Appeasement Politics

Every generation of the Congress party produces its own small heresies. Some are tactical, others merely foolish. Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal’s latest remarks declaring Tipu Sultan as the moral and historical equivalent of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj belongs squarely in the latter category. It is not just bad history but bad politics masquerading as ‘secular’ virtue.

Sapkal’s claim rests on a fashionable syllogism that as both men fought foreign powers, therefore both embody the same ideals of bravery, tolerance and national resistance. Chhatrapati Shivaji’s idea of Swarajya was not merely freedom from foreign rule but a carefully constructed political ethic, combining military pragmatism with a striking - by early-modern standards - religious pluralism. He protected shrines across faiths and grounded legitimacy in consent rather than conversion.

Tipu Sultan was, by contrast, a ruler of genuine ability but narrow vision. He fought the British bravely, died defending Srirangapatna, modernised his army and experimented with administration. None of this is in dispute. What is persistently airbrushed out by Congress spokesmen and so-called ‘liberal’ commentators is the other half of the record. Tipu’s reign was marked by forced conversions, temple destruction and brutal repression in regions such as Malabar and Kodagu. Contemporary accounts, later historians and even sympathetic chroniclers record campaigns of coercion that targeted non-Muslim populations with little restraint.

To note this is not to indulge in communal polemic but to insist on historical honesty. Tipu Sultan, by all accounts, was a complex personality. He was also deeply religious in a way that shaped policy. His establishment of a theocratic order ‘Sarkar-e-Khudadad’ and systematic disadvantaging of non-Muslims within and beyond his kingdom place him far closer to Aurangzeb than to Shivaji. Occasional temple grants or symbolic gestures were tactical concessions, and not evidence of tolerance.

Yet India’s lifetime liberals, desperate to defend a secular halo at any cost, treat Tipu’s record as an inconvenience to be edited out. They scoff at ‘right-wing history’ while practising a far cruder form of selective memory themselves. A tyrant’s token does not erase a trail of coercion. Nor does opposition to the British automatically confer moral sainthood.

The entry of Asaduddin Owaisi, invoking anti-colonial martyrdom and even Mahatma Gandhi, only sharpens the problem. Resistance to empire is not a blank cheque. History is full of rulers who fought foreigners while oppressing their own subjects. Mature politics can hold both truths at once.

Sapkal’s remarks also reveal the limits of Congress’s minority-appeasement reflex. By insisting that Tipu and Shivaji are the same, the party insults both history and Maharashtra’s political culture. Shivaji Maharaj is a civilisational symbol whose legitimacy rests precisely on his refusal to reduce power to faith. To equate him with a ruler whose statecraft was inseparable from religious coercion is to hollow out the great Maratha ruler himself. The deeper embarrassment lies in the fact that the Congress still equates secularism with flattering minorities and sanitising inconvenient figures.