By Amulya Ganguli
Like Narendra Modi misnaming the Mahatma as “Mohanlal”, Rahul Gandhi, too, revealed the gaps in his knowledge of pre-1947 Indian history when he told the students of a management college in Mumbai that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had ignored British protests against his walking into Parliament House in London in his dhoti.
The real story, however, is that when newsmen asked Gandhi whether he was embarrassed about his audience with the King in Buckingham Palace in such scanty attire, the Mahatma replied: “The King was wearing enough for both of us”.
It is possible that to the post-partition generation – Modi was born in 1950 and Rahul in 1970 – only the broad outlines of the colonial era are known and not the anecdotes like Sarojini Naidu’s digs at the still evolving Father of the Nation whom she called “Mickey Mouse” because of his large ears, or her comment that the Mahatma did not know “how much it costs the Congress to keep him poor”.
However, the slip about Gandhi’s visit to the Mother of Parliaments was not the only one which Rahul Gandhi made. His speech showed how his cocooned existence surrounded by “yes men” had restricted his knowledge not only of history but also of contemporary events. Since Rahul apparently accepts as gospel truth whatever his mother and her (and his) courtiers tell him about the period when his party was in power, he has no idea of how wide off the mark he can be.
His lack of knowledge has been compounded by the fact that he has never been questioned closely either by the courtiers or the media. On the rural employment scheme, for instance, he told the students that its critics had been wrong in saying that the scheme was wasteful. Yet, even the Congress’s rural development minister Jairam Ramesh had asked the “beneficiaries” of the scheme towards the closing stages of the Manmohan Singh government, “How many ditches will you dig? How many ponds will you rebuild? How much forestation will you do? There has to be a limit”.
Since no durable assets were built, the scheme was in reality no more than the handing out of doles. Although it did provide some relief to the very poor, their earnings was nowhere near enough for boosting the growth rate to 8/9 per cent, as the Congress vice-president claimed.
His description of Modi’s Pakistan policy as ad-hoc glosses over the Manmohan Singh government’s faux pas at Sharm-el-Sheikh where the final statement virtually conceded Indian involvement in the Baluchistan insurgency. It took nationwide outrage and vociferous opposition protests for the government to retreat. In contrast, Modi’s Lahore initiative has been widely acclaimed.
Rahul can get away with such patently erroneous statements because he does not address formal press conference where he can be pinned down. Instead, he prefers brief interactions during which he depends on one-liners like suit-boot ki sarkar or that Modi runs a one-man show. The interactions are never long enough for anyone to ask that if Modi’s is a one-man affair, what about the Congress which is run by one family.
What is obvious is that Rahul decided during the 57-day sabbatical that he will be a great deal more proactive and aggressive in his public performance. But, in essence, he remains a dilettante without any deep understanding of the political currents. His observations, therefore, continue to be as banal as before, a trait which has made historian Ramachandra Guha say that he is devoid of “brains”, one of the most acidic comments ever made about a top-ranking Indian politician.
Before him, only his late uncle, Sanjay, the enfant terrible of Indian politics during the Emergency, was called “wayward” and “uneducated” by an elder relative, B.K. Nehru. Otherwise, even if the politicians are rarely held in high esteem because of their suspected sleaziness, they almost never appear to be out of depth in their profession.
Virtually all of them are seen to be well clued in not only to the various political exigencies, but also the nuances of ideology and the intricate factors behind the laws and other initiatives. Nearly all of them have what is known as peasant cunning, which was Stalin’s assessment of the otherwise bumbling Khrushchev.
Rahul in this respect is something of a babe in the wood, who is able to carry on because of the extraordinary circumstance of his party having come to depend almost pathetically on his family. There is no one to point out to him inside the party that his convictions are not flawless. And to make the walls of his echo chamber totally soundproof, he has shied away from press meets after the disaster of a pre-general election TV interview during which he kept on glancing at someone else inside the studio, probably his more politically savvy sister, Priyanka.
There was a similar fiasco with a group of Bengaluru students when Rahul’s attempts to mock Modi’s Swachh Bharat and Make in India campaigns fell flat. Before the Mumbai meeting, therefore, his handlers tried to gauge the minds of the students. But, in the end, it didn’t help their lord and master come out with flying colours. (IPA Service)