Kejriwal is naive while Modi is a fascist: Mani Shankar Aiyar tells India TV
New Delhi: Mani Shankar Aiyar is one person who wears his secular credentials on his sleeves. He calls himself a 'secular fundamentalist' and he has very strong views on issues like secularism and communalism. Being
Q: Sometime back you had said that Congress may not win 2014 elections and that a spell in opposition will do good for the Congress party. Does it mean that senior leaders like you have already conceded defeat irrespective of whether Rahul Gandhi is projected as PM candidate or not?
Mani: Not at all. I never said that the Congress will be defeated or should give up hope. In 2004, at exactly this time January, Mr Vajpayee was so confidant of a BJP win that he brought forward the elections by nearly six months. And I recall that Yogendra Yadav, who was then not a political activist but a psephologist of some renown, had written an article in The Hindu in early February saying that whereas everybody thinks the outcome of this election is open and shut and the NDA will return to power, this may not be so. And it ended up with a thorough defeat for the NDA and a huge victory for the Congress party which then formed the UPA government. So you don't give up any election until it's over, you fight for it.
But I was making a completely separate point that even if we get defeated we can avail of that opportunity in opposition to do the revamping of the party which has been proposed since Rajiv Gandhi's famous centenary speech of 28 December 1985 but has never been implemented within Congress party because every time we win, those who are at the head of the party say why change anything. Only when we are in opposition then even ideas arise about how we can make things better. So while I believe that Rahul Gandhi in particular will make the changes whether we are in power or not, I think the opposition within the party to attempts by him to radically alter the nature of the Congress party might be more successful if we are not that successful in elections.
And the other thing is that it is very unlikely that any govt formed in 2014 will be able to last its full term. So it's entirely possible that we'll have another election in 2016 or even 2015. So this spell in opposition if we happen to lose will not be too long but it'll be sufficient for us to undertake the recasting of Congress party in 21st century to make it the natural party of governance in the 21st century as it has been in 20th century.
Q: Being a senior politician, what is your reading of current political scenario in the country, especially from Congress perspective?
Mani: The polity in India has never been fractured as much as it is today. We saw the consequences of the fracturing in 1989 Lok Sabha elections which threw up the V P Singh govt and started a process where the normal life of a government is a few months or at most a few years. That fracturing in 1989 was less than what it is today. You take my own state of Tamil Nadu. You had the one DMK that won in 1967. Within 5 years, it had split between the MGR faction that came to be known as AIADMK later on and the DMK. Today, you have the PMK, DMDK, MDMK and so on and so forth. There has been a fracturing of the Dravidian movement.
And therefore, if there has been a fracturing of Congress domination over the political system today as compared to Nehru's day, then it is a proof of the advance of the democracy. And since we are the sole authors of democracy in India then it is a matter of pride for us that the doors have really been proved to be open and the Aam Aadmi Party, in particular, has convincingly demonstrated to the Aam Aadmi that there is a prospect for the Aam Aadmi to be participative in our democratic process. And in that sense we welcome the maturing of Indian democracy even though for our party, it throws up the problem that Lord Rama had in fighting Ravana that there wasn't one head to fight , there were 10 heads to fight. So we are tackling the 10 heads.
Q: Do you believe that Congress should declare Rahul Gandhi the PM candidate without any further delay?
Mani: We don't have a presidential system and there is absolutely no need for us to declare who the PM candidate was. Even in 2004, where did we declare that Sonia Gandhi was our PM candidate? We all assumed she would be. And in the event she decided she wouldn't take it and somebody whose name was not in the picture became the prime Minister of India. And in 2009, obviously because he was already the Prime Minister we didn't have to name a PM candidate. We would have done so only we had wished to change him.
In 2014, he has withdrawn himself from the race for PM. So let's see what the outcome is. I think, very correctly, Sonia Gandhi has said that we'll name the candidate at an appropriate time. And there is no knowing whether the appropriate time is before or after the elections but I suspect that it will be after rather than before.
I don't really know what really is in the offing because I'm being deliberately kept out of everything in the Congress. I'm the total outsider. So I know less than you know about what is happening in the Congress.