For the Congress the events of 2002 in Gujarat seem to have become the only peg to hang its electoral fortune on. That is understandable. The party dares not speak of its achievements because statistics are no substitute for the food on the plate of the common man. That food is shrinking with inflation refusing to plummet. With the economy in a shambles, the rupee at its lowest value in a decade, the desperate roadshows of finance minister Chidambaram not getting even a single dollar flow, several large projects like steel plants proposed by POSCO and Arcelor-Mittal, Vedanta, etc. cancelled, the current account deficit in trade is widening. The RBI has in a desperate measure to save the rupee, again raised interest rates. The market response is that this remedy is not working. The Congress has pushed the economy to the ICU. What does the Congress do? It is blowing up a Frankenstein of communalism seeking to frighten the minorities, mainly the Muslim community, into a herd that would out of fear vote for it en masse. In this game the Gujarat riots of 2002 come in handy. As if over the six decades of Congress rule at the Centre and in many states there have been no riots at all! As if days and months of rioting in Mumbai in 1993 and 1994 under the Congress regime in Maharashtra are to be forgotten. The minority decimation in Malana near Meerut under the Congress regime in UP and several other riots (Bhagalpur in Bihar) are non-events. And the slaughter of Sikhs in 1984? The party has got so desperate that it is once more driving hard its communal agenda, squeezing it to the last drop and even ignoring the grave danger it poses to national security. The latest in this dangerous game is what Shakeel Ahmad, Congress spokesman, said the other day: Indian Mujahideen was the outcome of the Gujarat riots. The subsequent disowning of his absurd statement by the Congress has little value because such irresponsible statements by its leaders are regular and fit into a pattern. The whole country is aware of the IM’s origin. When the central government banned the SIMI after irrefutable evidence surfaced about the connection between the so-called students Islamic movement of the 90s and several incidents of terrorism and the IB traced the SIMI activists’ link to Pakistani terrorist organisation LeT and the notorious Pakistani army intelligence unit ISI, the SIMI activists went underground. The IM’s top operatives like the Bhatkal brothers are linked to LeT and ISI. The series of bombings including the local train bombings of 2006 in Mumbai have been already traced to this linkage. The IM has been active and several reports of various investigating agencies like state-level ATS have exposed IM hand in events like the Bangalore stadium bomb blast, the Pune German Bakery attack and the Varanasi temple bombings, but in none of these did the agency reports say that IM was the outcome of Gujarat riots. The trail of the Bhatkal brothers originating from the South Karnataka village near Mangalore is as old as the 90s and most activists of that organisation have been found out to be none other than banned SIMI leaders. The spread of the organisation as far as Malabar coast, Hyderabad, Bihar, UP (Azamgarh), all expose the deep roots that could have developed only over two decades starting from 1990s. In fact when the Delhi Police tracked a secret cell of the IM working from Batla House in Okhla, there was no reference to Gujarat riots as an excuse for the widespread of carnage this Islamic organisation was planning. To give Ahmad his due, he has not been alone. The Batla House event where a brave Delhi police officer lost his life exposed the Congress empathy with Islamic terror. Congress leaders like Digvijaya Singh rushed to cry over the shoulders of the kin of terrorists killed and even declare the terrorists as innocent and the police as guilty. Despite the official stand about the finding of the terror module in Batla House, Congress leaders to this day are repeating that those killed were innocent. This open empathy with terror outfits of sections of Muslims is not an isolated or occasional event in the recent history of the Congress. The Congress-led government in Kerala had sought to prevent the Karnataka government two years ago from arresting notorious extremist leader Abdual Naseer Mahdani for his involvement in the Bangalore stadium bombing. The ruling party is totally ignoring the serious consequences of this communal approach that is being fed further day after day through the open support to Islamic extremism in every respect, whether in equating the religion-based teaching in madrasas to secondary education in government schools, the bowing down to every demand of the extremist groups like banning whatever books they object to, the hounding out of Bangaldeshi writer Tasleema who the Islamic lobby is opposing, and several others. The result is before our eyes now. Only the other day, V Ramesh, the BJP’s Tamil Nadu general secretary, was hacked to death in Salem. And Ramesh’s murder is not an isolated incident. It is one of over a dozen such killings of RSS/BJP workers in Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the recent past. The methodology used for hacking reminds us how Islamic extremists in Kottayam in Kerala hacked the hands of a Christian professor for the question paper he set that had some references to a Muslim character to which the extremists objected. The Islamists of India have become emboldened by voices of empathy emanating for them from several Congress sources. Islamic extremism is running riot in Kerala with its own IM under the guise of People’s Democratic Front imposing its writ on social issues as well on Muslims and even on some key non-Muslims. It is a fact that Pakistan is the kingpin of the global terror network and responsible for most terror-related incidents in India. Of course it denies its involvement and attributes the growth of terror in India to its internal problems. And the likes of Shakeel and Digvijaya also never mention Pakistan’s role in this serialised bloody drama and often accuse Indians (read Hindus) of terror acts in India. How is that Pakistan and a section of Congress leadership are on the same page on this issue? Any answers?