Khurshid is too clever a player to unilaterally pluck the nine per cent figure out of a skull cap at a public meeting in his Farrukhabad parliamentary constituency.
There are two possible explanations for his announcement. First (and the more unlikely one), it is possible that the Law Minister demonstrated uncharacteristic impatience and jumped the gun. In other words, the Congress had decided to incorporate the nine per cent quota for Muslims in its election manifesto for Uttar Pradesh.
Khurshid merely leaked the proposal to an obliging media. Second, it is more likely that the Congress deliberately fielded Khurshid to float a trial balloon and observe the reactions to the proposal which was under active consideration by the group that regards UP as a make-or-break election. Khurshid's pre-arranged leak was premised on the principle of deniability by the official Congress.
The desperation of the Congress to make the UP Assembly poll a Muslim-only election may strike many people as astonishing. The party has absolutely no hesitation in wanting to upturn the strictures in the Constitution against religion-based reservation for the sake of courting a community that makes up some 15 to 17 per cent of the electorate.
The reasons are grounded in a mindset. For many ‘radical' editorialists the outcome of the UP election depends on the answer to the question: Which way will the Muslims vote? Everything else is irrelevant. The Congress appears to have been excessively influenced by this mentality.
To reduce an entire election to the behaviour of Muslim ‘swing voters' is an excessively narrow way of viewing the election. The truth that many of these angst-ridden radicals fail to recognise is the alternative principle: Muslims vote — and in very large numbers — but they are not the only people who vote.
It took less than seven days for the idea that UP is made up of many castes and communities to sink in. By mid-week, it was becoming apparent that a proposal which in effect set aside one-third of the Other Backward Classes quota for Muslims was calculated to produce a vicious reaction.
Most affected was the group known as the Most Backward Classes that feared being squeezed into oblivion by a large quota for Muslims. The Congress, therefore, suddenly woke up to the realisation that Khurshid's grandstanding, far from generating a Muslim wave for the Congress, was more likely to produce a backlash against the Congress. More worrying for the Congress was the fact that the major beneficiary of the OBC/MBC resentment was likely to be the BJP, a party that has been written off by the strategists attached to the Crown Prince.
It is the same story with Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh's persistent demand that the Government initiate a fresh inquiry into the shootout at Batla House, Delhi. The issue, it would seem, continues to agitate a section of Muslims in Azamgarh who organised a black flag demonstration against Rahul Gandhi last week.
At the same time, there is fierce opposition within the security and intelligence establishment to re-opening a case in order to project suspected terrorists as helpless victims of trigger-happy policemen. The Congress had to choose between converting the Batla House encounter into a Muslim issue and letting it remain an incident in the country's anti-terror operations.
It is my guess that had Khurshid's nine per cent announcement been accompanied by Muslim euphoria and OBC/MBC indifference, the party would have found a way of giving the green signal for a fresh inquiry into the Batla House incident. The likes of Digvijay Singh would have no doubt impressed upon Rahul Gandhi to pressure the Prime Minister and Home Minister into doing what was beneficial for the Congress.
The emerging OBC/MBC backlash has put paid to these plans and has allowed an emboldened Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram to say that there is no question of any fresh inquiry that would have politicised the anti-terror operations.
The lessons for the Congress from the foiled bid to overplay the Muslim card are obvious. Success in Indian elections depends substantially on creating a broad coalition of castes and communities. All political parties have realised this in UP. Mayawati, for example, has a core Dalit vote. But she can only transform the BSP from being a sectional player to a governing party if she is successful in getting an incremental vote from other castes and communities.
Likewise, the upper caste leaders in the UP unit of the BJP have been grudgingly made to realise that to be a credible player it needs OBC support and, more important, a strong OBC leader such as Uma Bharati.
The Congress, which enjoys a smattering of support from all the Hindu castes needed en bloc Muslim support to woo voters who are inclined to support winners. Yet, social engineering involves a delicate balance to ensure that no community feels displeased. In its haste to leave absolutely nothing to chance, the Congress overdid its courtship of the Muslim community, with unfortunate consequences for it.
Being too-clever-by-half works when success is guaranteed. In being too clever, the Congress appears to have fallen between two stools.
