “fascist forces” like the RSS and the BJP. “The RSS, in the garb of its nationalist ideology, is targeting Muslims the same way the Nazis targeted the Jews in the 1930s, ” Mr Singh had said. He said the RSS was sowing the seeds of Muslim hatred in the minds of the new generation and “this is the biggest danger for us”. He said the RSS had made its activists enter the bureaucracy and even the army. He asked: “Why did all the people involved in various bombings like Malegaon, Mecca Masjid, Samjhauta Express have links with the RSS”, effectively restarting the debate on Hindu terror.

 

The Congress, driven by its own compulsions and contradictions, neatly assembled the problem and slid it under the carpet. Academics and experts call the whole package “soft Hindutva ”. The party has had its proponents of ritualised Hinduism. Kamalapati Tripathi, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh more than 50 years ago, prominently wore external symbols of Hinduism. Madhya Pradesh was the first Congress-ruled state in India, under chief minister Govind Narayan Singh, to pass an anti-conversion law, the Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantraya Adhiniyam, 1968, though a committee to investigate conversions and missionary activity had already been set up by the Congress government in 1954 (the Niyogi Committee). These are just two examples of various manifestations of Hindutva that existed in the Congress as a stream of thought.

 

This is the background of the thinking in the Congress of which Digvijaya Singh is a product. But there’s more to him than just a closet Hindutva-vadi at best and a rabid anti-RSS politician at worst. As chief minister (1993-2003, admittedly a long time ago) Mr Singh, who began as a shishya of Arjun Singh, put in place many administrative reforms that ironically came back to bite him. His implementation of decentralisation and strengthening of panchayati raj institutions, leveraging the 73rd constitutional amendment, gave the sarpanch of zila panchayats autonomy and power.

 

However, when they got to a point where members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) began to feel disempowered, his party MLAs began to question him. Madhya Pradesh’s road infrastructure was unimpressive. Though Mr Singh made budgetary allocations for roads, only a small part of this went towards maintenance, with the lion’s share paying for wages of the road development corporation, a state-owned entity. After the bifurcation of Madhya Pradesh and the creation of Chhattisgarh in 2000, 32 per cent of the power-generation facility went to Chhattisgarh.

 

Madhya Pradesh had two options: Quickly augment power generation while buying power from Chhattisgarh. But in the interim, the state was, for a time, saddled with a 50 per cent shortfall in power. After having promised free power to farmers and other categories of consumers, Mr Singh was left to face the ire of angry consumers, who demanded he keep his word. Little wonder then, that the Congress was thrown out of power in 2003.

 

In his thinking, Digvijaya Singh has merely mimicked many of his predecessors, leading academics to question the soft Hindutva construct, which tends to weaken constitutional secularism without overtly attacking it. As an administrator he has many half successes to report. But in the history of the Congress, he will always be more than just an agent provocateur.