Rahul Gandhi, Member of Parliament from Wayanad in Kerala, has come of age. Again. If age can be defined as a factorial of electoral losses and political hit wickets. The most charitable description of his latest, disastrous parliamentary speech about India being a ‘Union of States’ and not a kingdom is just one word: Rambling.
Informed sources tell me that a good chunk of non-BJP political sections actually prefer Rahul Gandhi’s rather… umm… naïve parliamentary utterances such as “You can call me Pappu”, “Lok Sabha has 546 seats”, “Bhool gaya, bhool gaya”, not mention the crowning glory of his gaffes: His infamous and embarrassing pirouette of hugging Prime Minister Modi on the floor.
Given the history of the functioning of our Parliament, rambling and incoherent speeches of our MPs actually counts as a saving grace. Incomprehensible verbosity is preferable to violence.
But the specific element in Rahul Gandhi’s speech that really caused a debate among even non-partisan circles was when he began to speak about history. Needless, the speech was wholly scripted, a telling proof of which was the prearranged symphony of cheers that arose from a gamut of the usual suspects including professional politicians like Shashi Tharoor, former quizzers like Siddhartha Basu and socialites like Simi Garewal. That is quite an eclectic but a highly representative constituency.
There is a surreal literary symbolism embedded in the whole thing.
When names like Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka drop from Rahul Gandhi’s dynastic lips, the Indian voter who, for more than half a century, had entrusted his bloodline to govern the political apparatus of this ancient civilisation, feels scared. This scary quotient is further heightened when he also speaks about the Indian Constitution, that singular victim of unbelievable vandalism and hammering at the hands of his “Iron Lady” grandmother.
As prime minister, Indira Gandhi’s knowledge of the Constitution was directly proportional to the political utility that it could fetch her. There is every reason to believe that her grandson’s knowledge of the Constitution such as it is, comes from his dense association with JNU-style far-Left radicals and his quid pro quos with the global NGO network innately hostile to India.
What stands out like a sore thumb in Rahul Gandhi’s speech about India being a “Union of States”, etc, is his ignorance of the self-same history of this rhetoric, whose roots lie in the early history of the Communist Party of India. More specifically, in a 1943 document published by the (undivided) CPI titled Pakistan and National Unity. Authored by the CPI ideologue Gangadhar Adhikari, this eventually was codenamed Adhikari Thesis. This official publication of the CPI was explicitly meant to justify Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s demand to carve Pakistan out of the undivided India.
The basis of this justification hinged on the specious and treacherous argument that India was never one united country but a collection of kingdoms. Thus, it argued that if Lingayats, Sikhs, Pashtuns, Balochs, Kanyakumaris (sic), Marathis, Gujaratis, etc, demanded separate countries, the demand should be fulfilled. But the “thesis” was unclear as to who would fulfil these “demands”.
The updated version of this thesis is something called the “United States of South India,” a balloon of divisiveness floated on 14 July 2016, pitting “Delhi” against “south India”. Shorn of its clever-by-half verbiage, it is a barely-masked declaration of what can only be called a civil war. Like the Adhikari Thesis, this piece too, liberally drops words like “federalism,” “union of states,” “negotiation,” “partnership”, etc.
Rahul Gandhi’s speech, which draws from the same rhetoric, is simply its parliamentary version. From another perspective, his speech is what you get as an angry confession if the Congress is completely pushed to the wall. It is also a backhanded compliment and proof that the BJP is the only party today that thinks about India as a sovereign democratic and integrated republic, and not a coalition of states.
How did we get here?
One answer to this question once again takes us back to history. Our investigation should begin with this fact: The Indian National Congress of today did not get us political freedom from the British. In fact, at no point except in its foundational years was there something called an “original” Congress but that is a story for another day. But for a few brilliant flashes in its history, the dominant years of the Congress were characterised by blind Gandhi-worship, a trend that the Nehru dynasty shrewdly appropriated to itself after Independence. And so, when Rahul Gandhi talks about “Shahenshah’s diktat (sic),” “rule of king,” etc, nobody is amused.
A defining glow of these brilliant flashes was a spirit and actioned practice of India’s all-encompassing civilisational integrity of which its political facet was just as important. We’re not sure if the Wayanad Congress MP has heard the name of a co-founder and the sixteenth president of the Congress, Lalmohan Ghosh.
In a speech in 1908, this is what he said: “Be it a Bengali, Tamil, Kannadiga or Pashto, all Indians belong to the same country. In the matter of India getting what it rightfully deserves, differences of Jati, sect, region and language do not count. India is one. Its unity and integrity must be preserved. If trouble arises in any area, people in the other parts of its geography must regard that trouble as their own and attempt to resolve it. The same unity must be exhibited in the case of profit and fame as well.”
Contrast this with Rahul Gandhi’s recent speech: “There are two competing visions of India. One, of a Union of States, where decisions are taken through conversation and negotiation — a partnership of equals… You will never, ever in your entire life, rule over the people of Tamil Nadu.”
We believe this is self-explanatory.
But in passing, and notwithstanding the “Adhikari Thesis”, a careful reading of the history of our struggle for Independence reveals the same contrast vis-à-vis Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s conception of our freedom movement was defined in inversive terms — i.e., he viewed the ultimate objective of this struggle to be the overthrow of the British but had no integrative vision for India’s future, speaking in an embracive sense.
In an extraordinarily farsighted and prescient speech delivered (in Kannada) at Bangalore University in February 1970, the legendary statesman and political philosopher from Karnataka, DV Gundappa thundered the following warning: “In every situation, our freedom fighters would think, ‘is this related to India? Is it useful to India? Does it help or harm India?’ At no point would they think, ‘If this is related to Mysore, we don’t want it. Is this coming from Madras? If so, it doesn’t concern us.’ Any incident that occurred anywhere in India, they would embrace it as their own.”
The speech, fittingly titled Decency in Public Life, is all the more remarkable and paraphrasing it will rob its original majesty. Gundappa belonged to that rarefied class of thinkers, philosophers and public eminences who correctly assessed and predicted the far-reaching threats to the unity and integrity of India when its map was redrawn along linguistic lines. He fought a rather lonely and prolonged battle against this move and headbutted the then Congress leadership, calling it the “neo paramountcy of the Congress”.
Here it is: “Regarding the point about national unity, I think our unity has been broken due to four main reasons:
- Fights among linguistic states: Maharashtra fights with Mysore; Kerala fights with Mysore; Punjab fights with Haryana.
- Attempts on the part of each state to fight with the Centre.
- In the setup of the central Government, states are fiercely and vulgarly competing with one another to garner as much central funds as possible.
- In the name of religion and caste pride, there is now a marked tendency towards India splitting up. None of this bodes well for the safety of India. Unless India stands as one unit, no region of the country will remain safe.
If China, Russia or Pakistan launches an attack against India, those foreign powers will not show any mercy on the feelings of any region or group here. Why will the invader show special treatment towards Andhra or Kerala or Punjab or Bengal? Why will he regard one state as superior over the other? He will occupy the region that he finds most convenient or easy to capture. From there, he will systematically conquer other regions. What happens to Bengal today will happen to Uttar Pradesh tomorrow. Day after, it will occur in Mysore, too. If this danger hits even one part of India, it means it has hit all of India. National security is a philosophy. For that reason, national unity is also a philosophy.”
A huge contributor to the astounding longevity of the Nehruvian Congress after Independence is the sinister manner in which it has completely silenced the existence of analyses of this quality. And they exist in the thousands. Likewise, the moment this chokehold of the Congress was decisively broken — most notably, after 2014 — real accounts like this have begun to emerge in a torrential fashion.
In the ultimate reckoning, Rahul's parliamentary speech can also be perceived as the macabre consequence of the kind of “history” that his own grandmother in alliance with the communists, disseminated to two-and-a-half generations of Indians. Today, this topmost leader of the remnants of the Congress is using the same “history” of India as his political rhetoric.
Epilogue
In a highly acerbic commentary written in a Leftist journal on 1 January, 1984, Rahul Gandhi’s grand-aunt Nayantara Sahgal (of the Award Wapsi fame), in a way, was prophesising: “It is the central leadership’s relentless pursuit of its ambition to establish a bloodline that has demanded fealty and extra-curricular loyalty from state chiefs and tolerated their wheeling and dealing…The gangrene cuts through the entire fabric of society. There is almost nothing to match the decadence that comes to surround a regime that is built around a single…personality who treats the country as a personal possession.”
She continued, “The myth-making machine in support of dynasty was set in motion in 1969, but the process has been intensified and accelerated…A cushion of privilege supports and surrounds Rajiv Gandhi’s son, Rahul, at the Doon School. He can take a jaunt to America in the middle of term with his parents and grandmother, and there are security arrangements at school for his protection (against whom?). His sister, Priyanka, is likely to be admitted to boarding school without passing the entrance examination.”
Sahgal added, “In the end, the mystery of the personality that clings to power, even unto the next generation, may be as simple as holding on to what one has got, much as the monkey hangs on to his peanuts though he dances on the rising heat of the laboratory floor. And monkeys clutching peanuts must be what some of history’s rulers will look like when viewed by people of a more advanced era.”
Further commentary is superfluous.
Sandeep Balakrishna is founder and chief editor, ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Views expressed are personal.
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February 08, 2022 at 06:21PM
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