The practice of selective amnesia is a time-tested technique used by Congress scion Rahul Gandhi and/or his speech writers. He did it again with a series of outrageous allegations against the government of Narendra Modi from his middle-row-corner perch in the Lok Sabha during this Winter Session. Ostensibly, he was commenting on the presidential address.
The assumption from his handlers is probably that if the nationally televised speech is emotive, and delivered with a degree of verve, a section of the public sympathetic to the storied Congress, can be swayed.
This, irrespective of all the missing bits of the argument. Emphasis is all. Never mind the specious content. That can be left to the supporters of the ruling party to mull over and argue about. The shooting and the scooting would have been accomplished anyway. Some will ask if Rahul Gandhi is ready at last. At least he delivered a 44 minute speech with the bizarre arguments coherently put forth.
There is also the urgent necessity of yet another ‘coming of age’ claim to the leadership of the combined Opposition, should it manifest. Open challenges from Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, riding high on her victory against the BJP in a keenly fought Assembly election, must be thwarted. And then there is the dark horse Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi, waiting to first take Punjab in the upcoming elections, before possibly casting his hat into the ring as well. Veteran warriors such as Sharad Pawar might possibly be content with playing kingmaker in 2024. Others, such as KCR and MK Stalin are also stirring.
As for the technique of the speech itself, it deserves marks for audacity. That it is impossible to start India's recent political history only from May 2014, when his party was routed in the general elections by the BJP/RSS/NDA combine, is something Rahul Gandhi finds difficult to accept.
He repeatedly called Modi — a very successful elected politician with over 20 years in high office, risen from very humble beginnings and a small town in Gujarat — a king, by implication a dictatorial figure.
This coming from a political dynastic scion who has enormous if unexplained wealth, and has never worked for a living, unless you count being an MP. There was a preening for the cameras to rival a Lawrence Olivier soliloquy. The irony of it was he was doing so in a proudly republican parliament. And that it is comic to accuse this government for having no sense of history, coming from him.
The fantasies are lurid. For Rahul Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who started it all for Rahul Gandhi, if you refuse to count Subhas Chandra Bose, was probably a sterling democrat. One who never acted ruthlessly against his opponents. One who was fiercely antagonistic to Chinese ambitions in Tibet and the Akshai Chin. One who objected strenuously when Pakistan ceded part of the Akshai Chin to China so that it could build a road to Tibet through it. One who didn’t give up the seat offered to India in the UNSC, saying pehle aap in a wonderful demonstration of political magnanimity. One who tamely lost huge tracts of Indian territory to China in 1962.
But Nehru said, (or did he, according to Rahul Gandhi’s selective amnesia), it didn’t matter, because ‘not a blade of grass grows on it’.
The trouble is, seven years of uncovering the unvarnished truth about the Congress-UPA governments, their multiple blunders and deceptions, not to mention the massive corruption, has left little room for taking the moral high ground. To pose, again and again, as the saviour of the poor, is not in accordance with the facts.
Rahul Gandhi does not remember that it was the Manmohan Singh government, remote-controlled by his mother Sonia Gandhi as chairperson of the UPA, that refused to retaliate militarily against 26/11. Was this so as not to upset Pakistan? If this is an example of how the Congress prevented China and Pakistan coming together, then heaven help us.
The righteous dream continued. Nehru was followed shortly by a kindly, democratic, Indira Gandhi, who never invoked Article 356 of the Indian Constitution to topple elected state governments, in what Rahul Gandhi called ‘A Union of States’. She didn’t use the IAF to bomb Mizoram to quell dissidence. She never imposed the draconian Emergency. Nor did she invade the Golden Temple in Amritsar with tanks and soldiers.
Indira Gandhi was followed by Rajiv Gandhi, who never condoned the massacre of thousands of ordinary Sikhs in retaliation for the assassination of his mother in 1984.
Then there was the Rahul Gandhi version of ‘The Tale of Two Cities’, the Dickensian tale on the French Revolution. The oft applied characterisation of the Two Indias, a repeat of his earlier ‘suit-boot sarkar’ jibe, namely, one for the very rich, and one for the rest. The key angst was against the rich companies in the formal sector, Ambani and Adani in particular, versus the alleged neglect of the MSME Sector. Tata somehow was not mentioned. But even Bollywood has largely dropped this rich-girl-poor-boy trope in less socialist times.
According to Rahul Gandhi, ‘Make in India’ cannot go forward without the MSMEs and the unorganised sector. It is doomed. This flies in the face of the considerable success of the aatmanirbhar defence manufacturing initiative of the Modi government. L&T, not one of his usual targets, is manufacturing thousands of crores worth of defence equipment.
Job creation is impossible without encouraging the MSME sector, says Rahul Gandhi, completely ignoring all the financing efforts made by the Modi government in this regard. MSMEs have also attached themselves to the major industrial initiatives being taken by the large companies in concert with the Government of India.
Rahul Gandhi plumps for a consultative vision of the union of states which he alleges is missing. He ignored the strident non-cooperation of the Opposition allied to the Congress, both in Parliament and outside it, on the streets. Other political parties, who do not adhere to the Congress line, can and have found common cause on a case-to-case basis multiple times over the last seven years.
He alleges that the institutions of India are being captured by the ruling government, and included the EC and the Judiciary in this. There are already some legalistic reactions to these comments.
His suggestions that the autocratic ways of the Modi government will reap the whirlwind do not jive at all with the iron-fisted High Command culture of the Gandhi family. That it has brought the Grand Old Party to the point of near extinction both as a party and one in power, is the real truth that Rahul Gandhi can’t deal with. He thinks he can make it all better by somehow getting rid of Narendra Modi from power. But every attempt makes the BJP/RSS/NDA more successful.
The people, the voting public, even the Congress party rank and file, and not a few of its leaders, don’t seem to be buying his arguments. But, in the world of Rahul Gandhi and his remaining sycophants, this was a dazzlingly brilliant speech.
His bizarre attack on Home Minister Amit Shah wearing his house slippers while visiting Manipuri politicians were asked to leave their street-shoes outside, was a failed attempt to paint this government as imperial. The sanskari point made by Minister Piyush Goyal was all but lost on him.
Rahul Gandhi does not remember the way he himself treated Himanta Biswa Sarma, the present NDA Chief Minister of Assam. Rahul Gandhi cancelled several appointments urgently sought by Sarma when things were slipping in Assam, before finally seeing him as the then Congress president. Sarma said how in this final meeting, Rahul Gandhi concentrated on feeding his dog Pidi biscuits while largely ignoring Sarma. This occasioned Sarma to leave the Congress. And in due course, this resulted in the loss of Assam and the North East for the Congress.
The US has made it clear it does not agree with the fascistic innuendos and other allegations made by Rahul Gandhi in his speech of 2 February 2022.
The attempt to loosen the bolts of national unity by suggesting ‘fissiparous tendencies’, a term much used in the seventies if not by Rahul Gandhi, are good for federalism, is probably the most pernicious of his comments.
The praise of China’s clarity of vision also makes people wonder what the content of the agreement the Gandhi family signed with the Chinese on behalf of the Congress entails. We would, of course, have to apply to the Chinese embassy in Chanakyapuri to find out.
The writer is a Delhi-based commentator on political and economic affairs. The views expressed are personal.
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February 04, 2022 at 04:10PM
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