The 83rd Congress plenary held here on Sunday and Monday could be different in many ways. While the party’s call for halla bol against the BJP and the Sangh Parivar could project the latter as a natural party of Hindus, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s offer to appear before the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament has confused Congressmen and the Opposition as well.
In her address, party chief Sonia Gandhi had said, “The Congress Party makes no distinction between organisations of ‘majority’ and of the ‘minority’ communities who indulge in communalism and related acts of terrorism. They are all dangerous, they must all be defeated,” she said without naming any organisation.
But the political resolution clearly identified the RSS and the VHP as the communal organisations and asked the government to investigate links between “terrorists and the RSS and its sister organisations.”
It charged the ideology of the BJP and its affiliate organisations like the RSS with threatening our polity by spreading hatred and violence and said, “The RSS and the VHP are insidious in their effort to break. But the resolution remained silent on naming the “minority”’ organisations who indulge in communalism. The BJP and the Sangh Parivar could exploit this by charging the Congress as an “anti-Hindu” party.
The Congress is also finding it difficult to convince why PM Manmohan Singh offered to appear before the PAC. This is because the party has been opposing to call the Prime Minister before a parliamentary committee in the 2G spectrum allocation controversy. Mrs Gandhi, in her address to the CPP general body meeting here on December 13, had said, “Our government has nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Our concerns are that we should not undermine the established institutions such as the PAC and the CBI. Nor should we do anything that will degenerate the institutions of the Prime Minister. We cannot sacrifice institutions at the altar of political expediency.”
The political resolution moved on December 19 at the plenary said, “As vested political interests seek to malign our institutions, the Congress Party affirms that it shall protect the instituions of democracy.”