Dealing the religion card in the nuke deal

The hullabaloo over the controversial Indo-U.S. nuke deal in the Indian parliament has exposed the country’s poor brand of secularism. The Congress-led coalition government survived the vote of confidence over the deal, which had come under attack from both the left parties and the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP.

Critics of the deal fear that this might compromise the sovereignty of the country and affect its independent foreign policy.

The leftist parties that earlier supported the minority Congress government from outside to keep the "communal" BJP out of power backed off after the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, made the deal a prestige issue.

As a result, his government had to seek support from others to survive the trust motion.

In sheer desperation, Manmohan Singh’s Congress party, which claims to be secular, played the religious card to win over the support of the Sikh MPs.

Indeed, Singh is the first Sikh prime minister of the country. The Congress leaders had urged the Akali Dal, a ruling party of the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab, to vote in favour of a Sikh PM. They even asked the head of the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs, to issue an edict asking the Sikh MPs to do so.

A number of Canadian Sikhs, who celebrated Singh’s appointment as a Prime Minister, also wanted the Akali Dal to save his government.

Akali Dal, which considers itself a party of the Sikhs, is traditionally opposed to the Congress. It decided otherwise and supported its ally, the BJP instead. The party leader and the Chief Minister of Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal, clearly said that Manmohan Singh’s religion is not an issue. He asked his eight MPs to vote against the motion. However, one Akali MP had abstained from the vote, forcing the party to expel him.

While the Akali Dal has always exploited the Sikh religious sentiments for its survival in Punjab, this time it shamed the Congress-led government, which also calls itself progressive. Even Singh did not hesitate quoting from the prayer of the tenth master of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh.

Singh’s religion is his personal matter. Using it for political benefits is unacceptable. If the Congress really cares about the Sikhs, it should punish those Congress MPs involved in the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984 that followed the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, by her two Sikh bodyguards.