Most people don’t know that the new Congress chief minister of Telangana, Revanth Reddy, once worked in an RSS journal. And on his first day in office was surrounded by Hindu priests chanting shlokas. Well, well, well.

So how did he clear the Congress’s acid test of secularism? The answer is well known. Despite all its lip service to Muslim welfare and so on, culturally it has always been a Hindu party because the majority of its members are Hindu and party policy is not the same thing as individual preference.

Nehru understood this difference. That’s why, after his bruising battles with the traditionalists in the Congress in the early 1950s, he re-branded it as ‘secular’.

That was a new term to Indian politics and it had a different meaning for him — no state religion — from what it acquired later under his daughter, Indira Gandhi. But even though she hid it, she was quite a devout Hindu.

Hindu and secular

Now even that effort, to hide the religious preference, has gone. Rahul Gandhi parades his Hindu-ness. Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh, both Congress leaders from MP, to name just two more, go around saying we are Hindu and secular. That’s exactly what members of the BJP and RSS also say.

And that’s why, for the last 20 years, I have been writing that the BJP and the Congress should merge. It’s quite a no-brainer. They are like two tubes of toothpaste differentiated by colour.

My suggestion has evoked two reactions. One says don’t be a fool. The other says yes, it’s a good idea. But I think it’s an idea whose time has come.

The point is this: as a political party the BJP has long outgrown the RSS and the Congress has outgrown the Gandhi family. Recent election results show just this. Both the family and the RSS are no longer as relevant to electoral outcomes as they used to be.

So it’s not the fevicol that the Gandhi family provides to the Congress, or the ideological leadership the RSS provides to the BJP, that matters now. A very large proportion of Indian voters have moved on.

In the RSS-BJP case, it’s more a case of voters saying, “Ok, we are all Hindus but how about a job now”? This is a case of “Yeh dil mange more”. You can’t beat the Hindus-as-victim-for-1,000 years drum beyond a point. You can’t push temple restoration agendas also forever.

So even at election time since 2019, RSS help is not needed as much as it was in the past. But RSS loyalists do get appointed to high office. They take orders from the BJP.

In the Congress case it’s the well-known fourth generation incompetence. The Gandhi family now is an irrefutable case in point. So the Congress party’s regional leaders don’t need the Gandhis any longer. They win or lose on their own. We must also remember that the RSS is 98 years old while the BJP is just 44. It has pretty much struck out on its own. If nationalisation was the core Congress belief from 1956 (Avadi resolution) to 1991, education curricula and temples are the core RSS needs. Both have been delivered.

Defections will happen

And then there are defections. Congress politicians have been joining the BJP in large numbers. This can and will go on happening. These guys don’t care either about the Gandhis or the RSS ideology. All they want is an opportunity to make some money by peddling influence.

Then there is the vote share. If you add the BJP and the Congress shares, the number crosses 50 per cent. You can imagine what that means to Parliament seats.

You may well ask what about an effective Opposition, then? Well, if it’s an effective Opposition India needs, it’s not going to come from the Congress. It can’t. That’s like asking different coloured toothpastes to work differently.

Effective Opposition has to come from the large number of regional parties because they are genuinely different from the BJP and the Congress in both identity and ideology. They can easily provide around 200 seats in Parliament.

The Congress at present does not fit any category. It’s neither fully regional nor fully socialist. It’s become BJP Lite, just as AAP has become Congress Lite — or what in Punjabi is called aadha teetar, aadha batayr (half partridge, half quail).

Of course, this merger will not happen formally and it needn’t, partly because it’s already half happened and is going on happening. Over time it will become a fait accompli.

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