Frankly speaking, I have no patience for speeches, even for my own. People ask me to speak for 40 minutes, and I speak for 20 minutes. When people seek 20 minutes, I close at 10 minutes. But, well, I am not a Narendra Modi or even a Rahul Gandhi. So who cares? When I listen to any video, I tend to fast forward it. But I heard the entire speech of Rahul Gandhi in the Lok Sabha.
There are fans swooning over his speech. And then, there are others who are upset with lose play that Rahul speech writers did about historical facts. These extreme reactions made me hear Rahul’s ‘iconic’ speech.
First things first. This, indeed, is the best speech Rahul ever made in his life of half century plus. Well-rehearsed, carrying the right punches using every popular — amir vs garib, capitalist vs proletariat, old-time Tata-Birla vs bhookhi nangi janta to new-age Ambani-Adani vs poor imagery. He has every right to it.
It doesn’t matter that his much-feted great grandfather and grandmother were the ones who created crony capitalism using licence-quota raj to control those ‘vampires’ (to borrow evocative left vocabulary) who quietly “sucked the blood of toiling masses” with kind blessings of the flag bearers of socialism. It was a time when certain new-age capitalist giants rose too, exploiting the same loopholes and taming ‘socialist’ leaders with the ‘right’ methods to rise as monopoly giants smothering competition using wonderful laws that they could get through quietly. This golden age was before Modi came and raised aspirations of millions and encouraged every youth to dream of creating a unicorn.
In his first 18 minutes he hit the right notes and pressed the right tear glands. I almost saw him as the next big white hope for ‘toiling masses’ and us poor ‘squashed middle classes’ of India that is Bharat. But his handlers must have become ambitious looking at his rehearsals and raised the bar, serving more than the audience could digest. And then, he just let his ‘wisdom’ flow.
“Ours is not a nation, but a Union of States” was the call that re-triggered the battle between two “ideas of India”. Only difference is that it is not the idea of two Indias of Vir Das, or of the Nehru scion. It is the idea of Bharat that ‘Hindutvavadi fascists’ have been arguing for since 1947 and have been slowly winning it because it is clear as day light that India that is Bharat was not born on 15 August 1947 but it is a continuous flow of civilisation since at least last 8,000 years as per scientific verified documents.
I don’t know from where our perennial rising leader got a figure of 3,000 years (Discovery of India?) No other nation disowns its heritage (except Pakistan). British who taught us this Aryan Invasion theory and measured age of Vedas and Mahabharata had to do it because they couldn’t go against the dating of mother earth as per Bible. But we have no such compulsions. Any child who has read history from sources other than NCERT or JNU brand historians can easily see that India that is Bharat was not born when the clock struck midnight in India (and the world was sleeping as Nehru chacha put it, forgetting that half the world was up and about at that very moment.)
There are enough scholars who have written on this ‘Union of States’ vs a nation that had states as governing units. I would just like to remind that this thought comes from communist doctrine that influenced his great grandfather hugely that India would never have been a nation but for British. My fear is that Rahul’s comrades have deliberately rekindled that communist spirit of 1946-47 that asserted that India was made of at least 17 nationalities to encourage breaking India forces that saw bloody Partition and 70 years of bloodletting in the Valley.
Rahul talked about ‘unity in diversity’ but failed to identify the unifying thread. What thread is holding together this bouquet of flowers — a bouquet not of dead plucked flowers tied with Western idea of threads of contract but a living breathing bouquet flowers blooming in different gardens of cultures, irrigated, nourished and preserved by the common sap of Bharatiya culture and history that runs through all of them and celebrated by all of us.
Word of the day was ‘conversation’ used more frequently than his other favourite word ‘strategic’. He talked of conversation between states and Centre, that ‘his great grandfather, grandmother and father’ had. He forgot how states were made to bow before ‘Planning Commission’ of Delhi durbar to get funds, to get their plans passed. This planning commission that did not ‘converse’ but dictated.
It was the same royal family that between it had nearly 80 percent of total state Assemblies dissolved since 1950. I am not even talking of Emergency and murder of democracy since there was no ‘conversation’ at that time; even for amending the very Preamble of our Constitution inserting “socialism and secularism” that the founders of the Constitution had refused to insert.
And poor dictator Modi has nothing to show in this urge for ‘conversation’ except persuading states on path-breaking GST within a year, what Congress culture couldn’t do for a decade. And, one must forget that under this intolerant dictatorship share of states has increased continuously in revenue sharing than under previous government.
I could appreciate his lament of lack of dialogue between Centre and states, but for the fact that Opposition allies have sunk too low in breaking protocols of decency. Example of Modi’s visit to Punjab is enough. Why the haughty dynasts have chosen not to meet a Dalit President is known only to them.
His sense of entitlement was as if he wishes to enjoy the fruits of his elders’ sacrifices. His speech writers used cruder language that could be interpreted as “my parents spilled blood for the nation, now you must pay me the homage for it”. He spoke as a right of entitlement when he said you must listen to me because, “Don’t you know, who my parents were?”
The ever-emerging leader talked of “Ashoka the great” repeatedly, forgetting that he killed 18,000 non-Buddhists who refused to convert to his State religion after he became a Buddhist. He had no respect for his satraps. A great conversation indeed. Yes, Chandragupta Maurya did devolve power to ‘janapadas’ but Nehru did not allow ‘traditionalist’ view to have ‘panchayats’ as the basic building blocks for devolution of power in the Constitution.
Strong cultural roots have kept Bharat together, not the artificial construct of ‘secularism’ that is a euphemism of anti-majority, pro-minority bias. No government had the temerity of implying that Hindus were always the aggressors in communal riots and labelling them as violent. Congress brought in the infamous Communal Violence Bill under Sonia Gandhi’s chairmanship that targeted Hindus. Hate begins at the doorsteps of Nehru family.
I won’t touch upon the laughable charge of the Modi government bringing together Pakistan and China, as every sane person of India knows when it began. All in all, full marks to Rahul for starting a new divisive ‘conversation’ of North vs South, Tamil Nadu vs Delhi and so on.
He has gone back to the old British trick of ‘divide and rule’ that his ancestor learnt under the tutelage of white teachers in India and UK. Rahul is indeed coming off age but has tripped over on the wrong side.
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February 07, 2022 at 08:14PM
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