Pity the Congress party. So keen on winning back religious minorities, yet so shy of secularism - this is indeed the essence of the recent Congress Working Committee resolution condemning the attacks on the Christian community in Gujarat. In consciously opting for a Hindu face, Sonia Gandhi's Congress is demonstrating, as did the party under the aegis of her husband Rajiv, symptoms of political schizophrenia.

The terse, three-paragraph Congress resolution echoes hypocritical BJP leaders who, even as they stoke communal passions, never miss the opportunity of insisting that India is secular, because India is Hindu.

These paeans to Hinduism ring particularly false in contemporary India. Communal mayhem in the Nineties, the abject failure to punish the perpetrators (Bhagalpur, Delhi and Mumbai riots), the demolition of the Babari Masjid, and the perennial search for an enemy of the majority community, belie the grandiloquent claims about the inherent greatness of Hinduism. Its votaries can indeed be as violent and rabid in their beliefs as those of other religions.

Statements about an intrinsically tolerant Hindu society are not only trite but also seem ironical because of the inequitable caste system: Hinduism is tolerant within an essentially intolerant social system it has created. The disabilities Dalits suffer from, the social privileges and economic advantages upper castes enjoy, and the increasing tension between these two social groups, raise the moot question: whose Hinduism is the Congress talking about - upper or subaltern castes"?

Indeed, the crisis of secularism in India is the crisis of Hinduism - and is closely linked with attempts to managing the tension in Hindu society ... Gandhi viewed the divinely-ordained varna system essential for the harmony of society, and untouchability as only a perversion of pristine Hinduism.

In Gandhi's view, all varnas possessed equality of social status, but not equality of opportunity ... Gandhi's perception of Hindu society ... aimed at managing the inherent contradiction between upper and lower castes without questioning the extant power arrangement, and then uniting them to fight against British rule.

... Scathingly critical of what he perceived to be Gandhi's patronising attitude ... Unlike Gandhi, equality meant not only equal status of the varnas, but also equal social and economic opportunity. He wanted to accentuate caste distinctions in order to create a society in which primordial identities would ultimately become irrelevant ..

In Independent India, the Congress endorsed the Gandhian prescription: it created a social alliance in which the political power vested in upper castes, and Harijans, in return for their support, were granted protection and concessions.

The disenchantment of Dalits with Congress politics initially surfaced in the late Sixties and then, after the Garibi Hatao interregnum, in the late Eighties and Nineties ...

This trend received a fillip during the anti-Mandal agitation ... Mandal united the disparate OBCs, alienated the Scheduled Castes and fragmented the polity – these developments understandably, aroused apprehensions among the numerically inferior upper castes about a possible decline in their power.

With the Congress failing to find new ways to tackle the tension in Hindu society, the BJP adroitly stepped into the vacuum. It sought to allay the fears of upper castes through the creation of 'the other' or 'the enemy'. In raising the bogey of Hinduism in danger, the BJP hoped to paper over caste contradictions and unite Hindu society thwart subaltern pressures and preserve the existing status quo.

No wonder, upper castes endorsed the BJP's Ayodhya agitation and overnight switched allegiance from the Congress. Indeed, the BJP's method of managing societal tension entails a perpetual search for 'new enemies' of Hinduism - it was Islam earlier, it's Christianity today, and no one knows who it might be tomorrow.

Alternatively, it will seek to create emotive issues (nuclear bomb) or project charismatic figures (Vajpayee) to obfuscate the societal contradiction.

The Congress' problem is that it cannot blatantly replicate the BJP's technique of managing the tension in Hindu society. Purportedly an umbrella organisation dominated by upper caste leaders; the support of religious minorities is crucial to its revival. It is this dilemma the Congress resolution seeks to resolve - in condemning the Sangh Parivar it demonstrates its pro-minority concerns; in invoking Hinduism it aims to allay upper castes' fear of radically restructuring society ...

The Congress may indeed win the support of upper castes disenchanted with the BJP, but this will not in any way help resolve the crisis in Hindu society. Pressures from below will seek new methods (in the form of new grassroots alliances) of mounting challenges to upper castes hegemony. The Congress will then have no option but raise, not unlike the BJP, pseudo-issues of the nation- in-danger slogan (Indira Gandhi) or become schizophrenic (like Rajiv, who overturned the Shah Bano judgement and opened the lock of the Babari Masjid).

If the Congress were to somehow succeed, the religious minorities, especially the Muslims, will find their friends among OBCs and Dalits ... In this sense, the BJP may be defeated - but so also will (be) secularism. (Source: The Hindustan Times, 24 January, 1999)