Column

Delhi’s grandmotherly but savvy chief minister Sheila Dikshit caught the city by surprise last week with her insensitive, off-the-cuff remark about television producer Soumya
Vishwanathan’s gruesome

pre-dawn murder on the capital city’s killer roads. “All by herself till 3am in a city where people believe…you know…you should not be so adventurous…’’ she was quoted as saying. She has since apologised with a phone call to Soumya’s grief-stricken parents and a regretful message to a memorial meeting for the young journalist. But the apology cannot shake off a growing sense of unease that the Congress seems to have lost its way on the eve of elections.

Dikshit’s ill-advised comment only underlined the impression that the party is either tired, or has simply retired from the business of politics after a string of poll defeats in
recent months. What else explains the Delhi chief minister’s rapidly increasing list of gaffes? Or the party’s deafening silence as a sense of alienation grips Muslims after a police encounter in Jamia last month raised questions instead of providing answers?

Not one senior Congress leader has bothered with a healing touch visit to the Jamia area even as complaints pour in about police harassment and strange biases that are virtually de-linking the residents from mainstream life in Delhi.

A report released by the Delhi Union of Journalists last week carried an anguished piece from a resident who requested anonymity as he described life in Jamia after the Batla house shootout in which two supposed terrorists and a police inspector were shot dead and one suspected terrorist was arrested. He writes that pizza parlours have stopped
deliveries to Jamia, private internet providers are refusing connections and commercial establishments have cut back on daily supplies. “I fight daily battles,’’ he writes. “These daily battles make me angry. But all that anger doesn’t make me a terrorist…..Why am I asked to prove my loyalty to my country every time (a bomb blast) happens?’’

What is surprising is that the Congress seems entirely oblivious of the resentment and anger burning in a community that is a key voter constituency of the party. After the blasts in the London tube in 2005, the then Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair, went out of his way to reassure Britain’s large Muslim community that the fight was against terror, not against Islam or Muslims. Strangely, no important Congress leader has thought it necessary to send a similar reassuring message to Muslims in India as terror assumes frightening proportions here.

Dikshit’s thoughtless comment on adventurism after a brutal murder shocked the city she governs is reflective of the peculiar paralysis that seems to have gripped the Congress just when it should be sharpening all the weapons in its armoury for the big battles coming up, first in the states where assembly elections are due in November-December and then for the Lok Sabha elections in the first half of 2009. It’s almost as if the party has given up the fight even before it’s begun. Dikshit is certainly not displaying the sophistication that won her a second term from Delhi’s mercurial voters.

But why blame her alone? A similar paralysis has overtaken the high command, preventing it from shaking up the union Cabinet, if only to send a strong message to the nation that it means business on both the security and economic fronts. So, has the Congress decided to retire from the battleground for the moment? If the Congress believes that it needs time out to regroup, it really should think again. By the time it is ready to rejoin the power game, someone else may have taken its place.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net