The Congress has never been particularly smart about handling sensitive issues of faith. Particularly telling instances of such maladroit handling were seen during the later years of the Rajiv Gandhi period, when the prime minister first attempted to win over Muslims by enacting the Muslim Women’s Bill and then play the Hindu card by opening the gates of the locked complex and later allowing the shilanyas ceremony to be conducted. Unsurprisingly, the Rajiv government did not succeed in impressing either the Muslims or the Hindus as the results of the 1989 general election proved. The BJP, at that point, was able to run rings round the Congress precisely because the latter had laid itself open to such attack through its compulsive mishandling of matters of faith.

The UPA government’s initial management of the affidavit on the Sethusamudram project was marked by that familiar ineptness and it gave the BJP and the Sangh Parivar an issue to take to the streets — as they did on Wednesday. The Congress’s course correction is therefore evidence that the party may be finally learning some of the lessons from its own past. As our columnist argues, state secularism — as it has been conceived in India and in other parts of the world — isn’t constructed to interrogate faith but merely to show equal respect to every faith within the country. It could even be argued that a more rigid definition of secularism may have seen the collapse of the secular state as we know it in India. So finally Union Law Minister Hans Raj Bhardwaj got to see the light, with some elbow from the Congress president. He demonstrated unsuspected depths of poetic imagination when he declared before the media on Thursday that “the existence of Rama cannot be doubted. As Himalaya is Himalaya; Ganga is Ganga; Rama is Rama”.

... contd.