You ask experienced Congress ministers and they are both embarrassed and concerned. They know they have allowed their allies, particularly the Left, to ‘secularise’ the agenda of governance so aggressively, it has now become communalism in reverse and both the Congress and India will be made to pay for it. Nobody today even claims any of these attacks were the handiwork of anybody but ultra-Islamic groups, howsoever small and minuscule. A few more such attacks, God forbid, a soft, this kind of politically loaded approach towards them, along with issues like Afzal’s hanging, will be seen to be a repeat of the old “biryani for terrorists” story.

THE harsh political reality is that this will only harm the Congress. As popular insecurity grows, with unsolved terror attacks — for three years already — and increasing Naxal mayhem, the mainstream (as different from majority community) Indian voter will blame the Congress for incompetence. And the traditional Muslim vote, already taken by Mulayam, Mayawati, the Left and now even Nitish, will remain where it is. Senior Congressmen also know this. But so stifling is the compulsion to sustain this government for two more years, come what may, and so compelling still the nostalgia for the Muslim vote bank, that nobody is willing to question this even at the party’s top forums.

This presidential election is a good example of how the Congress has handed over to the Left the authority to certify any of its leaders and actions as secular or non-secular. So its home minister is not qualified for presidency not because his police and spooks failed to catch any terrorist in three years, but because he is a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba and was ‘soft’ (fair?) with the BJP when speaker of the Lok Sabha. As if this country has banned religion, or God, or godmen! Which party allows its senior-most leaders to be humiliated in public like that? And why? And finally, if the man’s secular commitment is so suspect, how can he continue to be the presiding deity of law and order in the entire country?

... contd.