This refers to the article, “Secularism haunts Congress post-poll” (July 4) by Kalyani Shankar. The author has rightly lauded Mr AK Antony's publicly-aired scepticism of the Congress's dubious claims of being secular. Over the years, the party's approach to this issue has been fashioned by two considerations. While initially, Muslims, being the largest minority group, were perceived and wooed as a vote-bank with promises of sops and appeasement, the rise of the BJP in the 1990s so scared the Congress that it shifted its focus to raising the communal bogey to reap the Muslim vote harvest.
The irony is that even this fake concern for the minorities concentrated entirely on the Muslims. For the Congress to really re-invent itself from its nadir now, its leader, obviously not the reluctant party vice president Rahul Gandhi, has to first totally shed its adherence to the mythical concept of ‘secularism', which really is pseudo-secularism.