One cannot help feeling sorry for Congress men in Kerala. Also, for Congress women, even if they were nowhere to be seen. It caught them in the sort of existential crisis that few parties in India have been for a very long time.

The worst thing for the Congress is that it still has the hangover of the Mahatma. But for that, the aura of hypocrisy, growing thicker day by day around the image of the party in Kerala, would have subsided and dissipated. Gandhiji exalted the moral above the political. In fact, politics without morality was listed by him as one of the five cardinal sins.

What is the essence of morality? How does it differ from the cynically political – politics understood as a theatre of expediency? To be ethical is to act according to set and tested principles that belong to the order of universal imperatives. Secondly, the ethical choice is free from calculations of profit and gain. According to Immanuel Kant, one’s capacity for ethical action is proved by indifference to consequences. Even if we do the right thing, but do it guided by expectations of some gain or fear of some loss, it is unethical. So, one thing is certain, and not even Congressmen would dispute this: if Gandhiji were here today he would have undertaken a fast to purify the Congress in the wake of party playing fast and loose with its ideological and ethical core and for letting the people Kerala down at a crucial moment.

In the beginning, Ramesh Chennithala and his newly-gained Sangh Parivar cohorts were alike clear that discriminating against women on the basis of religion was bad in law. They hailed the Supreme Court verdict spontaneously. Then, the state think-tank of the BJP, with its tails on fire for making major gains in Kerala to offset the inevitable losses the party is believed to suffer in other parts of the country, saw a goldmine. This sent shivers down the spin of a handful of Congressmen in Kerala. They did some quick back-of-the-cover calculations. Thought they saw disaster ahead, if BJP was allowed to turn Sabarimala into an electoral bumper harvest. The rest is history.

In all the reactions that emerged in the wake of the volte-face by the two parties, no surprise or disappointment was felt or expressed by the people of Kerala on the opportunistic way the BJP conducted itself in the matter. It was as if the party, in public perception, was acting entirely in character. But the flip-flop of the Congress – even as it continued to stridently justify and rationalize its strategy- evoked not only disappointment but also derision. The secular mask of the party cracked, revealing a reality of opportunistic communal appetites. The BJP fared better, if only for the reason that, unlike the Congress, it has no need to pose as a party committed to secular democracy, with unwavering loyalty to the Constitution of India.

The person who has suffered maximum image-loss in this process is not Ramesh Chennithala, but Shashi Tharoor. Poor man, Shashi! In one spell of political nervousness – the fear of losing a few votes in his constituency- he suffered total amnesia about all he had stood for. He, unlike Chennithala, had been almost persuasively articulate about the character and commitment of the Congress party, especially its principled commitment to secular democracy. He needs to explain to the rest of us, especially the people of his constituency, how his idea of secular democracy squares up with taking a stand – even by way of playing second fiddle to Chennithala – in favour of a practice that is, in the considered opinion of the Supreme Court of India, clearly gender-discriminative and vitiated further by traces of untouchability. Saying, ‘Well, we respect the Supreme Court verdict but we are with the believers” is too ridiculous to be reckoned.

It is inscrutable as to why politicians have to be necessarily short-sighted and infantile. Immediacy – that is, obsession with immediate advantage to the neglect of long-term and larger consequences- is a function of infantility. Adult ethical behaviour – which alone does justice to one’s stature as a human being- is the bridge between political pragmatism and statesmanship-like sagacity. There are times when one has to stand unflinchingly before the prospect of short-term losses in order to win people’s deep-seated trust and respect. Shape-shifters are neither respected nor trusted by any one; no, not even by their camp-followers. Jesus Christ put this principle well when He said, those who save their life will lose it; but those who lose their life for the sake of eternal values will find it. I am afraid Shashi has lost it. And that is a huge disaster.

It cannot but be that the Congress is ruing and lamenting the infantile pitch they adopted in a knee-jerk reaction, driven by the animal instinct of survival. Even the BJP has nothing to write home about from what was envisaged, according to the state BJP chief, as the Sabarimala pot-boiler. Clearly for the Congress, it was a tragedy – not comedy – of errors. But there is a big difference between the plight of the two parties. For the BJP it is a trick tried and failed. For the Congress, it is a matter of being coaxed out of character by somebody’s else’s trick. The BJP did not succeed; the Congress stands badly exposed.

There is only one way the party can salvage a modicum of its lost credibility in Kerala. Unfortunately, that is not, on the face of it, a happy option. That option is to make a public admission of its lapse in ideology and character, and to apologize to the people of Kerala for the same. Though this looks a humbling option, it is far better, even from an electoral point of view, than persisting obdurately with what even a child knows to be a self-denigrating blunder. The humility – which could be mistaken by the shallow as humiliation – of acknowledgement has greater power to win hearts and minds than the boorishness of continuing to defend the indefensible, palpably struggling to convince even oneself that one believes, somehow, what one is asserting in public to be true. This could have worked, if the people of Kerala weren’t as sensible and sentient as they happen to be.